Scheduled Events Are Here!

We are excited to tell you about the newest feature making its way to your dashboard: Scheduled Events. Whether you are planning a big event, public hearing, community celebration, or a weekly livestream, this update will help you stay on top (and ahead) of your livestreaming operations.

What Are Scheduled Events?

Scheduled Events lets you plan livestreams in advance across destinations, giving you greater control over setup and more time to prepare and promote your broadcast. If you are planning a YouTube stream, it also creates a public event page you can easily share with your audience, so that they know when and where you’ll be live.

This feature is designed to boost awareness for your events, improve setup reliability and support your team by eliminating last-minute scrambles to go live, plus it adds post-event analytics, helping you understand your audience’s behavior to better-prepare for future events.

This is not just a new feature for us, it lays the foundation of everything we want Switchboard Live to become: your go-to system for all things livestreaming, offering you flexibility, transparency, time-savings, and value beyond a feature-set.

What You Can Do With Scheduled Events

These are the features available on the current version of Scheduled Events:

• Schedule livestreams across platforms.
• Create shareable YouTube event pages in advance.
• Upload custom thumbnails or use the default.
• Manual “Go Live” control when you’re ready.
• Flexible start window: 30 mins before or up to 6 hours after.
• Editable title, description, and stream info before go-live.
• Access post-event analytics on the “Global Events” page to measure impact.

What to Keep in Mind (Current Limitations)

Scheduled Events can’t do it all just yet. These are the details we are still working on at the moment. Keep this in mind as you prepare your first event using the scheduler feature in your Switchboard dashboard:

• No auto-start: For now, streams still require manual launch.
• Recurring events aren’t available, this means each one is a single instance.
• YouTube event pages only apply to your channels (not Partners—yet). The event will still be scheduled to your Partner’s destination, it just won’t have a public page.
• No advance event pages for Facebook or LinkedIn.
• If the event isn’t started within 6 hours, it will expire.

These restrictions help keep the feature lean and reliable for now. But we’re actively working on improvements, and your feedback helps us shape and improve what comes next.

Are Scheduled Events For Me?

If you manage a small but mighty team, are responsible for streaming multiple events every month (or every week), and often have the lingering feeling that there’s something you forgot to do at work, then, yes, Scheduled Events is for you!

This feature is designed to make event coordination and promotion easier, helping increase transparency and visibility across your organization and with your audience. Many users have previously asked for a way to send out a YouTube link ahead of time, and now they can! It’s also great for coordinating events with guests, co-hosts, and teams who need advance notice to prepare, especially when workflows span multiple departments.

This update also introduces the (highly requested) livestream analytics. Completed streams now land on the new “Global Events” page, helping transform your broadcast history into strategic data you can use to review the performance of your stream into actionable next-steps to make your events more engaging.

‍

Switchboard Live is on a mission to make livestreaming simple and reliable for government and public sector organizations, something you know you can set-up once and forget about, and focus instead on creating and distributing content that matters to your community. Scheduled Events builds on that promise by cutting down setup friction and giving you more control over your time, helping you promote your events more confidently, go LIVE smoothly, and be informed on what is (and isn’t) working during your streams–all while you meet your audience right where they are.

We hope you will enjoy the new Scheduled Events feature. If you have questions, you can check out our FAQ, review the quick-guide on this update, or shoot us a line at success@switchboard.live (PD; this is also where you can send us any feedback you have regarding this update and your overall Switchboard Live experience).

‍