Tag: live streaming

Expedia “Transports” Sick Kids To Exotic Locales With Live 360-Degree Installation

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
As part of its St. Jude Dream Adventures campaign, travel booking site Expedia worked with its agency 180LA to create a live 360-degree video installation for children battling cancer at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn. The installation filled the walls of a room with projections of 360-degree live views of exotic locales such as a national park in Argentina, the Monkey Jungle in Florida, and the Great Maya Reef in Mexico. Some Expedia employees were on location as virtual tour guides to show the kids the sites. You can watch the wonderful experiences those kids had on the campaign’s YouTube playlist.

What Brands Need To Do
Expedia is commendable for utilizing 360-degree live videos in this well-executed campaign for a heartwarming cause. Beyond this use case, such interactive installations also allow brands to engage consumers with an immersive experience that doesn’t require a bulky VR headset. For example, travel and hospitality brands could virtually transport customers to exciting locations to inspire travel and vacation destinations, whereas auto brands may use this technology to devise simulated test drives on advantageous and scenic routes.

 

Source: AdAge

Header image courtesy of Expedia’s YouTube Video

Publishers Are Broadcasting With Facebook’s Live Video

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Following Facebook’s wide release of its live-streaming feature Live Video, some early-adopting publishers and media owners are jumping on board and creating original content for the fast-growing platform. A few weeks ago, MTV Germany became the first TV channel to air a live show on Facebook with the launch of MTV+You, a 16-part weekly talk show featuring celebrity guests talking about entertainment news, gossip, and trends. Last week, celebrity gossip site TMZ reported that its live shows on Facebook are getting between 75,000 and 100,000 live viewers. Similarly, The Daily Beast announced today that it is launching two new daily live shows on Facebook, aiming to foster a long-term relationship with readers with routine video consumption.

Market Impact
Starting with Meerkat’s breakthrough at SXSW last year, live-streaming has seen significant growth  thanks to the likes of Twitter and Facebook coming out with their own live broadcasting features. With Live Video, brands can leverage Facebook’s massive reach to acquire a new audience, and the immediacy of content and the relatively low production costs of live-streaming content make it an appealing emerging platform for brands to explore.

 

Twitter To Put Periscope Live Streams In Timelines

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Twitter is about to give its livestreaming app Periscope a huge boost by integrating the live streams into its iOS app and allowing users to watch the broadcasts right in their timelines. This feature is set to roll out over the next few days, with support for its Android app in the works.

What Brands Need To Do
In June, Nestlé became the first brand to run a paid campaign on Periscope, and BMW debuted an interactive live-action campaign on Periscope later in October. Now with the added exposure, brands will be able to reach a much bigger audience with their live broadcasts, which offer brands a great shortcut to get their content in front of a mobile audience in real time. If your brand has yet to try out live streaming, now would be the time.

 

Source: Wired

Facebook Rolling Out Live-Streaming For Everyone

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
After testing its live-streaming feature within celebrity Pages for about 4 months, Facebook finally started rolling out its answer to Meerkat and Periscope to all users last Thursday. Named Live Video, the new feature is now available to a small number of iOS users in the United States, with plans to expand to Android and more users soon. Users will be given the option to save a recording of their broadcasts on their timelines when it’s over.

What Brands Need To Do
Facebook’s vast user base could give this new livestreaming feature a leg up and capture a large number of Facebook users who haven’t been previously exposed to live-streaming. It will provide brands with a new channel to connect with fans in real time, as well as opportunities for sponsoring social influencers or broadcasting branded events, such as what Guess recently did with AOL’s little-known live-streaming app Kanvas. Its capability to automatically save a live broadcast to a timeline should also help brands easily create some lasting video content from their live-streaming efforts.

 

Source: Digiday

How Brands Are Increasingly Utilizing Live-Streaming

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Mobile-first live-streaming platforms are on a hot streak of late. As SXSW-breakout Meerkat and Twitter-owned Periscope continue to duke it out for the top spot, formidable newcomers launched by Facebook and Samsung also look to capitalize on the live-streaming craze.

Unsurprisingly. some early-adopting brands have already started experimenting with this rising platform. For example, Coach and Taco Bell used Periscope for live announcements of new products and special offers. To better engage with fans in real time, Nissan and Target offered fans exclusive, behind-the-scenes footage, while Benefit Cosmetics hosted live Q&A sessions about their products. Meanwhile, brands like JCPenney are using it to host celebrity “takeover” sessions to appeal to a larger fanbase on social media.

What Brands Should Do
As the examples mentioned above demonstrate, there are a variety of ways that brands can utilize the live-streaming platform to connect with today’s mobile-first consumers. Producing live content may be a bit trickier for brands due to its “high-stakes” nature, so it is crucial that brands and agencies have a live-stream strategy in place and carefully choose the right ways to engage with a live audience.

To learn more about how your brand can utilize live-streaming to reach a wider audience, read our recent Fast Forward feature on live-streaming.

