Live streaming an event (or a series of events) can seem daunting. But if you break the process down into steps, live streaming becomes approachable for even small teams. To get started, you’ll need to line up your equipment set-up and then promote your live stream to build an audience.

Setting up your live stream: Equipment and more

The right set-up will depend on the event location, how many speakers or angles you want to shoot, and whether you’re including additional visuals like graphics or presentations. Even the most basic live stream requires a few non-negotiables in order to get off the ground:

• Camera: Your shoot can range from very simple—a single camera on a tripod—to as complex as your budget allows. A more advanced set-up will include multiple cameras and a switcher.

• Audio source: This can range from the microphone on your camera to a set-up with multiple microphones and a sound board.

• Capture card or device:  At Brightcove, we often use Blackmagic’s products ; they’re affordable and work well.

• Encoder: This can be a piece of software, like Wirecast or Open Broadcaster Software , on your computer, or a dedicated hardware encoder for more demanding events.

• Internet: Live streams should almost always run over a hardwired connection with speeds of 10mbps or greater. The best case scenario is Gigabyte ethernet, with your live stream prioritized using QoS at the main router, and redundant ISPs.

• Content Delivery Network (CDN): For a seamless viewing experience with minimal buffering, you’ll need a high-quality CDN like Akamai . A CDN may be bundled with other video solutions , like your Online Video Platform.

• Player: Whether your player is embedded on your website, in an app, or on a secure VPN, it should be an immersive, high-quality experience for viewers. Your player may also support interactivity, like a chatroll, via tools like Pigeonhole Live .

From here, your set-up can get exponentially more complex, to include cloud encoders, hardware encoders, and multiple internet connections. Are you monetizing your live stream? Then you’ll need to add Server Side Ad Insertion (SSAI) or some kind of paywall authentication.

Once you’ve decided on a set-up, it’s essential to test it. When it comes to live streaming, the unexpected almost always happens—and it’s much better to figure out a solution beforehand. Come up with back-up plans in case the internet goes down, check and re-check your equipment, and save IT’s phone number just in case.

Promoting your live stream

After you’ve figured out your equipment and set-up, it’s time to build an audience for your live stream. After all, you want people to see the fruits of your labor, right? Start by setting up a landing page or registration page for your live stream, so people can sign up to attend. Include a calendar invite, so attendees’ time is blocked off, and schedule a reminder to go out the day of the event.

Besides the registration itself, design your pre-event page in a way that begins to bolster community and build excitement:

• Social media: Include links to your social media—or embed your social feeds within the page itself to boost engagement.

• Countdown: Including a countdown to the live event is a good way of confirming to your visitor that they’re in the right spot, but that the stream is not yet live.

• Homepage: When  the page is built, make it easy to find by featuring it on your homepage.

• Calendar: Make sure your live stream appears in your website’s calendar of events, with a call-to-action to register.

Now that the building blocks of your event are in place, you can start sharing it with your audience. Aim for low-hanging fruit first. Identify existing customers and prospects that might be interested in the topic of your live stream and target them via email and paid social media campaigns (or in-product notifications if possible). Post about your live stream organically too—and if you are partnering with influencers, other brands, or guest presenters, be sure they’re also sharing the live stream news on their social media pages.

To keep your emails, social media posts, and landing page engaging, try making a brief promotional video to introduce the people who will appear in the live stream. It doesn’t have to be elaborate or highly produced—just hone in on the specifics that a viewer will take away from your event and explain how they can register. Take it a step further and introduce interactivity by allowing people to sign up within the promotional video itself.

Take it live

When you’re all set up and you have an audience, it’s time to go live. Stay tuned for our next post to find out from FORA.tv how to make the most of your content and ensure that your live stream is successful. And be sure to watch our conversation, Let’s Talk Live: How to Build the Live Stream Experience Your Audience Wants .

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There’s an infographic making waves right now in the LinkedIn community that illustrates the demand for a more connected, innovative, and adaptive workplace. Put simply, The Evolution of the Employee illustrates the needs of a new generational workforce. Driven by applications like Slack and Google Drive, online remote working, and paperless office policies, it’s clear the future of good business is online, collaborative, and adaptive—and video workflow is no exception.

It’s no surprise that video has become the new document; it is extremely effective at converting , educating , training , and entertaining viewers. However, keeping up with the company-wide demand for video content is challenging for internal video teams who often feel bogged down by complex, clunky processes.

