Should I stream vertical video on LinkedIn Live?


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With LinkedIn having rolled out vertical video now, the question arose: is it also possible to do vertical video on LinkedIn Live?

  • Possible – yes.
  • Advisable –  not so much.

Let me show you. First of, usually my livestreams on LinkedIn come across in the 16×9 format, which looks like this when the guest is an author. (I typically highlight their book on-screen for the duration of the episode.)

livestream on Linkedin

And when they don’t have a book it looks like this: 

example of a livestream on linkedin

To produce these, I use the default setting in Restream (bottom right of the video):

Livestreaming with vertical video

To stream vertical video on LinkedIn Live, just push that vertical icon in the bottom right, and that same video will reformat to this below. I usually have to move one way or the other to center up better for my eye-level camera.

vertical video in Restream

 

Try podcasts and books on Audible now

But then, on LinkedIn it displays like this:

vertical video on LinkedIn Live

And with two people like this:

vertical video on LinkedIn Live

So, it is possible, but it doesn’t render correctly on the stream. It just squishes the vertical video into the horizontal box. It’s not ideal, and I wouldn’t recommend it for now. One exception would be if LinkedIn is your secondary network, it might make sense. For example, if you multicast to Instagram (vertical) as your main channel, LinkedIn is an add-on.

So vertical video on LinkedIn Live, while possible with software solutions like Restream – which is what I use, I would not recommend it in general for now.

And if you need vertical soundbites from your podcast episodes, just upload the horizontal video into Opus Clips and choose a vertical reformat.

resizing horizontal video to vertical

 

 



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