Ok, this won't be an in-depth essay, but I just wanted to type out a few thoughts on what livestreaming is, why you might get it, what to think about, etc.
First up — livestreaming has definitely become more of a thing since Covid — particularly funeral livestreams; and people tell me that they want it for overseas relatives, and for elderly relatives with mobility issues.
Many of the wedding livestreams I've done are for Indian weddings, where there might be a whole community in India watching along.
So I guess that's point one — if you don't have a lot of overseas family and friends, maybe it's not worth doing.
Point two is that there's a lot of different ways to livestream. Cheaper companies are pretty much just some dude with an iPad. And if you think, "Hang on — I could just get my brother/sister/cousin to do that", you're right — and couples do.
The more expensive companies will have complex setups, with wireless video transmitters and multiple cameras that they're switching between. But no wedding company that I've seen has a broadcast-grade setup as such. You know, that sort of gear is in a whole different price league from weddings, and what people are willing to pay for a wedding livestream just doesn't justify it.
So that's point two — that livestreaming is a broad church, and there's a lot of things that fall under the label, including a lot of different levels of quality.
Last point is: a really well-done livestream, for most couples, to a large extent replaces the need for a long-version wedding video.
And this kind of surprised me. For a professional, livestream video is clearly lower quality than going through the traditional capture-footage-and-then-edit-it process. The actual image quality is worse (the bitrate is lower and there are compression artifacts from wireless transmission), and there's also camera bumps and audio glitches and other things that are hard to avoid under live conditions.
But, for the average person on the street, they care about the content much more than the pixels.
I once saw a bride watch her ceremony livestream, just before the reception entrance, sitting in the green room with her friends, and she was in tears.
All she said was: "That’s us."
