My day job is the Director of Art and Media Production at the National Foreign Language Center at the University of Maryland. Summer is usually full of language conferences but obviously that's not happening this year. Our leadership decided to host a virtual conference that brings together all of the cancelled language conferences for three days. NFLC would not only handle all the organizing of speakers, but I would handle creating the live stream event.
Everyone is so sick of Zoom. The Alex Lindsay group I've been watching (Office Hours) talks a lot about how we can all improve the quality of our audio and video for online meetings and events. One of the member of the group is Oliver Breidenbach, the CEO of Boinx Software. They make a piece of software called mimoLive, a software switcher with livestream integration. There are others like OBS and vMix, but mimoLive is Mac only software and I'm a Mac only guy. Boinx has made mimoLive free to members of the Office Hours group for a few months. It's really cool software, and I decided to use it for the conference. My goal was to make the livestream more engaging with graphics, on screen Q&A text from participants, countdown clocks, etc.
One problem I have is a lack of computing horsepower. mimoLive supports NDI, which I've been using for a couple of years at NFLC, so to spread around the compute requirements I decided to have panelists call into a Skype meeting on one laptop and another laptop running mimoLive would pull them in over NDI. That laptop would handle the switching, graphics, and live streaming. I wish I had more power available, but it worked pretty well and it looked way better than a basic Zoom call.
The other piece of the puzzle was a Q&A submission system I built in Drupal. It allowed viewers to submit questions, someone on our staff would review and promote good questions to a queue to be answered live, and then a JSON feed of approved questions was fed into the graphics engine of mimoLive. Pretty cool!