This blog helps you identify the common reasons why your live streaming is failing and how you can correct them! Continue reading
Live streams are fun, but unlike recorded videos, they don’t give you the flexibility to make edits. Anything can happen during a live stream.
The spontaneity and immediacy of live streaming often lead to errors and failures. Understanding the pitfalls why live stream fails and how to avoid them can significantly improve the quality of your live streams.
In this blog, we will showcase the 10 common live streaming mistakes to avoid and give you some actionable tips to troubleshoot the root causes. But before that, let’s understand the consequences of live streaming failure.
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Whether you’re presenting a webinar to clients or delivering online classes to students, any failure or disruption during live streaming can affect in many ways. Here are the most common consequences when a live stream fails.
There could be many reasons why your live streaming is not working. It may be due to low bandwidth, or using the wrong live streaming software, poor production quality, or even due to a lack of planning & purpose.
The only way to deliver seamless and smooth live streaming sessions is to identify the potential live streaming issues and their roots, and fix them before going live.
Let’s move forward and explore the common live streaming mistakes that streamers often make.
This section is curated by professional live streamers who have already made live streaming mistakes and faced the consequences. Here we are sharing the most common mistakes live streamers make, so that you can avoid them while live streaming.
This is the very first live streaming mistake to avoid. Live streaming without a clear agenda leads to disorganized presentation and irrelevant messaging that fails to retain viewer’s interest & engagement.
If you’re live streaming randomly, having no objective at all, your audience may find it difficult to follow along and stay engaged.
Hence, it’s recommended to do an in-depth research on the topic you are presenting and clearly showcase the key-points. Keep your intent and messaging consistent throughout the live streaming, or else it will be very difficult to retain your audience till the stream ends.
Not testing your live streaming setup before going live is one of the most common live streaming mistakes made by streamers. This often leads to technical glitches or failure during live stream, disrupting the viewing experiences of the audience.
To avoid this, it is essential to conduct dry runs before going live. This includes testing your camera, microphone, lighting setup, presentation flow, and also the internet connectivity.
Checking your live streaming setup during the dry run makes you familiar with the equipment and functioning of the live streaming platform. You can also identify potential technical issues that may happen during the actual live streaming, and accordingly, stay prepared for the crisis.
Inconsistent live streaming is one of the common live streaming mistakes to avoid that can lead to unnecessary confusion and reduced audience loyalty.
Being a professional live streamer, you need to ensure a pre-defined schedule for live streaming. When you start live streaming without any prior invitation or notice, viewers are less likely to participate and interact with your live broadcasts.
It’s highly recommended to avoid erratic and inconsistent live streaming habits as it may severely hamper your brand’s growth and audience engagement.
Create a consistent schedule – a particular day & time for your live streaming and build trust & reliability with your audience.
This is a terrible live streaming mistake to avoid. We have seen many live streamers who ignore audio quality and lighting, facing audience retention issues.
In most cases, where audio is not good and visuals are shady and too dim, viewers often leave the live streaming event in the first 5 minutes. The absence of proper audio and correct lighting in a live stream makes it difficult for viewers to engage with the content.
We suggest not using the built-in microphone and camera of your laptop or computer. Instead use a good-quality, may be wireless lapel microphones that come with auto noise cancellation and an external camera with high mega-pixels.
Also, for adequate lighting and texture in the live streaming, we recommend using additional lighting equipment such as softboxes or ringlights.
It is a nightmare to experience power or internet outage during live streaming. But it’s true – such mishaps often happen with live streamers.
We have faced unstable internet issues during our live webinar sessions, and we know how awful it is for viewers to experience buffering and dropped frames.
To avoid this, we strongly recommend arranging back-up for both power and internet connection before going live. For internet back-up, don’t opt for a mobile hotspot as they are not reliable for live streaming; instead, go for satellite internet services.
Being a live streamer, you need to understand viewers are giving you their time & attention, and in-return they expect the same-level of attention and value.
If viewers feel their presence is not acknowledged or they are being ignored, they will immediately leave the live streaming session and may never come back.
Remember, you cannot just keep reading the script without any live interaction with your audience. It will make your live stream extremely boring, compelling users to quit immediately.
Simply be real to your audience. Look straight into the camera. Read aloud the Q&As, conduct polls, drop valuable sharings like case studies, guide links, YouTube videos, and contact details using the chat box.
Interact with confidence and understand your audience’s preferences and accordingly make them feel important throughout the live streaming session – This is the secret to higher audience engagement during live streaming.
Distributing live streams via a single platform is a common live streaming mistake to avoid.
Mostly, the new live streamers commit this fatal streaming mistake. They live stream on one platform only. As a result, they never get the exposure, they deserve.
If you are live streaming only on one platform, be it Facebook or YouTube, then you are missing out on audiences who are present on other platforms.
For example, if you are live streaming on YouTube only, then you will not get the viewers of Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn! As a result, your viewer base will never grow. Hence, we suggest sharing your live streaming feed across all the social and broadcasting platforms for maximum reach.
