Your SparqFest subscription includes support for online streaming of your Official Selections as well as support for a number of different live streaming architectures.
Online Screenings
When we collect screeners from your creators, we stage those assets for use in both in-person and online screenings. For in-person screenings, festival staff (and no one else) has access to the original assets to help in the creation of DCPs or BluRays (or whatever) for the projectionist. For online screenings, we automatically transcode the original into a variety of formats suitable for streaming across many different bandwidths and device types.
In your Staff Portal, you create an “online screening” and assign selections to the screening. You may schedule the screening for a specific time, or you can make it accessible for the duration of the festival. The features of our online screenings include:
- Scheduling base on festival timezone or user timezone
- Assigning one or more selections to the screening
- Instructions on how to purchase tickets as well as links to making a purchase
- The ability to watch the screening online, end-to-end
- Automatically run a general pre-roll before ever screening and/or a block-specific pre-roll for specific screenings
Live Streams
There are two primary challenges to including live streaming in your festival program:
- The resources required to produce the live stream
- The complexity of directing your online access to the live stream and managing access
While we don't address the first issue, SparqFest does address all aspects of the second.
Two Streaming Options
We give you two choices for streaming depending on what you are comfortable with, what your budget is, and how important event security is for you:
- Third-party streaming
- SparqFest streaming
Both models provide almost identical audience experiences. They go to a page promoting the live stream for information about the event. At the time of the event, they go back to this page. When the live stream starts and if they have access to the live stream, they get a “Join Now” button that connects them to the live stream.
Third-party Streaming
If you have run a live stream in the past, then you have some experience with third-party live streaming. This approach is where you use someone other than SparqFest (Facebook, YouTube, Twitch, etc) to host the actual live stream. Festival directors will take this approach because they have experience running a live stream on one of these services and it is the most cost effective. Another reason to take this approach is when your audience is readily found on one of those platforms (especially, Facebook or Twitch).
From the audience experience, when they click “Join Now”, SparqFest redirects them to the actual location of the live stream.
Pros: most tools are pre-configured for this approach, those sites have built-in audiences to whom you can market
Cons: harder to control access through ticketing, more moving pieces
SparqFest Streaming
For an additional a-la-carte fee, you can start a live stream in hosted in SparqFest. Under this approach, you configure your streaming tool (e.g. OBS or Zoom) to send the stream to SparqFest. When an audience member clicks “Join Now”, the live stream opens up directly in SparqFest.
For any SparqFest live stream, you have the option of setting up one or two chats that will run during the live stream. The first chat is a general audience chat in which anyone signed into the live stream can participate. The second chat is a moderator chat that enables audience members to submit questions to a moderator. Both chat windows support live translation of chat content.
Pros: better integration, full control over access to the stream
Cons: more expensive, more complex to set up, no built-in audience outside your festival audience