[00:00:08.860] - Gordon
Hello.

[00:00:09.250] - Taylor
Hello.

[00:00:09.640] - Gordon
My name's Gordon from Drayson Design.

[00:00:11.740] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.

[00:00:13.790] - Gordon
And welcome to "This Week With Taylor and Gordon," a weekly podcast and vidcast, where we talk about things that have affected our businesses over the last seven days. And welcome back.

[00:00:24.250] - Taylor
Welcome back.

[00:00:25.210] - Gordon
You'll notice we don't have our little microphones on today. We listened to the footage and the audio that came out of our normal microphone and the audio that came out of our little two microphones. And because they were right together, the audio wasn't great because it was picking up the other person, wasn't it?

[00:00:43.170] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:00:43.440] - Gordon
I think it would work much better if you had a bit more separation between them and then it will be able to just focus on that one person rather than both of them. So we won't be using that for the time being, but we're back to our normal microphone. Hopefully it all sounds good to you. Please let us know in the comments. Let's get straight into it. Shall I go first this week?

[00:01:07.010] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:01:08.130] - Gordon
So something that we, I don't believe, have talked about is something called Restream. Now, Restream is a service. It's a software as a service in fact, so it's a SaaS that we use to allow us to broadcast This Week With to more than one place at the same time. So at the end of the episode, you'll hear us say that we're on Facebook and we're on YouTube. And the reason we can do that is because of Restream. So the workflow is that Restream will basically take a signal that's coming in from us, on this occasion it will be through the computer. They take that one signal, that stream, and they then deliver it to more than one place. In our case, Facebook and YouTube, and they do it at the same time. So they're both going out to the same places, sorry, to different places at the same time. And this is a service that I actually got as a lifetime deal. And it gives me the opportunity to stream to lots of different places, and I can do it from my phone. In fact, that's what we're using now as our camera. So what's really cool about that is that any time we want to go live, we can go live to multiple places at the same time. And I only really use it for Facebook and for YouTube, but I believe they've got an integration with Twitch. They may even have an Instagram integration. I'm not entirely sure about that. We'll put the link to it in the show notes so you can have a look. It's a really good service, though. And the only downside we found is that at the beginning of a stream, it takes a little bit of time for the services to actually start receiving the signal, which is why at the beginning of our episodes, you'll see that there are a 30 second countdown because we found that it takes five, six, sometimes 10 seconds to actually go live on each platform. And so by having this countdown, we know for sure that it's going to be okay.

[00:03:32.820] - Taylor
Yeah, it's a really good service because you can reach a wider audience. Some people prefer YouTube, and Facebook is good because you can catch people while they're scrolling Facebook. And so it's a really good way to distribute your content among multiple different places to hopefully be in front of the eyes of the people that are passing by or have visited you directly. I'm not sure if you can embed it on your website some way, but it's very cool because-

[00:04:11.090] - Gordon
Well, no, I don't think you can, because we've looked at this, haven't we? I think you can embed the live YouTube stream, which is something we considered doing and then chose not to in the end. I can't remember why. I think there was an issue with having it updating to a different episode each week. I think that was a manual process. But the thing I was just going to finish off saying about the intro, the countdown, is that that gets cut off on YouTube once the show has finished optimising on YouTube's platform so that, a) you don't have to watch it, but more importantly, we cut it off because we use the audio from our episode for the transcription. And that also goes onto the podcast. It would be rubbish having 30 seconds of music just at the beginning of every episode for the podcast bit. So that gets chopped off and it makes the episodes a lot shorter. So if you still see the countdown timer, it means that it hasn't been transcribed yet. If you don't see it, it means it's either being transcribed or it has already been transcribed. Yeah. So keep going. Anything else you want to say?

[00:05:29.680] - Taylor
I think it's good because you can catch people on the service and platform they want. If you send out, so sometimes YouTube sends out notifications that you've gone live, if you have notifications on.

[00:05:41.680] - Gordon
Or scheduled, because we do schedule it as well, don't we? We let people know that it's coming.

[00:05:47.240] - Taylor
And sometimes they don't get sent out. And so people that are on Facebook, I think it also sends a notification if you're in the group. And I think it's just a good way to, if you're, for example, streaming to Twitch, which a lot of people do stream to Twitch and to YouTube, you can use the YouTube version as the ongoing version. So there are VODs on Twitch, but they are...

[00:06:15.660] - Gordon
Videos On Demand.

[00:06:16.850] - Taylor
They're not as searchable. They're not as... You can't really find them anywhere. Whereas with YouTube, you can obviously find them a lot easier because the search algorithm is a lot better. And people usually to go to YouTube to watch videos that have already been uploaded. And that's the main purpose of what YouTube was for. So it's a nice way to cut out having to upload a video if you just want to have the uncut versions of your show, your episode, your whatever you're doing.