So the question is: how do businesses future-proof their video workflow to: 1. Scale video production and; 2. Ensure their teams are happy, efficient, and collaborative?

Workflow Ingredients for Happy, Efficient Teams

Video making involves a lot of people and activity: internal and external production and post-production teams, team review cycles, stakeholder and executive approval, and hosting and publishing for various audiences. Video teams need a workflow that adapts to their needs and saves them valuable time. A workflow that:

1. Allows teams to work remotely from around the world, and quickly find and upload the files

2. Enables creative teams and non-technical collaborators to quickly and intuitively get involved

3. Creates a transparent and collaborative creative process that is tied to video outcomes

Step one is an absolute must—cloud-based software must connect global teams and make it easy to upload, download, and share clips freely within a workspace that synchronously updates with their content library as well as their video editing tools.

Step two involves making it easy for executives and stakeholders to review and approve video content and ensure it’s on-brand. Nobody has time to download a video and markup comments in email anymore.

The final step is about making sure these collaborative workspaces are adaptive, transparent, and integrated into the tools of the modern workforce. Say goodbye to siloed workspaces and hello to software that integrates from the first revision to the final published file—while also making it easy for your team to make data-driven creative decisions based on that video’s performance.

Your New Connected, Collaborative Video Workflow is Here

Forward-thinking companies are quickly adopting cloud-based video platforms that combine best-in-class video workflow and publishing all in one future-proofed workspace.

When producing over 400 videos annually, every moment we save by using Wipster and Brightcove together via the cloud means more time optimizing content and delivering results to our stakeholders.

— Pat MacFie, Global Director of Media at Xero

No one wants to waste their valuable time digging through emails, hunting for files, or logging in to various platforms to edit or publish content. Connected platforms should give you time back in your day—which is why Wipster’s integrated Brightcove Look Folder provides teams intuitive and transparent access to their entire Brightcove Video Cloud, which then syncs with the Wipster platform for collaborative workflow, review, and approval. Once your team’s video content is finalized, you simply publish to Brightcove with one click and distribute it to the appropriate audience.

 

But the job’s not finished—how did that video perform? Finally, creative teams can see video performance data directly on the asset instead of emailing the marketing team or crunching a bunch of numbers. Playback and analytics data from your Brightcove account is aggregated and fed back to your Wipster workspace to give your team insights into how your video is performing in real-time. Now you can see how things are landing, and better iterate for future content.

Tools and Teams that Work in Harmony

As you hire and expand your video team, what kind of workflow are you going to bring them into? Does it unite or separate? Does it create time or waste it?

We believe a key component to happy and collaborative video teams involves providing them with powerful and connected tools that work for them—not against them. Which is why we’re excited to offer deeper integrations that help you meet the demands of your growing teams and allow you to scale your video content strategy.

Check out the full Wipster integration announcement  or get started with a custom demo with a Video Workflow Designer. They’ll go through your video content workflow with a fine-tooth comb, identify bottlenecks, and suggest real solutions that connect and empower your teams.

For more on all things workflow, check out our recent webinar How Deloitte’s 3-person video team united a company of 280,000 or read the follow-up piece Level Up Your Video Strategy with these Workflow Tips  on the Brightcove blog.

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The three questions in this video can set you up for success when it comes to creative ideas around your video strategy.  Follow the exercise in this video to generate executable ideas with legitimate ROI potential.

“Video Strategy”.  Everyone’s talking about it.  We all need one. Yet everyone seems a bit foggy on how to actually define it. Before you get started, ask yourself these three questions—their answers will lay the foundation for your video strategy.

1. What do we want to talk about?

2. What is a video best at?

3. Where should this video live?  What is the goal?

These may seem like simple questions; however, by answering them thoughtfully you will be setting yourself up for success and avoiding many of the tangles that slow us down when creating good videos.

What do we want to talk about in our video?

The most common answer to this is “my product”. After all, how can we sell our products or services if we don’t tell the world all about them, right? The truth is, we all love to talk about our products, but that’s not necessarily what our customers want to hear.  

During a recent “Video Strategy Workshop” I conducted, we came up with the following list of topics that our customers might actually care about.

• Your product/service (we took that one off the board, remember?)

• Your industry: Subject matter expertise/thought leadership

• Industry events: Trade show coverage or major news, like GDPR

• Common challenges: Especially ones your organization can solve for them

• FAQ about your industry: What are the most common questions your sales and support teams hear?

