Women’s day: 25 Years Ministry of Equality, powered by Boothted
March 8 is an iconic day: Women’s Day. Still, equality between Women and Men is way too often not yet a reality. Over the last 25 years the Luxembourg Ministry of Equality (MEGA), has been working to create this balance. For us, at Boothted it was an honor to be in charge of producing and hosting the live-stream of the prestigious celebration of Women’s Day, which was the perfect frame to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Ministry, hosted in collaboration with the Luxembourg National Library.
Producing a hybrid-event is always a challenge as every single element has to smoothly work together to make it a true success. The concept was clear: 3 speakers and the recital of texts especially written for this occasion by the authors Sandra Wolter & Elise Schmit and presented by the actor Nickel Bösenberg. This stunning line-up had to be filmed at the Luxembourg National Library. Du to Covid-restrictions no audience except a few staff-members would be present, yet all speakers would be speaking on-site, including the minister Taina Bofferding herself as well as the director of the National Library. The event had to be simultaneously translated from Luxembourgish to French. In addition to the stream on Boothted, the event had to be streamed as well to Facebook and Youtube.
The live-production
Filming and streaming a live-event in times of a pandemic is not an easy job. Respecting social distancing, sanitizing microphones and controls, and making sure that still everything looks nice is a challenge. Challenge accepted. We filmed on-site with 3 cameras, Livestream Studio served as our broadcast-solution while the sound was captured from the existing infrastructure of the National Library.
Pre-recorded videos were added directly from Livestream Studio while a Powerpoint-presentation was integrated using Boothted’s slide-sharing feature. We had been a bit adventurous by using a new Apple Macbook Pro with its M1 processor. We had been performing extensive tests before going live and found that the performance was quite stunning, even though Livestream Studio doesn’t run yet natively, but instead is launched using Rosetta 2. The only downside was that NDI wasn’t available in Livestream Studio so that we had to connect our cameras in different ways.
Streaming destinations
Most of the time it‘s sufficient to use either Boothted‘s built-in live-stream or any other embedded live-stream. This case was a bit more complicated as both the Ministry as the National Library wanted to stream in addition to Boothted to their Youtube and Facebook-profiles to reach a bigger audience. While the stream on Boothted was of course the preferred one because of the additional interactivity, still giving people reluctant to sign-up for the event a possibility to view was important. Giving us all the login-ins to their respective accounts wasn‘t an option. So we proposed they setup ReStream.io-accounts (get a $10 discount by signing-up on ReStream) and add their Youtube and Facebook-account in there, providing us only with the RTMP details of ReStream.io. On our end we decided to create a dual-stream in Livestream Studio: the mainstream going to Clevercast for the multilingual version and at the same time to Vimeo. Vimeo was used as a backup-stream and at the same time, we‘ve added both Restream. io-accounts as a destination to Vimeo in order to keep the bandwidth on our broadcast-system as low as possible. This setup proved to be entirely reliable and worked like a charm.
Going multi-lingual
One of the reasons, Boothted was chosen as the platform to host the entire event was, that Boothted can easily integrate with simultaneous-interpretation services and even host multilingual streams. On this occasion, we decided to again use Clevercast for the live-stream because of their ability to create a multi-lingual live-stream as well as to provide interpreters with a stable yet easy-to-use virtual infrastructure.
Clevercast integrates seamlessly into Boothted with its own player that features the possibility to select various languages directly in the player. The interpreters were a bit wary at first as they had made bad experiences in the past working with online systems, but after a short demo and test run, they became quite enthusiastic about the possibilities. Boothted seamlessly integrates the Clevercast-player into the booth which made it easy for attendees to choose their preferred language.
The Boothted experience
One of the biggest benefits of using Boothted is the possibility to easily propose a plethora of additional material to be downloaded or viewed. PDF-documents can be made available under „resources“, additional videos can be added to a playlist, information about the event and the organizers can be added to the „About us“ section and of course the agenda of the event is shown in the „Schedule“ section. Interactions are made possible through the moderated and up-votable Q&A, FAQ‘s and the optional public-chat. The possibility to add partners with their own booth, in this case, the National Library, was another plus. Detailed (real-time) analytics showed how successful the event was.
A consistently high number of attendees connected throughout the entire event with surprisingly few drop-outs. In addition, the replay of the event on the Boothted platform helped not only to show the video of the event but instead to bring to the people an experience almost as complete as the live event itself.
Bottom line
The Boothted-team delivered on their promise to make this event memorable and at the same time, we felt the importance for us to be involved in such a prestigious event that highlighted both the tremendous progress made over the last 25 year but also that unfortunately equality between women and men still has a long way to go.
Resources:
- www.boothted.com
- Luxembourg Ministry of Equality (MEGA)
- Luxembourg National Library
- www.restream.io/welcome?ref=R9EZO
