Who Does What: Roles on a Streaming Team Print

A short guide to how streaming work divides up, what each job needs, and who to ask for what. Useful when you are organising volunteers, or working out what you have taken on yourself.

Three jobs

However large or small your operation, the work falls into three jobs. In a big organisation that is three people or three teams. In most it is one or two people wearing all the hats — which is fine, and worth knowing, because it tells you which hat you are wearing when something goes wrong.

The Content Creator

Makes the material. Films, records, edits, and produces the finished file.

What they need: editing software — DaVinci Resolve is free and genuinely professional, and Premiere or Final Cut work if you already have them. Audacity is free for audio-only work. And Shutter Encoder, also free, for the final conversion step.

The one thing that matters most: every file they hand over should match the same specification. See Preparing Media Files for On Air. A creator who exports each project with whatever settings happen to be selected creates problems that only appear later, on the channel, in front of viewers.

The Media Manager / Scheduler

Organises what exists and decides what plays when. Uploads to the library, writes titles and descriptions, builds playlists, sets the schedule.

What they need: the control panel, mostly. For audio stations, a tag editor such as Mp3tag (free, Windows) is worth having — the artist and title tags embedded in your audio files are what listeners see as "now playing", and untagged files look untidy on every player and app.

This job is undervalued and it is usually the one that decides whether a channel feels professional. Good scheduling with modest content beats excellent content scheduled badly.

The DJ / Live Coordinator

Handles anything live. Runs the camera and encoder for a live video stream, or presents a live radio show.

What they need depends on whether it is audio or video:

For live audio: broadcasting software on their own computer — BUTT, Mixxx, RadioBOSS and others all work — and their own DJ Account. See Setting Up DJ Accounts for Your Station.

For live video: encoding software — OBS Studio is free and where most people start — plus the actual equipment: camera, a way to get sound from your mixing board into the computer, and a wired internet connection. See Live Streaming Equipment: What You Actually Need.

This is the job with the most equipment and the most that can go wrong in the moment, so it is the one worth rehearsing.

Which job matters most for your service

Who gets access to what

This is worth settling early, because it is awkward to unpick later.

Your main account login stays with whoever owns the account. It manages billing, settings and every service you have with us. It is not a login to share around, and there is no need to share it.

Live audio presenters get a DJ Account. Their own username and password, their own connection point, removable individually when someone moves on.

Live video operators get the stream key. That is the credential their encoding software needs, and it is all they need — they never require your account login. Treat the key as a credential: keep it out of shared documents, and ask us to reset it when a volunteer stops helping.

Creators and schedulers work either through the account owner or by handing finished files over. In most organisations the person who owns the account is also the one scheduling, so this rarely comes up.

If you are doing all three yourself

Most people reading this are. The useful thing is knowing which job you are in at any moment, because the three fail in different ways and at different times.

Creator problems show up weeks later, on the channel. Manager problems show up as gaps in the schedule and things nobody can find. Live problems show up immediately, in front of an audience.

Which is why, if you only rehearse one thing, rehearse the live one.