Source: Digiday

Meerkat Teams Up With Discovery Channel To Live Stream Shark Week

Posted on by Lab Team

Read original story on: TechCrunch

Earlier last week, Meerkat launched an embeddable player to allow live streams to be embedded into and viewed on other digital services. The live-streaming app is now making the push with a new partnership with the Discovery Channel, which will be the first content brand to use the player for its annual viral event Shark Week.

As part of the deal, Meerkat will help push out the Shark Week content provided by the Discovery Channel to the users,via a @SharkWeek account, and the embedded player will be used to add behind-the-scenes content on the channel’s DLive web portal.

This is not the first time Meerkat has worked with media owners to provide mobile streaming platform in exchange to exclusive live content—it teamed up with CMT Music Award to broadcast part of the show just two weeks ago. As an alternative digital outlet, Meerkat promises a new second screen experience to engage with today’s mobile-first consumers, and we expect to see more media owners to collaborate with it.

 

The First Brand-Sponsored Periscope Stream Is Here

Posted on by Lab Team

Read original story on: AdWeek

Nestlé has snatched the honor of becoming the first brand to run a paid campaign on live-streaming app Periscope. Working with social influencer platform Izea, Nestlé hired a few Periscope personalities to broadcast classic summertime scenes featuring the Drumstick ice cream cone to their followers, in addition to opening an official account to provide similar content streams.

Ever since Twitter launched Periscope in late March to compete with this year’s SXSW breakout Meerkat, the two apps have been locked in a heated competition that brought much attention to live streaming on mobile. As a result, brands have been quick to follow the audience as well, as we see publishers, cable TV, and even auto brands started to experiment with this emerging media platform, all in attempts to connect with today’s fractured audience. Now that Nestlé has tested water with branded streams, we expect to see more brands to try it out. Twitter also offers their 6 general tips for brands getting on Periscope, although it mostly involves buying promoted tweets.

Twitch And YouTube Fighting Over E3 Streaming

Posted on by Lab Team

Read original story on: The Verge & Variety

The E3, (short for Electronic Entertainment Expo), the CES for the video gaming industry, is currently underway. All giants in the gaming industry and adjacent are coming out with big announcements, vying for the attention and wallets of all gamers worldwide. But on a smaller scale, a fight for eyeballs is also playing out between Amazon-backed Twitch and Google-owned YouTube, which we anticipated weeks ago.

Last Friday, YouTube timely announced the imminent launch of YouTube Gaming, a brand new app and website carting specifically to gamers with features that sound exactly like Twitch’s offerings. E3 offers YouTube a great opportunity to start gaining traction among the gaming community, and the leading online video site is a shiny new E3 hub, which features “a 12-hour live stream marathon” filled with gamer interviews, commentary from YouTube stars, as well as exclusive demos of the newly announced games.

As the de-facto streaming site for video gameplays, Twitch enjoys an inherent advantage given its audience demo and platform focus. Besides the standard wall-to-wall live coverage of the E3 events, it will also, for the first time, allow users to “co-stream” all of Twitch’s broadcasts from the convention, so as to broaden the reach of its user-generated content and enrich its streams. It will be interesting to see how Twitch holds up against YouTube’s attacks, especially considering Google was reportedly set to acquire Twitch for $1 billion before backing out due to alleged conflicts with YouTube.

 

 

Meerkat’s Makes TV Debut At The CMT Music Award

Posted on by Lab Team

Read original story on: AdWeek

Live-streaming app and SXSW breakout Meerkat teamed up with cable channel CMT and Mountain Dew to give users a front-seat view of country duo Florida Georgia Line’s performance during the CMT Music Awards aired this Wednesday. A live, exclusive angle of a TV event with a brand sponsor is a first for Meerkat, who has been eagerly conquering new grounds to stay ahead of its better-funded, Twitter-owned archrival Periscope.

 

Head image taken from meerkatapp.co

Periscope Users Live-Pirated The MayPac Fight

Posted on by Lab Team

Read original story on: The Verge

This past Saturday night, the welterweight boxing championship match between Mayweather and Pacquiao captured the nation’s attention. Yet the pay-per-view content providers HBO and Showtime weren’t happy when they found out that a handful of paid viewers used live-streaming app Periscope and, to a lesser extent, rival app Meerkat, to re-broadcast the fight to thousands of non-paying fans. Twitter CEO, Dick Costolo, even declared Periscope the “winner” of the night via a tweet, but the obvious piracy issue here no doubt undermined such victory.

Despite the complications it causes in re-broadcasting live events, the rise of live-streaming apps also brings content creators new channels to connect with an increasingly fragmented audience. HBO itself used Periscope to offer a behind-the-scene look into Manny Pacquiao’s dressing room via Twitter. When it comes to live-streaming, like many new media platforms before it, there may be more potential that could be utilized by media owners than its downsides.