Create a Facebook Live video

You can schedule the video without an encoder, but before going live you’ll need to set up an encoder.

Go to “Publishing Tools” for the Facebook page

Keep crossposting in mind when you choose the page to stream from – KTOO has the most expansive crossposting set up (as of the beginning of 2019), so it’s often the best option if you want to crosspost to other stations (or think you might)

Go to “Video Library” in the left-hand menu

Click the “Live” button

Enter text for the post and a title/tags for the video

Review your options under the “Settings” tab on the upper right

Review the options under the “Live Video” section

Of particular note:

Publish this as a continuous live video lets you stream for longer than the usual 4 hour limit but deletes the video when you’re done (i.e., it’s not available on demand). Probably mostly useful for long-running breaking news coverage (when you might be live for a long time but parts of the video could be out of date by the time you’re done anyway).
End broadcast when stream ends may stop the stream if it loses connection to the encoder. I leave this checked when streaming on reliable internet from the station, but would consider unchecking if streaming from the field and wanted it to be more forgiving if the connection dropped

Crosspost the video if desired

Important: if you use these options, make sure you understand how live crossposting works – it’s not always intuitive:

Turning on crossposting for a page will give that page’s admins the option to post the video if you see the the little badge/checkmark icon next to the switch :
If you don’t see that icon, turning on crossposting will automatically post to that page (which happens if you’re an admin of both pages or the target page has your page set to allow auto posting). It’s probably polite to check with a page admin before automatically crossposting to their page.

In this example, the scheduled video will be automatically posted to 360 North (admin of both pages) and Alaska Public Media (because of their crossposting settings). It will be available for Alaska’s Energy Desk to crosspost, but they would have to take an additional step for it to actually show up on their page.

Make note of the “Server URL” and “Persistent Stream Key” fields and click “Schedule”

If you are going live immediately, set up and start your encoder and skip down to the “Go Live” section

Enter the start date/time, upload an image, and click “Schedule”

Important:

Even if you switch to Manual Start, you only get 10 minutes after your scheduled start time before the event is cancelled
When you click “Schedule” in this popup, the event will be published to the page with no additional review

Set up and start the encoder

You’ll need an URL that you get by combining the “Server URL” and “Persistent Stream Key” from above. It should look something like this: rtmp://live-api-s.facebook.com:80/rtmp/991974224385411?s_ps=1&s_sw=0&s_vt=api-s&a=AyyFVtEvSTJb8sSP

Before it’s time to start the event:

Important: check with the producer/director of the video (often Mikko or Aidan) before the stream goes live!

Open the event (under Publishing Tools > Video Library)
Make sure the video is streaming and sound is working (it’s muted by default – the control is in the lower right of the screen)
Manual start – by default, the stream starts at the scheduled time. It’s often a good workflow to:
- Schedule the video for the start of the “real” event (i.e., the time people should tune in to see things actually happen)
- Click “Manual Start” before the event begins
- Click “Go Live” 10-20 minutes before the “real” event – largely so people know something is coming and everything is working