Every now and then you come across something that seems to contradict itself and you have to take a double pass and ask yourself what you’re missing; that was the case when I noticed OneStream Live on AppSumo: a tool to upload videos and queue them into multi-stream LIVE streams? .. of a video?

But if it exists, it must have a reason, right? so the first important step in understanding the tool is to understand what it does and why. That goes for all tools, obviously, but more so for one that is not straightforward.

Live Streaming a Pre-recorded Video

After doing a bit of research and reading a bunch of articles, some from OneStream Live’s website and some from other websites, reviews and even competitors, I can say I did get a bit intrigued by the idea.

The whole point here is that videos are increasingly taking the crown in media consumption, more so than written words, and live streaming is at the forefront for many reasons, most of all because it promotes interaction between the audience and the media creator.

Unfortunately, sometimes it’s just not possible to livestream for many reasons, one being that you might not have a good enough connection.

More over, the quality of a livestream will never be as good as what you can do with a video you can edit and work with. This means that most livestreams have a very low production value, unless they’re made by a professional.

That also works for the person talking. I can attest to it myself, as the videos I prepare for MasterStack are my very first videos of this kind, and without the basic editing I do, they wouldn’t be serviceable at all (assuming they currently are!).

The other part that’s quite annoying to me is when you have tons of uh-ehm filler words and wastes of time on a video, when people go off on tangets and off target for 10 minutes, etc. That eventually contributes into making a nice and clean 10 minute concept/video into a 30 minutes grind.

The final positive I’ve been able to see is that you can schedule the live stream at any given time, and what you can and should do is be there, so you’re not even busy streaming and you can interact with your audience. That, to me, is quite a solid pro that sometimes, depending on the stream, might become difficult to do.

So by uploading and scheduling your stream with a video, you can produce a better content than your livestream, you can produce it with your most ideal conditions and you can engage with your audience live. That seems like a pretty good deal to me, for some form of content.

It seems so good, in fact, that I’ll try doing that for the video for this Preview, to see how that works, if that works (wops, spoilers!)

What’s the Deal?

Now that we know why we could consider a pre-recorded video live stream, let’s delve into what OneStream Live does and whether it seems like a good tool for this job. Taken directly from the deal page:

You can only stack two, the 2nd stack is far more convenient than the first alone, so if one considers this tool useful, it’s probably worth it to directly get 2 stacks.

Feature wise they’re both good and I don’t see anyone with 2 stacks reasonably reaching any limit. The only one that can be reached in time is the storage space, but you can use cloud services to bypass that directly. You can use Google Drive, One Drive and Dropbox at the moment, but they’re integrating more.

Multi-stream is allowed on both plans, and that’s one killer feature that allows you to have your video live at the same time on multiple platforms.

Another good one is that your team members could upload on your page/groups/accounts without having access at all to said accounts, as they use OneStream Live to schedule them.

As for features, the only ones missing are actual livestream and live-screen share. They’ve been asked by sumo-lings and the developers said they’re working on it: however, they will only be available to the Professional plan. So grab 2 stacks if those are features that interest you!

I can’t see anything missing from these prices, and especially the 2 stack pricing seems just too good, if everything works as it should and the concept behind this tool is as sound as it seems to me.

OneStream Live Preview Final Thoughts

We understand what the tool does and we understand the reasoning behind it: we like it!

The pricing is great and allows us to appreciate everything the tool does without visible limitations or paywalls (limits are there, but they’re pretty far down the road): we like it!

Reviews both on AppSumo and around the web seem to indicate it’s a solid tool that does what it says, so we like that as well.

All that’s left to do is for us to use it to upload this very preview video, and we’ll see on the OneStream Live Review how it has performed so far.