• Your customers: Case studies/credibility

• Company updates: The latest news about what you are doing to be relevant and successful

• “How to”  or “For Example” content

As you can see, there are plenty of topics to cover, and they’ll be different for every company and industry.  Take a few minutes and add your own ideas to this list.

What is video best at?

Both a Ferrari LaFerrari and a tractor can have approximately 900 horsepower.  However, they use it very differently. You don’t want to plow a field with the Ferrari and you won’t win any races with the tractor.  The same goes for video and any other type of content. So what is video’s sweet spot? What is it really good at? 

• Connection: Video is personal. The right video can forge a connection between the viewer and your service/product/company.

• Emotion: It makes you feel something.

• Entertainment: It’s a fact—we love video and watch tons of it, sometimes simply because it’s fun.

• Education: Video can explain complex ideas quickly.

Where should this video live, and what is its goal?

The final destination of your video and how it will be used in your campaign can help determine what type of video you’re making. They all have a different feel, different production value, and a different purpose.  Below are some examples of different uses of video and the goals of each of those destinations.

• A teaser video: The goal of this video is to drive traffic from outside sources to your site.  This needs to be engaging and evoke curiosity.

• A video sent through email: The goal is to educate and inform customers, and drive them back to your landing page.  This can be a bit less formal.

• A social-only video: Think of this video as your first introduction to the world. Its purpose is to establish empathy and awareness, and so these can often get away with somewhat lower production value to feel more personal and approachable.

• A video campaign for segmenting purposes: You can use a top-performing video in a campaign simply to identify who is interested in a specific topic.  This video needs to be on a single topic and very specific to a targeted group.

• Support Video: You can provide quick self-service access to support information.  In this video, focus on making the info clear and do it quickly. These kinds of videos can help reduce incoming support requests.

• A “flagship” video on your homepage: This video needs to catch someone’s attention early and keep it.  This is where you’ll want to spend some money hiring a professional team.  This is your billboard, and it needs to look good.

While there’s more to fleshing out a complete video strategy, many fail to set a proper foundation and then struggle through the rest of the process. Use the questions above and the accompanying worksheet as a kind of litmus test.Start by spending some time on your own or with your team answering these questions…then go make those videos!

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Couldn’t be at #PLAY2018 ? Our #REPLAY series will cover themes and highlights from this year’s event. Catch up on all the takeaways we learned from our amazing group of presenters and attendees, and find out how you can apply these tips to your next video initiative.

With a smartphone and a little creativity, you, too, can become a user-generated content (UGC) master, just like Skyler Moss .

The content marketing connoisseur has built a career out of crafting digital marketing strategies, just by making the most of his resources. As former Director of Digital Marketing for HCSS , Moss executed one of the company’s most successful UGC campaigns to date, “I Build America ,” which gained impressive momentum through bottom-up, grassroots-style sharing via social media. Today, Moss works at Randstad USA , where he’s the Senior Director of Content Marketing, and he admits, he doesn’t have the resources he had at HCSS—namely, his video team. Ironically, that’s exactly what’s sparking his current user-generated content strategy.

“I came to Randstad, and we had one video guy…so I said, ‘Well, we have 12,000 employees who are content generators. They want this. They’re ready to do it, just sitting and waiting. And we’re not doing anything with it.’ So that’s where the UGC stuff came about.”

Watch the video below and learn Moss’s tips for creating a do-it-yourself UGC strategy that’ll take your marketing efforts to the next level.

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This past December, I was lucky enough to attend the Massachusetts Conference for Women for the third year in a row—thank you, Brightcove! After the event each year I feel inspired and ready to tackle the world. This year specifically, I could not stop thinking about all of the intelligent, kind, and powerful women that I work with at Brightcove, and how wonderful it would be to learn more about them. Maybe corporate video could be the channel that connected women employees across our company.

I’ve been with Brightcove for four and half years as a part of our Account Management organization. Throughout my tenure, I’ve seen many phases of our internal women’s group and as of late, due to busy schedules, the programs that used to be in place have fizzled. I regularly listen to “All the Social Ladies ” podcast where the CEO of Likeable Media , Carrie Kerpen, has insightful and candid conversations with some of the smartest women in marketing and advertising. During my morning commute, while listening to one of her stories it hit me: I wanted to emulate this with our very own ‘Women of Brightcove’ speaker series! The wheels started turning and I quickly realized we could host the events in our Boston office and make them available via secure live stream on our internal communication platform for our other offices and remote employees.

