How to Schedule a Stream and Promote It Before You Go Live

A stream nobody knew was coming gets whoever happens to be scrolling at that exact moment. A stream people knew about in advance gets an audience that showed up on purpose — and a shareable page they can put on their own calendar makes that possible without any extra production work on your end. The gap between those two outcomes is almost entirely about advance notice, not production quality — the same broadcast, announced a week ahead with a real link to save, reliably draws more people who actually meant to be there.

Pick a date, time, and timezone for an existing stream card — live or pre-recorded — and CastFork requires the scheduled moment to be at least 5 minutes out, so there’s no accidentally scheduling something in the past or the same instant you hit confirm. Whatever timezone you pick is what gets stored; CastFork converts it under the hood so it stays correct for anyone else involved, and for every viewer who eventually opens the share page in their own zone.

An email reminder goes out automatically 10 minutes before the scheduled start, so you’re not relying on your own memory not to miss your own stream.

Scheduling generates a public countdown page you can share anywhere — a link in your bio, a post, a message to your audience — with no login required to view it. It shows:

• The stream's title and host name.
• A live countdown to the start time, automatically localized to whoever's actually looking at the page — no timezone math for your viewers either.
• Which platforms will carry the stream, by name.
• An "Add to calendar" download that drops a real .ics file into Apple Calendar, Google Calendar, or Outlook.

The page is deliberately minimal about anything sensitive — no RTMP URLs, no stream keys, no internal account details, and no viewer counts to inflate or deflate expectations before you’re even on air. When the scheduled time arrives, the same page flips automatically to a "live now" state.

The .ics download is a real calendar entry, not a link back to a web page — Apple Calendar, Google Calendar, and Outlook all open it directly and add an event with the correct start time already converted to whatever timezone the calendar app itself is set to. That matters for an audience spread across regions: someone in another timezone who adds it to their calendar sees it at the correct local time automatically, the same way the countdown page itself localizes the time for whoever’s viewing it. Nobody has to be told "that’s 3pm Eastern, so figure out what that is for you."

• Share the countdown link directly rather than just announcing a time in text — a page people can bookmark or calendar converts better than a sentence they have to remember.
• Post it once you schedule, not the day of — the whole point of a countdown page is giving people enough lead time to plan around it.
• If the stream itself is a recording rather than a live camera feed, the promotion works identically — a scheduled Upload & Stream premiere gets the same countdown page and .ics file as a live broadcast. See how pre-recorded premieres work if that’s the format you’re using.

It’s easy to assume the countdown page and calendar file are purely audience-facing tools, but the automatic 10-minute reminder email goes to you, the person who scheduled it — a real safety net for the version of this that actually happens: you schedule something two weeks out, get busy, and would otherwise only remember at the moment it’s already supposed to be starting. That’s a small thing, but it’s the difference between a stream that starts on time and one that starts eight minutes late while you scramble to get the encoder running.

Reschedule or cancel any time before the stream starts — the countdown page and calendar entry exist independently of the underlying stream card, so adjusting the time updates what viewers already added to their calendar rather than leaving a stale entry behind.

A weekly show doesn’t need a brand-new setup every time — schedule the next occurrence once the current one wraps, reusing the same stream card and destination toggles, so the only thing that changes week to week is the date and time. Viewers who bookmarked or calendared a previous countdown page won’t automatically get the next one, though — each scheduled instance gets its own share link and calendar entry, so it’s worth re-sharing the new link rather than assuming last week’s page updates itself.

Scheduling works the same way whether the underlying stream is a live encoder feed from multistreaming or a pre-recorded premiere from Upload & Stream. It’s available on every plan, including Free — see pricing for what else changes by tier.