How to Add Pre-Roll to Your Livestream

Before a livestream, Stellar opens a "virtual lobby" one hour in advance of your event's listed start time. This is for customers to log into their Stellar accounts and test to make sure everything is working right on their viewing device, but also presents an opportunity to interact with your customers. You can schedule all of this in advance with a pre-roll.

Pre-roll is simply lead-in footage tagged onto the beginning of your livestream. Think of the advertisements, previews, movie clips and trivia that are shown at a movie in a cinema.

You can include up to a hour of pre-roll. Live chat can also be engaged if an event admin or moderator would like to interact with customers or to let viewers chat amongst themselves in preparation for the show.

Here are some suggestions on what you can include in your pre-roll:

• Promote your upcoming events
• Advertise merchandise related to your event
• Trivia questions and let viewers reply via chat
• Soliciting donations for a charity
• Background on your organization

Although you do have the option to broadcast live video during the hour leading up to the event start time, we recommend that you prepare a video file in advance to use for pre-roll. This can be automatically scheduled or played live through your encoder.

Please note that you should not include pre-roll for your video on demand file. If you are hosting a livestream and a VOD, your VOD file should begin with the start of the actual show.

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