Why is there a publishing delay to my live-streams on certain social networking sites?

A publishing delay of several minutes is not unusual on social networking sites. Social Networks like YouTube and Facebook have review teams which review all new live-streams (and also uploaded videos) prior to letting them go live. This is to the protection of their organization and to their viewers protection as well. But it is also a form of control and possible censorship. It is not necessarily a risk to publishers, but a mere necessity in our times, as the leading social media networks are bombarded with every type of media content imaginable. 

Please keep in mind that, even if a social network’s review team deems your content as compliant to their terms, and pushes it to live, the entire process can still add a few minutes of delay until the stream is live on their websites. 

We therefore recommend to schedule live-events within the Media Cloud a few minutes prior to actual start time and also start the broadcast/stream within the live-encoder (such as Wirecast) 3-5 minutes prior to the actual event time in order to give Social Networks, and their review teams, time to let the stream pass their review and go live on their websites as well.