An irritation with facebook live video broadcasting, is that you cannot share your screen and use your webcamera simultaneously, without using a third party plugin or application. As soon as you press the “Stop Sharing” button, your webinar transmission ends and you will have to start things all over again from scratch!
This is a huge inconvenience to your viewers during a webinar, when keeping them engaged is so important. This is because you want to greet your viewers first off and then share your screen and finally finish with your camera view to say goodbye. Having to start stop start your webinar is unacceptable and unprofessional.
Everyone on the Internet says that this cannot be done without using third party streaming software which we don’t have and don’t want to use.
Luckily if you have the Windows 10 Operating System running on you computer, then I have found a work around using a built in tool! Windows 10 comes with a feature called “Camera” which you can use to test your camera without worrying about trusting a third party browser plug in or application.
What you need to do is after you launch a facebook live broadcast and press the “Share Screen” button, click the Windows start button on the bottom left corner and launch the “Camera” app. Don’t launch your camera until after you press the sharing button as you will get a conflict error between the Windows 10 camera app and the facebook live
Your camera view will then appear and you can say hello to your groupies.
What you are doing is cleverly sharing the Windows 10 camera app test screen!
After your preamble, simply press the “minimise” button on the top right of the camera view so that you can come back at the end of your broadcast to say “goodbye” and press the “Stop Sharing” button. You will see the camera icon in your taskbar at the bottom of your screen. Simply click the icon to maximise your camera test app to finish off your broadcast of brilliance!
Windows 10 Camera testing app