I’m on the lookout for the best live streaming software and apps. In this video I review Be.Live as an option for live streaming. I’ll also show you around the app so you can have a look at the features that are included with Be.Live.
馃晵Timestamps馃晵
BeLive Pricing: 2:14
Behind the scenes with BeLive: 3:10
Connecting your camera: 3:25
Adding a guest: 3:35
Adding text to your livestream: 6:42
Adding additional text and scrolling text: 7:36
Adding images to your livestream: 8:31
How to share your screen: 11:08
Going live on Belive: 12:58
What I like and what I don’t like about Belive: 14:22
How to end a livestream: 16:08
馃敶Get your free Facebook Live Cheat Sheets馃敶: https://saranguyenonline.com/special/facebook-live-cheat_sheets/
馃幀 Related videos 馃幀
ECamm Live Review: https://youtu.be/HygV4itzzzs
StreamYard Review: https://youtu.be/gZFjFu6bwIg
馃摀Resources mentioned馃摀
Be Live https://be.live/
Canva: https://saranguyenonline.com/canvaprofreetrial
Be.Live Review – Video Transcription
In this live stream, I am going to cover, I review all Be.Live. If you’re looking at different options for live streaming software, and you’re like, what’s the best live streaming software that is out there? I am doing a series where I’m reviewing a couple of them. I’m reviewing Be.Live on this, this video. I’m also going to be reviewing Ecamm Live and StreamYard. I’m going to give you a couple of options and talk about what I like about them, what I don’t like about them, and then give you a bit of a look behind the scene so you can see for yourself and decide which one is right for you.
I’m glad that we have sign of life, and I am glad that audio seems to be behaving for now. Thanks for your patience everyone and apologies for bad sound because that’s not how I roll as you know. Let’s get into the video now.
For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Sara Nguyen, and I help businesses build their brands, build their income and impact using video on social media and make sure that you check out the links in the description, because I’ll put links to the timestamps. I’ll put any resources and tools and things like that there. A lot of magic in the description for you to check out.
Now, let’s go on over to have a look a bit at Be.Live and what they actually offer. Be.Live, as you know, is a software provider who allow you to have more options when you’re live streaming and they provide live streaming for Facebook live and YouTube. I’ve been using them for a little bit now.
Let’s talk a little bit about them in terms of pricing, you have two options, you have the free plan and you have a standard pay standard plan, which is a paid plan, and there’s a third one coming soon. The two plans at the time of this recording is the free plan.
You get lots of options with the free plan, but you’re limited in terms of you have their branding on your live stream. You have the Be.Live logo and you also get a little bit, you don’t get as many options with the free plan as you do the paid plan of course you need to pay to get extra options but in terms of what you have the pricing I think is pretty fair and you can pay monthly or you can pay annually and there’s a bit of a discount there.
Let’s have a look now at what I think is personally the most important part, the actual features of Be.Live. After you have set up an account and you’ve logged in, this is what you see behind the scene. This is what you see in Be.Live. I’m just going to remove myself now because there’s no need for me to be there twice. You’ll be able to see this section here, which is where all the magic happens.
You can choose your camera in this top left corner here to connect the camera source. If you have multiple cameras, you can choose which one you want to have. You can also add a guest. I’m going to line that up. We will add a guest in a minute.
If you wanted to do a live stream and then have someone attend, whether you’re interviewing them or they’re presenting with you, what you would do in Be.Live is you would select this icon here to add a guest. It would give you this link and you would copy the link. This is what they see, your guest will see when they open the link. They’ll see an invite from you, and then they’ll be able to select this connect camera button and this will get Be.Live to, you know, start streaming their camera, so that’s what happens.
You can give that link to your guest and I’m just going to ask my guests to come on now, which hopefully here they are. Once your guest is on, you’ll see them appear at the bottom and you can add them to the live stream by clicking show in live stream.
You have a couple of options when adding them to the livestream. You can either have it side by side with you, split screen, you can choose the next option here, which is still split screen, but it’s just a little bit back. You can choose to have them smaller as kind of like this picture and picture on the screen, or you can switch that around and have them larger and you smaller. That’s pretty cool in terms of having your guests.
