What does live streaming actually cost?

Streaming costs scale with four things: cameras, hours, destinations and risk. Here's how that plays out in practice in the UK market in 2026 (all figures exclude VAT and assume a single day).

Simple webinar or boardroom stream — roughly £750–£1,500. One camera, slides, a streaming engineer with an encoder, one destination (Teams, YouTube, LinkedIn). The cost is mostly the engineer's day and the kit.

Single-room conference or town hall — roughly £2,000–£5,000. Two to three cameras, vision mixing, a dedicated stream audio mix, graphics and lower-thirds, redundant encoding, possibly a remote speaker or two. Crew of two to three.

Hybrid conference or awards show — £5,000–£15,000+. Multi-camera, full graphics package, platform with registration and Q&A, remote contributors managed on broadcast links, rehearsal day, redundant everything. The platform and the rehearsal day are the items people forget to budget.

What moves the number up: multiple sessions or rooms streamed simultaneously, pre-records and edit work, custom platform builds, international remote speakers needing managed links and out-of-hours rehearsals, and same-day highlight edits.

What moves it down: a venue with good in-house AV that provides a clean audio split and camera feeds; flexible timings; using our cloud galleries instead of physical kit on site; and remote operation — a remote vMix operator runs from a fraction of the on-site cost.

The cheapest insurance you can buy is redundancy: a second encoder and a bonded backup connection typically add a few hundred pounds — against the cost of your event going dark in front of your whole company.