Publishing stream to Facebook Live

Nimble Streamer allows publishing live streams to various types of destinations, like other media servers, CDNs, YouTube or Twitch.

Facebook Live platform allows taking RTMPS streams as input, so Nimble Streamer users can use that as a target as well. The setup and usage is simple so we'll show you how to do it.

As a source for your stream you can use any delivery method supported by Nimble Streamer.

• Published RTMP
• Pulled RTMP
• Pulled HLS
• Pulled and published RTSP
• MPEG-TS via UDP and HTTP
• SRT via Pull and Listen
• Icecast/SHOUTcast

Once the input stream is received by Nimble, it can be re-published via RTMP to Facebook . Let's see how this can be set up.

Notice that you may also find useful Streaming from Larix Broadcaster to Facebook Live article.

In this example we assume that you have a stream which has application name "source_app" and stream name "source_stream".

Go to Nimble Streamer -> Live Streams Setting menu and click on Republishing tab.

Now you need to take a look at the settings provided by Facebook. They may look like this:

URL: rtmps://live-api-a.facebook.com:443/rtmp/
Key: 10156882222123456?ds=1&a=ATgNxRcW4p654321

Click on Add RTMP button to see the dialog for entering new settings. Fill them in with Source app and stream name and with Facebook parameters as shown on the picture below.

As you can see, Destination address includes the domain part of your original "URL" setting.
You also need to check "Use SSL" checkbox so value of Port field becomes "443". This is mandatory for Facebook publication.
Destination application field is "rtmp" in this case and it's taken from the same original URL.

The "Key" original setting is also split into 2 parts. The first sequence of numbers is put into Destination stream field while the rest of parameters are set in Destination stream parameters field but without a question mark.

Now select the servers where you'd like to apply these settings to and click OK - your settings will be applied within several seconds.

As soon as your original stream goes online, Facebook Live will start receiving it.

Further usage

You can use Nimble Streamer to deliver your content to multiple destinations simultaneously. Use these examples of RTMP republishing to see what can be used as well:

• Re-publishing in Nimble Streamer
• RTMP setup in Nimble Streamer video tutorial to learn more about basic RTMP scenarios.
• Streaming to YouTube
• Streaming to Periscope
• Publishing to Limelight CDN
• Publishing to Akamai CDN

You may also consider re-publishing incoming RTMP streams with inserted ads. Nimble Advertizer provides a framework for inserting pre-roll and mid-roll ads into live streams for further output via RTMP, SLDP and Icecast with custom business logic and per-user ads. So if you create RTMP stream with ads insertion and pull it for further re-publishing, you can provide your target CDN with properly sponsored content.
Visit Advertizer web page to find out more about server-side ads insertion functionality.

If you need to change the outgoing content in any way, like change the bitrate, use our Live Transcoder for Nimble Streamer to transform. It has high performance and low resource usage.

For other live streaming scenarios, check our live streaming use cases.

Having that, you can create flexible delivery chains using Nimble Streamer for media hubs and WMSPanel for easy-to-use control panel. Install Nimble Streamer if you still haven't done that and contact us if your streaming scenarios need any updates of described functionality.

Related documentation

Live Streaming features, Live Transcoder for Nimble Streamer, RTMP feature set, Build streaming infrastructure,