You can also have them completely on screen and you off. Them take control of, I guess, them dominate the entire screen. Otherwise you can have options to display how these different selections here.
The thing that I find a bit limiting with Be.Live is that I can’t control the size that my guest appears. I would like the ability to choose. Yes, I get to choose between full-size and they’re side by side, or I can choose it there, it’s smaller in the corner, but like, I don’t get to make this bigger or smaller to the size that I want.
I may just have control issues and want to control everything but I would like the flexibility. Well, I like the flexibility to be able to choose the size of that. That’s a pretty cool option and that’s how easy it is to add your guests. You also have the option to mute them. If they’re coming on and they’re like, got a lot of noise and you’re like, stop that, you can select the mute button and turn their sound off, and you can also turn their camera off as well, so you can make them disappear and so that you can only hear them. There’s, you know, a little bit of flexibility there, and it’s really easy for you to add a guest and then to kind of manage your guests on the live stream as well.
Once you’re ready to have your guests leave, you can just remove them from the broadcast altogether. Thanks to my guest for helping me out there. That’s how you would add a guest on Be.Live.
The other things that I think is really handy with Be.Live is that you get to add text and you get to add images really easily. If you go to the left-hand sidebar, which is where all the magic happens, here where it says, add or edit agenda, you can add text and then just choose when you want it to appear and disappear from the, from the screen.
You can add this text to be whatever you want it to be. I can add another item and I can go good morning and then I can have it appear in the bottom of the screen like that. That’s how you can add some texts.
If you’re talking and you want to break it up into chapters, or you want to emphasize a particular point at a time, that’s how you can add some text quite easily to the live stream. The other way that you can add some text is, they call it this agenda option, but there’s one more option, which we’ll have a look at is this text on screen option. On the left-hand side text on screen, if I go to show the title, then this is what happens.
You get to display the text and this can be whatever you want, we’ll hide that and show it again. You can choose that text to be whatever you want and change it really quickly there as well and then you’ve also got the option to add a crawler. You can add this text and it runs across the bottom of the screen and this really reminds me of you know, those late night infomercial one call me now, only five units left ads where you can add that if you wanted to as well.聽
It’s really easy to add texts. Those are the options that you have and you simply choose it from within Be.Live. The other thing that you can add is images, which is what people always ask me for. It’s like, how can I add my images so that I can have some variety on the live stream? You can do that in a couple of ways.
If you go to the last option here, edit appearance, it allows you to add your own logos. If you choose the free version, then you’re stuck with their logo, which will appear in the top right-hand corner here. Otherwise, you can upload your own one in terms of images. You can also add an overlay. They’ve got some already loaded.
If I choose this and apply it, that adds that overlay, or I can swap this out and it just changes that instantly for me, or I can add my own ones. I’m going to go and add my own one. This is an example of one of my own overlays. I created an image in Canva and I gave it a transparent background and therefore, and then I just added it as an overlay and I would switch it out on the live stream. That’s how you can add some images.
You’ve also got the option to add, let’s go back to none, a background, and you’re like, she’s clicking on the background, but I don’t see anything.I’m going to choose a background and show you how it actually happens. I’m going to choose this one. Although you can’t see it right now, if I was to choose to share my screen or to add, if I was to choose to an option that made the screen smaller, you’d be able to see it. Let’s do that now.
I’m going to share the screen and I’m going to share a screen ’cause I’m not ready for that. If I was to go back and share a screen, I’m going to choose this document, click share. You can see the document when I show it in the stream like this. As you can see at the back, there’s also the background that I uploaded.
Instead of having the black, I can have whatever colored background that I want and that’s how you can do this. That is how you would add a background to the back of your live stream and then the last thing I just showed you, but I will show you again how I would share a screen.
I’m just going to open up a document so that it makes a bit more sense. I’m going to open this document. Okay. Let’s say I wanted to show a screen, share my screen. This is a common question I get asked all the time, how would you share your desktop so that you can either share a presentation? You can demo software, you can demo drawing, whatever it is.