Tapping into Subject Matter Experts

My first action item in accomplishing this goal was to meet with our fabulous HR leader, Katie Kulikoski, to see if something like this was even possible. She was quickly on board with the idea and actually secured our first speaker, Diane Hessan, one of Brightcove’s female board members . With the speaker and date in place, this meant I needed to start executing.

I set up a meeting with our IT team to help set up, test, and facilitate the live stream. We scheduled a testing period the day before the stream and also confirmed an hour of set up and test time right before the event.

Once we had the testing times scheduled, I knew I needed to lean on Laurent Bridenne, our Sr. Solutions Specialist for corporate video. Laurent ran online video operations for companies like Sun Microsystems and Cisco and has been instrumental in helping us roll out our own internal video solutions. Being the go-getter that he is, Laurent did much of the technical heavy lifting.

“The technological implementation of this live event was actually relatively simple. I used our own product, the Brightcove video platform, to create a secured live template and a live video asset – ensuring only our internal employees would be able to access this content. The next step was to give IT the information they needed for encoding, and communicate which URL to send out to the online audience.” — Laurent Bridenne, Brightcove Product Marketing Specialist

Getting the Word Out 

Now I needed to inform the women of Brightcove about my idea, and get people to tune in. This is where the magic of live internal events comes in. Brightcove is made up of 10 global offices and plenty of people that work remotely, which is why in the initial idea phase of this project, I knew a secure live stream was essential. Because we are so spread out, we lean very heavily on email and Slack . In an effort to reach everyone, I decided I would use both. I wrote up an email explaining the series and created a “Women of Brightcove” Slack channel for ongoing group updates, inspiration, and knowledge sharing.

The group attendee numbers on Slack were amazing. Within the first day we had over 50 people in the group and it now sits at 139 members and growing—and the event feedback was incredibly positive.

Using our Corporate Communication Platform

As the event date approached, Katie and I worked together to determine the speaker series layout. Our hope was to create an inviting environment that would lend itself to open sharing and collaboration. We settled on a “fireside chat” format with Katie as the moderator.

About an hour before the event started, I sent out a message via Slack and email as a reminder, encouraging women to head down to our office classroom if they were in the Boston office and to tune into our Brightcove-powered Gallery live stream if they were remote.  

I checked in with the IT team to confirm live stream testing was underway and going smoothly and then assigned a couple of my fellow Account Management colleagues, Caroline and Nikki, to monitor the Slack channel during the event for feedback and questions. It’s impossible to do everything yourself, so you have to lean on others around you for help.

Troubleshooting our live stream

Right at noon, the fireside chat began! Diane and Katie were incredible, discussing topics ranging from their “super powers” to their perception of the ‘glass ceiling’ and philosophy on mentors. The discussion was inspirational and everything I’d dreamed for it to be, except for one thing…

Audio issues for remote viewers listening to the live stream.

Our Slack channel was filled with audio issue comments. Being new to live streaming, it’s hard to predict all of the different things that could go wrong. Being an Account Manager, I have first-hand experience dealing with lots of varying issues including trouble with the encoder, positioning of the speaker, or even network connectivity.

After a thorough investigation into the audio issue, our IT team was able to diagnose that the microphone Diane was using was faulty and replaced it with a new, even smaller microphone to use for future events.

As I alluded to before, we utilized Brightcove’s secure live streaming capabilities to broadcast the event. Out of the box, we can clip the live event to an on-demand version in a quarter of the time it would take us to use a video editing solution. Because the issue we identified was isolated to the microphone, the on-demand version turned out beautifully. Brightcove’s Gallery product made it easy for us to distribute this video-on-demand (VOD) version within our internal communication platform, “Brightcove TV.”

What’s Next?

In order to keep the speaker series alive, I knew I needed to tap into the video analytics for performance results. I set about to figure out how many people the event impacted and if they found it to be a good use of their time.

Due to the ease of Brightcove’s video analytics, I was able to see that the live stream was viewed 83 times and 68 unique viewers watched, which means 27 people were so engaged that they went in and watched it more than once. This represents 48% of our female employees.

