Schedule a live stream of a pre-recorded video

Question

I have a pre-recorded (edited from dozens of sources) event that I wish to play as a "live stream", i.e. the video starts streaming at a specified time, and viewers must watch it in sequence - you can't fast forward to the end. I don't care if they start watching part way through and rewind to an earlier point, or watch/scan through the whole thing later. But the initial play must be "live".

The finished video is about 3.5 hours, and the file is about 10GB. I could likely just feed it into OBS (I've not used OBS, but it seems straight forward), and feed that to a streaming service. But if anything faults my end, the stream goes offline. For something pre-recorded, it seems there should be a safer way.

Looking through various streaming services, none seem to offer the ability to upload the file, and schedule the streaming time. streamingvideoprovider.com lets me upload in advance and schedule a time, but once the stream goes live, viewers can immediately view any part of the stream. Vimeo doesn't seem to allow pre-upload that I can see. Checking others, either I can't see the feature listed, or it appears to be the same functionality as streamingvideoprovider. Have I missed any that are providing this? I would have thought there would be other demand for this. Note that I've excluded Facebook & YouTube from my list, maybe they provide this, but there is background audio in some parts of the video which those services are likely to flag, resulting in muted audio or the stream going offline.

The other services I've found are restream.io and onestream.live, which appear to let you upload a video file, and schedule to stream to various services. They can stream to Vimeo directly, and both offer an RTMP option that I should be able to use with any other streaming provider. This basically ends up being the same solution as me streaming from my own equipment with OBS, except I can pre-schedule the stream, and their equipment is likely to be more reliable than mine in terms of speed and uptime. In the absence of an all-in-one solution directly with a streaming provider, I'm leaning towards this. Either that, or OBS myself and risk it.

Does anyone else have experience doing this on any of these services, or with any other services I've missed in my research? I'm guessing mostly people just OBS the file themselves, but we've got some pretty poor internet here in Australia sometimes, and I just don't trust that for a 3.5 hour stream.

Answer 1

So I ended up running the streams through Vimeo, who provide their own "Livestream Studio" software, which lets you stream from a pre-recorded file. They don't let you pre-upload the video, but it is apparently an often requested feature that they are "looking at".

Vimeo also advised restream & onestream as existing services to do this with - but without being able to verify the reliability of those services or get feedback from anyone, I was hesitant to use them. I tested Vimeo's software prior to airing the first stream, and that all worked smoothly, so in the end I just went with that. Out of 4 events/streams, the connection speed here did flake out a couple of times on one occasion, which is what I was worried about, but it otherwise worked.

Answer 2

For anyone else looking to accomplish this, I've used both restream and onstream.live for this, with good success. There are some video encoding requirements for each that you need to stick to. I recommend a test stream to ensure your video works well with their service.

Answer 3

Aslo StreamYard will do this job for you. It's similar to Restream.

Answer 4

This sounds exactly like the YouTube premiere feature. You can set an uploaded video to "premiere" at a scheduled date and time:

When the countdown is over, viewers watch the video together in real time. Viewers can rewind the video, but cannot forward past what’s been shown live.