How Samford University Delivers High-Profile Campus Livestreams with Castr

Big moments, bigger audiences, one chance to get it right

University events often bring together large and emotionally invested audiences.

Commencements, campus traditions, concerts, memorial services, annual student events, these are moments people plan their day around. Families watch from different cities and countries, alumni tune in from afar, and the campus media team needs to know the stream will simply be there when the ceremony begins.

Samford needed a livestreaming solution that could handle:

And reliability isn't negotiable here. When a commencement begins, there's no rescheduling and no second take, viewers expect the stream to work the moment it starts.

Campus livestreams, delivered on Samford's own website

Samford University selected Castr to power public livestreaming for its campus events.

The team manages every livestream from a centralized dashboard and embeds the Castr player directly on Samford's public livestream page. So families, students, alumni, and remote viewers watch major events without ever leaving the university's site.

Castr supports Samford with:

The viewing experience stays on the university's own website, while Castr handles the live video delivery behind the scenes.

1

Supporting Major Campus Events

Samford's livestreaming centers around its most important campus moments: commencements, university traditions, student performances, seasonal celebrations, and other campus programs that families and the wider community follow closely.

Because these events happen live, the streaming workflow needs to be dependable and repeatable. Castr helps Samford set up dedicated livestream channels for each event, so the campus media team can focus on production while Castr manages the delivery layer. This is especially useful for events where audience demand increases quickly, such as graduation ceremonies or annual campus traditions with strong family and alumni interest.

2

A Branded Livestream Experience on Samford.edu

One of the strongest parts of this setup is that the livestream stays on Samford's own website. Rather than sending viewers to an external platform, Samford embeds the Castr player directly into its public livestream page. That keeps the audience inside the university's branded environment and makes watching effortless for families, students, alumni, and guests.

For Samford, that means:

• Control over the viewer experience
• Simple, one-click livestream access
• A home for public-facing campus events
• No detours to unrelated third-party platforms
• A consistent destination for every university livestream

For a university, this matters because official events should feel like part of the institution's digital presence, not a disconnected external broadcast.

3

Built for the Audience Spikes

Major university events can attract significantly larger audiences than everyday livestreams. A commencement ceremony, concert, or annual campus tradition may draw thousands of viewers at once, especially when family members and alumni are tuning in remotely.

Samford needed a platform that could support these spikes without requiring the media team to rebuild its workflow for every event. Castr's adaptive streaming and scalable delivery infrastructure handles the surge by giving viewers a playback experience suited to their connection and device. So Samford can deliver important live events with greater confidence, even when audience demand is much higher than usual.

A reliable platform for high-visibility events

Samford needed more than a basic livestream player. It needed a platform that could handle professional campus production, large public events, embedded website playback, and the bandwidth to carry high-visibility moments.

Castr delivers on all of it: reliable infrastructure, adaptive playback, an embedded player, US-based ingest, and scalable bandwidth, in a workflow a campus media team can actually run. For Samford, the value of Castr is the ability to deliver important university events through a reliable, branded, and scalable livestreaming experience.

Looking Ahead

As university events continue to reach both in-person and remote audiences, livestreaming remains an important part of how institutions connect with their communities.

With Castr, Samford University has a flexible livestreaming platform that can support commencement ceremonies, campus traditions, student events, and other important university programming.

For higher education institutions, Samford shows how Castr can help deliver reliable, branded, and scalable livestream experiences for the moments that matter most.