Not recording & repurposing live streams is one of the common live streaming mistakes to avoid. As you know, creating new content requires time, effort, and capital, You have the opportunity to record your well-presented live streams and share them as on-demand content across social media platforms.
Repurposing live stream content can help you reach a larger audience and also promote your live streaming brand. It’s a smart way to keep your content creation costs low and ensure maximum ROI at the same time.
Most live streamers have seen tremendous growth in viewership once they started releasing their live streams as VOD on YouTube like platforms.
Not doing proper promotion and marketing is another common live streaming mistake to avoid. Without effective promotion, even great content fails to find its audience.
It’s essential to share updates and countdowns to your live streams. Leverage social media platforms where your target audience is most active and post about the live streaming topic and schedule.
Email marketing & push notifications are other ways to market your live streaming. Send out a nice invitation with date, time, and perks of attending this live stream. Also, encourage your existing fans and community members to spread the word on the live streaming event.
Many times, we have seen live streamers avoiding the Q&A session and directly closing the live stream with a Thank You note. This is a big live streaming mistake to avoid.
It’s obvious for viewers to have doubts. Simply encourage or motivate them to ask questions via the Q&A box, which you can answer at the end of your live stream.
Read out the questions aloud, so that every participant can hear and understand the context. Also, thank the attendees for asking queries by calling out their names. This will make your live streaming more interactive and interesting.
So, these are the 10 common live streaming mistakes you need to avoid on priority. It is wise to understand that there’s always a chance something unplanned will happen during the live stream, no matter how well-prepared you are. In such scenarios, it’s best to remain composed and not panic.
Whether it’s a technical disruption or presentation error, or some unexpected queries coming from viewers, try to adapt and respond gracefully.
Don’t get panicked on the mic. Stay calm and composed. If you stay confident, your confidence will reflect on your live stream too, which might impress your viewers.
You can even do a short meditation and deep breathing before starting your live stream. It will help you to calm down and focus on the actual content of your live stream.
Interacting with your audience is important. But, over-interaction is irritating. Some live streamers keep talking about random things the entire time, under the illusion that they are talking to their viewers. But your viewers do not want to hear random stuff. They want to hear substance. So, always keep a balance between what content you present and how much you interact with your audience.
Always record your live streams and repurpose them later. You can cut them and make reels and bite-sized videos. You can even publish them as it is in the form of video-on-demand content.
Consistency is the key to marketing success. So, you need to keep marketing your live streaming consistently. One announcement post or one-or-two random emails won’t do. Make a proper marketing schedule of emails, social media posts, and announcements, and stick to it.
Technical glitches in the middle of live streams can be extremely embarrassing at times. To avoid such scenarios, test everything beforehand. If time permits, dry run your live stream session one or two times to be 100% sure.
The live streaming software that you choose plays an important role in making your live streams a grand success.
Muvi Live is an enterprise-grade live streaming platform that allows you to broadcast your live events with a professional finish. Equipped with powerful global CDNs, Muvi Live ensures uncompromised lag-free live streaming.
You can live stream from any camera on any device, switch between cameras effortlessly, and deliver DRM-secured live streaming content across the globe!
With Muvi Live, you can:
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Live streaming may not be working due to an unstable internet connection, insufficient upload bandwidth, or misconfigured encoder settings.
To resolve this, ensure your internet upload speed meets the streaming requirements, verify that your encoder settings match platform specifications, and consider using a reliable streaming platform like Muvi Live, which offers built-in CDN, adaptive bitrate streaming, and 24/7 support to help you stream smoothly.
Live streams often stop when your upload bandwidth fluctuates or packet loss occurs, causing the viewer’s buffer to underflow and the playback to pause until more data arrives. They can also halt if the streaming server or CDN is overloaded, encoding settings are misconfigured, or software bugs interrupt the feed—leveraging a platform with adaptive bitrate and a global CDN (like Muvi Live) can keep your broadcast running smoothly
Live streaming often delivers inconsistent viewer experiences—prone to unpredictable latency, buffering, and bandwidth fluctuations—that frustrate audiences and undermine engagement.
Livestreams glitch when unstable internet or packet loss interrupts your data stream, misconfigured encoding settings or CPU/GPU overload hinder real-time compression, and hardware resource constraints can’t keep up with the processing demands.
Test and upgrade your network—use a wired Ethernet connection, close unnecessary apps, run speed tests (aim for ≥5 Mbps upload), and ensure your encoder settings meet platform specs.
Perform full equipment dry runs to validate camera, mic, and encoder configurations, enable adaptive bitrate, review CDN health, keep firmware and drivers updated, or switch to a reliable platform like Muvi Live that provides built-in CDN, ultra-low latency, adaptive bitrate streaming, and 24/7 support.
Live streams fail primarily due to unstable internet connections, causing buffering and packet loss, misconfigured encoding settings overloading hardware, and platform or CDN outages interrupting the feed.
Written by: Richi Milan
Richi is a passionate content marketing enthusiast with hands-on experience in strategizing and creating compelling content. Currently, working with world's best OTT platform provider - Muvi. Dive-in and explore the OTT-verse with Richi!!
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