Use in-event features

Step-by-step instructions for interacting with your audience

There are a number of ways that you, as a host, can interact with your audience during the live stream:


  • Blur your background, so your audience aren't distracted by your surroundings
  • Interact with the broader audience via Instant Message with Chat and emojis
  • View all participants in the event via the Hosts button
  • Share screen or play a video
  • Administer audience requests to join the live stream via  the Knock button
  • Delete inappropriate Chats
  • Ban misbehaving attendees


We recommend you tell your audience that they can click on their Knock  button if they'd like to request to join the live stream discussion - if they haven't attended a No Filter Network event before, they may not realize that this great interactive feature exists!


Each of these features is described in more detail below.


Blur background


Blurring your background can be very valuable if you're in a public place and would prefer not to distract your audience with whatever is going on around or behind you!


There are two ways to blur your background:

  • When you are joining the event and are selecting your audio and video devices, you can blur your background by simply toggling Blur Background on.
  • If you're already in the event and you'd like to enable blurring, navigate to your Settings and toggle Blur Background on there.

Chat & Emojis


Clicking on the Chat button will allow you to view questions, comments and conversations that all event participants are having via Chat. You may also add your own comments, answer questions etc etc.


Next to the 'Enter your message' box is an emoji pop-up submenu that allows you to add dynamic emojis to the chat. Viewers can also express their current sentiments to all event attendees by selecting a relevant dynamic emoji. When they do this, all event participants will see that emoji float up their screens, which makes it a really good way for you to understand how the audience is responding to the live stream and, if necessary, adapt accordingly!


If a guest or audience member posts a Chat message that you think is not appropriate for whatever reason, you can delete that Chat by simply clicking on the user's name to the left of the offending Chat message and selecting Delete Chat.


To close down the Chat window, just click on the Chat button again.

Hosts


Clicking on the Hosts button will allow you to view an up-to-date roster of all stream participants and audience members.


If you want to ban a guest or audience member from the event, simply click on the three dots to the right of their name and select Ban User.


To close down the Hosts window, just click on the Hosts button again.


Note: Your audience also have a Hosts button, but when they click on it, they only see a list of Hosts, Co Hosts and Guests - they cannot see any details about other members of the audience or about the Moderator.


Share screen or play a video


If streaming from a computer on a web browser, you'll have the option to share your screen in one of three ways:

  • Share Entire Screen, where everything visible to you on your screen will be visible to your guests and viewers. You can alternatively choose to only have a specific window or Chrome browser tab visible to your audience.
  • Share a File will allow you to browse your computer for a specific video or PDF file. If your PDF file has multiple pages, you can scroll through them like a slideshow to present to your audience.
  • Share a video will allow you to paste a video link to share live with your viewers. This could, for example, be a Youtube link or a link to a corporate video your team prepared for the event.


To stop sharing your screen, just click on the Share Screen button again.


Note: Ensuring the Right Window is Shared

When sharing either your entire screen, or a specific window, make sure to first click the screen that you want to share, then you can hit the share button, and your screen share will begin.

Administer Knocks


If someone in the audience has clicked on their Knock button, to request to join the live stream, it will be shown as an update to your Knocks icon.


Clicking on Knocks will open up a pop-up window that will show you two lists.


  • In queue is the list of audience attendees who are currently requesting to join the live stream. You can add them directly from the audience into the stream as a guest attendee by clicking their name.


  • Guest Speakers is the list of guest attendees who are currently participating in the live stream. You can return them back to the audience by clicking the 'x' symbol beside their name.


Currently, you can allow up to 24 participants into the live stream at a time. However, for an optimal viewer experience for your audience, we recommend that you never have more than 6 people on video at any given time.


To close the Knocks window, just click on the Knocks button again.




Dealing with network issues during an event


Ideally, when hosting an event, you will be using a reliable, high bandwidth internet connection. However, sometimes life just doesn't go smoothly, so you may find yourself using a poor quality network connection.


  • If everyone can see and hear you just fine, but you're having problems seeing or hearing others, then the upload speeds on your internet connection are probably fine, but your download speeds are poor. In this case, as a host, it's more important that your guests and audience can see and hear you clearly than that you can see them. So, to improve the situation, you should enable Low Bandwidth Mode in your event settings. In Low Bandwidth Mode, the video of your co hosts and guests in the event will be suppressed in the cloud, so only their audio and screensharing will reach you - this significantly lowers the download bandwidth burden on your network connection. You can continue to send good quality video, audio and screensharing upload to your guests and audience. No-one will even notice that you're in Low Bandwidth Mode!


  • If you're on a really low bandwidth network connection, such that you can't clearly see or hear your colleagues and they can't clearly see or hear you, then turn on Low Bandwidth mode to reduce your download bandwidth and turn off your video, to reduce your upload bandwidth. Your colleagues and the audience will see that your video is off, but it's more important that they can hear the cool things you're saying, so it's a reasonable compromise!


  • If you're on a flaky network connection, don't worry - the No Filter Stream platform is architected for full resiliency, so will minimize any impacts of a flaky network on you, your guests and your audience.


  • If you experience a full network outage during an event and you drop out of the event, stay calm - No Filter has your back!
  • If there is a co host in the event, the event will simply continue and you can rejoin when you re-establish network connectivity.
  • If you're the only host in the event, the event will continue for 5 minutes, to give you time to re-establish network connectivity. If you haven't re-joined after 5 minutes, No Filter will let your guests and audience know that the event is ending and will then end the event for everyone.