The results proved that we needed to keep this initiative alive! Not only have we since hosted four additional speakers, but we’ve opened up many of them to the entire company and viewership has increased each month. The Women of Brightcove Speaker Series also encouraged our IT team to update our microphones in the classroom and has pushed other teams to start live streaming more internally. Now we are working through enhancements to the experience, like moderated chat using one of our trusted partners, Pigeonhole . We are excited for all of the great things to come!

Interested in all things corporate video? Check out our post Level Up Your Enterprise Video Strategy with These Workflow Tips .

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As a company grows in size and spills across continents, connecting teams and employees to one another can be impossible. But that’s not the case at Deloitte, the world’s largest consulting firm with 280,000 employees in 150 countries. Why? Because they’ve leveraged a team of just three in-house experts to create a video strategy that connects, engages, and educates Deloitte team members around the world.

I recently spoke with Michael Weinstein, Manager Multimedia at Deloitte, & Rollo Wenlock, Video Workflow Designer at Wipster, to discover how Michael’s three-man team overcame video production challenges, leveraged in-house talent, established approval workflows, and scaled distribution in order to effectively share their work with the entire company.

Video: A no-brainer for internal communications

No matter how big or small, every company needs to onboard new employees, train teams on new products and systems, and share messages from company leadership. Increasingly, enterprise video is the obvious channel to address these needs. Employees are already engaging with video online—in a survey, 55% of people reported that they watch online video every day, and 59% of senior executives said they prefer to watch video instead of reading text when given a choice.

Deloitte uses a video-first internal communications strategy as a more human way to connect across its vast employee network. It’s more engaging than traditional communication channels, and it can communicate complex ideas in a short amount of time. Plus, once a video has gone live, metrics are always available, allowing Michael and his team to effectively track the performance of their communications. And with the right platform, video distribution can easily be scaled across teams and regions.

Challenges and solutions for small teams

No matter how large the enterprise, video departments are often made up of just a few team members. 85% of webinar attendees work with a team of six or fewer—and those few people face a number of challenges including budget constraints, multi-phase approval processes, and executive buy-in. Here’s how Michael and his team of three solved those challenges:

• They brought video expertise in-house, giving them direct access to key stakeholders and the ability to experiment, and giving the entire organization access to video resources

• Using Wipster, they designed a more effective video production workflow, enabling streamlined collaboration that empowered the right people to pitch in at the right time and helped drive higher quality outcomes

• With Brightcove, they scaled video distribution to all 280,000 employees across the globe via the firewall-protected Deloitte TV Network, with a multi-tab player that arranges content into playlists and channels

With these solutions in place, Michael and his team were empowered to produce more video than ever before, including a ten-episode series called Inside the Executive Studio. 75% of Deloitte employees engaged with the series, which required minimal executive resources yet connected high-level company leadership with employees on a human level.

Using video production workflow to level-up your communications

As a Video Workflow Designer at Wipster, Rollo Wenlock knows that the most effective video workflows cover the entire process, from brainstorming to results. This comprehensive approach streamlines content creation and delivery, allowing team members to focus on making their best work and scaling up production. Here are Rollo’s four pillars of video workflow:

1. Strategy: It’s much easier to scale your video production up exponentially if you laid out a plan to do so right from the beginning. Plus, an effective strategy will identify the goals of your video plan, tell producers who the audience is, and show stakeholders how video can impact the bottom line.

2. Creation: A systematized, templated production process leads to greater efficiency and performance. Plus, collaborating is easier when each team member knows their role and where they fit in the process.

3. Publishing: Why bother with a seamless production workflow if it grinds to a halt after approval? Including publishing in the process increases delivery speed and decreases the potential for human error. Performance metrics should also be accessible and actionable once publishing is complete.

4. Media Asset Management: A comprehensive, searchable media library makes everyone’s job easier. It saves time, leverages evergreen content, avoids repetition, and can spark new ideas.

When your strategy, workflow, performance metrics, and media are seamlessly integrated, your team is able to think creatively rather than getting bogged down in the process. The time and money saved on chasing down assets, approvals, and results can go toward scaling production instead. And when a small team is capable of producing and distributing video content at scale, companies are able to connect, engage, and educate their employees across the globe.

As the webinar wrapped up, dozens of questions poured in. We took the conversation to LinkedIn, and you can check out the answers in the comments on this post:

Our thanks go to Michael and Rollo for their insight on how to leverage video internally via an efficient workflow. Watch the webinar to learn more about their strategies and successes.

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