In Be.Live the option to do that is this third option here, share screen. I’m going to click on that and it’s really messy, but I apologise. You get the option to choose a window, you get the option to share your entire screen.If you have multiple monitors, you can choose which monitor you want to share, or you can choose a specific tab. I’m going to choose this document and we’re going to share it. Once it started sharing, I can then add it to the live stream, show in stream, and this is the document. Then I can just scroll and go through the document.
Once again, like you had with, when you add a guest, you can choose whether you display that 50 50 on the screen, or you can choose whether you display that like that or smaller on the screen, or to have it switched around and more dominant, so that’s how you would share a screen.
It’s quite easy to do. You would simply choose screenshare and then choose which screen monitor browser that you would like to add. Hopefully that’s covered everything.
Now, how do you actually go live with, Be.Live so another common one. Once you’ve set up everything, I’m going to just switch this to make sure I can see what’s going on. On the left hand-side here, there’s this start button. To go live, you would have everything ready, click live, start, and then go live and then there’s a bit of a countdown.
Usually we’ll see how we go with the demo and we’re just waiting for it to do its thing. There’s the countdown and then I can see that I am live, and I know that I’m live because there’s this red button here with the countdown timer and letting me know that it’s live and how long I’ve been going live for.
Then on the right hand-side, this is where I can chat. I can say hello and I can also engage with people on the live stream too. I’ll be able to see everything that’s happening here, which is pretty handy. That is a crash course look at Be.Live.
We looked at the options of getting in. We looked at the options of sharing the desktop. We looked at the options of adding images, text, as a nutshell of what you can actually do within Be.Live. I’m gonna switch back to my face. That essentially wraps us up.
What do I like? And what don’t I like about Be.Live. I love how it’s really simplified and you have enough options to give you lots of flexibility and to customise your live streams so that you can add images. You can add overlays, you can add a guest really, really easily, and you don’t have to struggle with a learning curve, a learning curve with learning the technology. It’s really simple. I really love that about it, what I don’t like about it. I don’t like that you can’t control the sizing of the, you can’t drag the size of whether you’re adding a guest into the live stream in the size of their video or the size of an image easily.
You kind of, you’re a little bit restricted to the preset sizes that Be.Live have for you, but it doesn’t mean that you can’t do it. You just have to kind of work with what you’ve got there. There’s not as much flexibility as I would like, but I don’t think that really is a big deal. Particularly if you don’t have control issues like me, it’s a really robust software that allows you to really customise, get up, start live streaming and, you know, make it, make it your own. I really love that about it.
Would I recommend it? Do I think it’s one of the best software options out there? Yeah, I do. Actually. I do think it’s a great option. The paid version, I think it’s definitely worth it, particularly if you want to get serious about live streaming. It’s a great one to have a play around with, to get started and if you’re not really technical, I think it’s one of the best solutions because it’s so easy to use, but it gives you so so much functionality.
That would definitely be my view of Be.Live. Great software, really easy to use, particularly if you don’t like technology or you struggle with it a little bit, it’s really, it works nicely. And in terms of being stable or not, amazingly stable. Oh, yes. That essentially wraps up the live stream.
What I didn’t show you, which I’ll switch back quickly is how do you stop a live stream? I showed you how to start one, but to stop it, you simply click on the red button again to stop the stream and that’s essentially it.
I just realised it was still running and I was ending my live stream without ending that one, and showing you had to do it. Let’s go back here now. Hopefully you found that useful.
If you found this video useful, if you thought that this was a great demo and that you got value out of it, I showed you how to get around, Be.Live and the features and how to use them, give me a thumbs up and don’t forget to subscribe to my channel and if you’re looking for more ways to grow your business, or you’re looking to get up and running with live streaming, make sure you check out my Facebook Live Cheat Sheets.
I’m going to put a link to them in the description and on the screen somewhere, so you can grab them. It’s a super simple guide to get you up and streaming on Facebook live, even if you’ve never hit record before. It’s also a roadmap to help you convert your viewers into buyers. That wraps up the live stream.
Thank you so much for your patience and bearing with me for this re-record of this video. And I will see you on the next live stream. Bye for now.
