Live Broadcasts
The difference between an audience and a room.
A webinar puts your people in rows, facing a screen. A composed meeting puts them in a room together — every face live, every voice in the conversation.
What we mean
Most online events are a broadcast in the older sense of the word: one signal, many receivers. People watch. They can type in a box. The organiser hopes the questions come, and mostly they do not. Everyone is an audience, and an audience is passive by design.
A composed meeting is built the other way around. Every participant is a discrete video stream, composited live through a broadcast switcher. A director decides what the room sees from moment to moment — a single speaker, two faces side by side, three in conversation — and cuts between them the way a director cuts a live programme. Lower thirds carry names and titles. Graphics arrive on cue. The picture is put together in real time, not stitched together afterwards.
Participants are inside the conversation, not watching a stream of it.
The effect is a room. People turn to each other. They interrupt, they agree, they lean in. Nobody is waiting for their turn in a queue, because there is no queue — there is a director reading the conversation and showing the room what it needs to see. That is the whole point, and it is hard to picture until you have sat inside one.
How the composed picture works
The frame is directed, not fixed.
Full frame
Two-up
Three-up
Owner slot: frames from a real composed broadcast — single speaker, two-up and three-up compositions with lower thirds — go here.
- The director
- One person watches every stream and decides, second by second, what the room sees. It is the same instinct that runs a live outside broadcast, applied to a meeting.
- The switcher
- A broadcast switcher composites the streams into two-up and three-up frames and cuts between them cleanly, so the picture always follows the conversation.
- Lower thirds and graphics
- Names, titles and branding sit where a viewer expects them, arriving on cue. The event looks like a programme because it is run like one.
- Every participant a discrete stream
- Nobody is trapped in a single shared grid. Each feed is its own picture, which is what lets the director build the frame instead of accepting whatever the platform hands over.
Where we have run it
We have directed composed broadcasts for organisations that could not afford the day to fail.
- University of Cape Town
- Vodacom
Owner slot: a short line on each named composed broadcast — what the event was, who was in the room, and what it achieved — belongs here, with the client’s permission to name it.
Six years inside Office Hours Global
Office Hours Global is a daily international production community, and we have been part of it for six years. The founder sits on the panel. That is where the composed-meeting craft is practised, argued over and refined every day — which is why the format runs cleanly when the date cannot move.
Bring us the date. We will make it a room.
Tell us what the event is for and who needs to be in it. A 15-minute call is usually enough to say whether a composed broadcast is the right shape.