[00:06:51.340] - Gordon
And we should say that the feed doesn't have to be just a phone. It can be coming from OBS if you want to, which a lot of people do when they're doing streaming for games and for programming and for building and creating websites and things. So you can actually send the feed directly from OBS, which means you can actually produce a show. You can use your stream deck to change transitions and change the video feed, and you can send that to Restream, and Restream will then send that on to all the other services. You'll notice my cough is a lot better this week, but it's still a little bit there, so I apologise for that. There was something else I was going to say. Oh, yeah, that's right. Restream also allows you to use different brands, depending on the plan that you're on. You can output to a certain number of platforms at the same time. You can also use it for different brands. So I use it for Gordon's Magic every now and then. If I'm at an event, for example, and I want to go live, but I want it to go into multiple places, I can send it to Restream and have it all set up that way, which is really, really good because I don't do anything differently with my phone; I'm still streaming, I'm just sending it directly to Restream rather than to one service in particular. They also have something which is really clever, and we don't really use this, which is to allow comments and chat that are happening live to appear on your screen from different services. So if people are on Facebook, if people are on YouTube, they can write their comments in their chat and it will come up, it will consolidate all of those comments and display them within the Restream interface as you're streaming live, which is really, really cool. I really like that facility. Not that I use it, but I like the idea of it. I think it's a great idea. They also, I believe, have a studio service, which is a little bit like OBS, but it's their own version where you can mix other footage from different cameras or even recorded video as well. And it's a service that, on the whole, we've been very pleased with. We have had some technical issues with them every now and then, but not very many and not very often. And when you're considering the amount of data that video takes up, that's saying quite a lot because there's a huge a temptation for these things to go wrong. Temptation is not the right word. There's a huge chance that these things could go wrong because of the amount of data involved. And they do rather well. Their customer service is reasonably good. It takes a little while sometimes to get through to them, but quite often they understand the problem and will be able to help and fix it, which is really good. Anything you want to say? Oh, they also do a service where you can upload a video and then you can schedule that to go live, which is also quite cool. If you've got a video that you're releasing and you want to release it on different platforms at the same time, then you can do so and schedule it ahead of time. So you don't even have to be there. You can be at the theatre or on holiday or something while it streams it live for you, which is really good.

[00:10:24.520] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:10:25.820] - Gordon
Anything else you can think of, Taylor?

[00:10:27.900] - Taylor
I don't think so. I think you've covered most of the things and why we use it, how we use it.

[00:10:33.620] - Gordon
Yeah. So if you're interested in Restream... I have to say we're not sponsored by them. This episode has, they don't know we're doing it. We are talking truthfully. We're giving you our own experiences with the service. So you can trust it's not coming from them and we're only saying nice things because they've paid us lots of money. They haven't. If you'd like to, and you're watching this Restream, please contact us because we do use the service and we do like it. And if you'd like to sponsor an episode, we'd love you to contact us. Next week, just changing the subject ever so slightly, is going to be a little difficult for me because I'm going to be away. I'm away doing several things, in fact. I'm going to Blackpool, which is the big magic convention. I leave for that next Thursday. So on the next Friday episode, when we should be doing an episode, I'm going to be walking around the Blackpool Winter Gardens. Probably very tired already, even though it's the first day of the convention. And then the following week, I'm in the States. So we may try and do an episode while I'm over there. That would need to be done by Zoom, and that is something that we've said we'll do in the past and haven't done. So maybe we'll try and do it this time. And I'm going to be there with a friend of the podcast, which is Marc Summers. And so maybe he would like to be with me on the call. That would be quite nice, I think, if we can get that organised.

[00:12:14.120] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:12:14.770] - Gordon
Anything else you want to say? Anything you want to talk about today?

[00:12:18.550] - Taylor
I don't think so. I think we spoke about a topic that we both use.

[00:12:25.300] - Gordon
Okay. So nice short episode for you. Just extolling the virtues of Restream and why we use it. I think there are other services out there, but I don't have any experience with them. Restream is the only one I've really used, so that's the one we focused on. Thank you for joining us. As always, you can find us on Facebook and on YouTube, thanks to Restream. Please like, share and subscribe.

[00:12:53.970] - Taylor
You can also go to our website thisweekwith.co.uk to find all of our past episodes.

[00:12:59.440] - Gordon
So until next time, hopefully it'll be not next week, definitely not next week, but possibly the week after, if not, definitely the week after that when I'm back. So it will be either two or three weeks time. We will see you at 1pm on the Friday. Until then, my name is Gordon and I'm from Drayson Design.

[00:13:19.460] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.

[00:13:22.410] - Gordon
Goodbye.

[00:13:22.980] - Taylor
Bye.

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Show Notes