How to set a broadcast for a date and time, why announcing it on the networks beforehand matters, and what the system does on its own when the moment arrives.
A scheduled broadcast is one you define now and the system puts on air at the time you set. You do not need to be at the computer when it goes live — but there is an important difference between kinds of source, and it comes below.
From the new-broadcast menu choose Schedule broadcast. A window opens where you fill in:
The default is a quarter of an hour from now.
Each channel can be opened separately and given its own title, description, category, visibility and image. That is useful when the same broadcast addresses a different audience on each network.
This is the step that confuses people most, so here it is plainly: scheduling here does not by itself create an event on YouTube or Facebook. It only tells the system when to go on air.
If you want a link you can circulate before the broadcast, tick Pre-announce beside the channel. The tick appears for YouTube and Facebook once you have set a date and time.
The thumbnail is resized automatically before it is sent to YouTube, because YouTube refuses images above its size limit. Without that handling an ordinary screenshot would fail silently and leave the event with no image.
You can reopen a schedule and edit it. A change to the title, description or time also updates the event already created on YouTube and Facebook, including the start time — so the countdown on the Page does not sit on the old moment. If the announcement went out as a post, the post itself is edited.
Half an hour before the moment, the system checks every destination on the broadcast: it refreshes the connections and looks for a dead one. If a channel is not healthy you get an alert naming the channel and the reason, with a direct link to where it is fixed.
The fix is one click: an expired channel shows a Token expired — reconnect mark, and reconnecting opens in a separate window so nothing already running is torn down.
This exists because a dead token looks fine right up to the moment you try to use it — which is to say, exactly at going live.
The system starts bringing the broadcast up about a minute and a quarter early, because setting a broadcast up takes time. The intent is that at the time on the invitation you are already on air, rather than only then beginning.
If a destination does not come up, it is retried. If some channels made it and others did not, you get a message naming exactly which ones failed and whether they need reconnecting — the rest of the broadcast carries on.
What decides whether the broadcast actually goes out is where the picture comes from.
If a broadcast is scheduled and you want to start sooner, there is a go-live-now option — it simply moves the moment forward to a few seconds from now.
Two deliberately different actions:
Because scheduling alone does not create an event on the network. Tick Pre-announce beside your YouTube or Facebook channel and a real event with a shareable link is created.
It depends on the source. A broadcast from a prepared video runs on its own. One from an external encoder such as OBS or vMix goes out only if the encoder is sending to us at that moment.
The timezone of the browser you scheduled from, and its name is shown beside the date field. Worth watching if you schedule while travelling.
That is intended. Cancelling a schedule only stops it going to air here; it does not delete an event that already exists on your channel. Deleting the broadcast does remove an event that never went to air.