Streaming Web Video Guidelines

These guidelines describe steps and considerations for featuring Canisius College events in live, streaming video on the web.

• Events streamed on the Canisius College official YouTube, Facebook, or any other social media account require the explicit authorization of the college president.  
• You may stream events on social media accounts attached to your office, department, program or organization, but there are things you should consider:
• You need social media accounts.   So you need to create, post to, moderate, and maintain those accounts within your office.  We strongly suggest you consult Marketing & Communications for advice on how to use social media safely and effectively.  But Marketing or Communications, ITS, COLI, or any other office on campus cannot create or maintain social media presence for any other office, department, program, or organization other than the College-level official accounts.  
• Know that social media sites like Facebook or YouTube can be complicated, so you may need time, even with assistance from Marketing & Communication, to learn how to use these sites.  You should be thoroughly familiar with every feature involved with streaming video before attempting a video stream.  
• Social media sites often have policies which impose practical delays between account creation and requests to upgrade, and the granting of ability to stream video.
• You will need cameras, and time to work out connections between the cameras and social media accounts.  For video hardware, consult the Canisius Media Center.  Again, they cannot help you create or maintain social media accounts.  
• Any event you plan to stream probably should have an appropriate (and timely) media campaign to promote it beforehand.  

• Considering the above, it is clear you need to schedule plenty of time before streaming an event to prepare your team, the accounts, and promotional efforts.  

But before live-streaming, consider carefully the following:

1. Do you really need to stream the event for a large audience who will likely tune in for the live stream?  If practically the event can only command a few remote viewers, consider using a web meeting instead, such as Zoom.  
2. If you have a live stream of an event, through a camera to the internet, anything that happens will be on the web, and likely forever.  You may think there will not be problems or inappropriate behavior among on-ground attendees, but you probably cannot control that.  
3. If you have promoted the event as a live stream, you have potentially invited individuals to a live-camera event, and they may have different ideas than you about how the event should go.  (Read point 2 again!)
4. Even if you can control attendance on-ground, and are quite certain that your attendees there will act appropriately during the live stream, there may be unanticipated embarrassments you cannot control for.  (Again, read point 2.)  
5. One of the core benefits of the web (versus television) is the ability to watch on demand.  This is usually more important to potential viewers than live coverage.  So if you record and post the event as a recording anyone who could have attended the live-streamed event, and may more people besides, are able to view it (repeatedly.
6. If you record, instead of live-stream the event, dangers presented by points 2-4 are greatly reduced.  You have the options of editing the resulting video, or not posting it altogether.  It is also easier to craft introductory graphics, captions, and so on, as part of the editing process.