While interactive content and shoppable videos are nothing new, the demand for live commerce and live interactivity videos continues to grow. Not only are viewers showing higher engagement rates, brands and retailers are recognizing their potential to drive higher conversions, connect with younger buyers, and boost sales.
So it shouldn’t be surprising that live commerce has been shown to generate up to 10x conversion uplift . In fact, the U.S. livestream commerce market is projected to account for $35 billion in sales and 3.3% of all U.S. e-commerce by 2024 .
However, the technical complexity of live streaming, particularly when incorporating interactive elements, can be daunting. Furthermore, understanding the nuances of interactive videos can be especially challenging for some content creators.
In this post, we’ll take a deep dive into the benefits, the technical requirements, and the challenges you’ll need to navigate. You’ll learn how to harness the power of live interactivity and ensure you get it right to maximize its potential.
Business Benefits of Live Interactivity
For starters, adding interactivity to your live events helps you stand out from the millions of videos that are uploaded to the internet every day. But there are several other ways it can benefit your business.
Deeper Community Building

Interactivity plays a crucial role in helping viewers feel as if they are truly a part of your community. This community-building can extend beyond your brand and products by fostering connections between like-minded viewers who are engaged with your video. Allowing them to actively participate in the content facilitates social interaction and creates a more dynamic and enjoyable experience for all.

Better Audience Feedback
Another key benefit of interactive video is the ability to gather instantaneous feedback and insights. Traditional metrics such as video views are table stakes by now and by themselves are no longer sufficient. Today’s creators must understand which aspects of their livestream resonate best with viewers and incorporate these understandings into future content. Data gained from interactivity, like viewer behavior, preferences, and demographics, will offer insights that can also help achieve other key goals like sales, subscribers, and retention.
Enhanced User Experience
Moreover, live interactivity can enhance the overall user experience by integrating seamlessly with various technology ecosystems, such as Learning Management Systems (LMSs), e-commerce platforms, marketing technology (martech), HR platforms, and Over-the-Top (OTT) media platforms. Adding interactivity to any of these platforms should be an essential part of the viewer’s overall digital experience. Using that interactivity to deliver greater personalization creates a unique end-user experience tailored to your company and specific to each viewer’s journey.
Ideal Cyclical Journey
When implemented effectively, live interactivity can propel users into the ideal cyclical journey: content consumption, engagement with your digital experiences, positive response to calls to action, and brand affinity growth. Successful completion of this cycle will encourage users to share their experiences with others. The end result is amplified reach and increased impact of your interactive video content, bringing even more users into the cycle where it can repeat and continue.
Technical Requirements of Live Interactivity
With a thorough understanding of these benefits, you may be ready to level up your live interactivity but questioning what it takes to start implementation. Short answer: that depends. Why? It may be helpful to break the technical requirements down into two categories: basic setup and advanced setup.
Basic Setup
A basic setup has a couple main requirements.
Online video platform (OVP) for content distribution and playback
Platform capable of handling video overlays and calls to action (CTAs)
However, this only scratches the surface of live interactivity’s potential.
Advanced Setup
To truly unlock the power of live interactivity, creators need to go beyond the basics and integrate their interactive video platform with other systems, such as e-commerce platforms, LMSs, and marketing technologies. An advanced setup in this sense means more than simply connecting the two. Rather, it should enable interactivity that is personalized and unique based on specific attributes of a user’s profile pulled from the system you’re connecting to.
An advanced setup will open up new possibilities, for example:

Connecting with e-commerce platforms to allow users to buy a product from within the video without having to navigate to a purchasing page.
Personalized calls to action based on previous purchase history.
For internal use cases, like training, the LMS system and player working together to create in-player quizzes, establish success criteria, and determine whether the user passed.
Create customized content recommendations based on user behavior within the LMS.

These scenarios offer a glimpse of the potential, but there are countless additional opportunities for your particular use case. By producing a well-integrated interactive video experience that communicates with other technologies, it greatly enhances the end-user experience and becomes an invaluable asset for creators.
How Brightcove Can Help
Brightcove Live Interactivity simplifies the advanced setup. With features including surveys, polls, quizzes, real-time chat, and shoppable e-commerce, you’ll be fully prepared to deliver captivating experiences that boost live audience engagement.
For example, Brightcove’s proprietary chat technology allows you to incorporate chat into live videos and provides greater control over branding and user experience.
With mobile web-first interactive player overlays, you can also create a consistent and visually appealing experience that aligns with your brand while seamlessly integrating with product management platforms. Retail and e-commerce businesses will also appreciate the easy-to-manage events console that gives you the ability to add product information to the livestream in real time.
Although live-streaming can be stressful and challenging, that doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t realize the many opportunities and benefits it holds. If you’re nervous about truly going live but still want to incorporate live interactivity features, Brightcove Simulive and/or Cloud Playout could be the answer. These solutions allow you to pre-record your content, air it as “live” when you choose, and then simulate a live experience complete with live interactivity features. They essentially combine the best of both worlds while mitigating the risks and costs.
Additionally, these features will be automatically transitioned from your live event to a video on demand (VOD) asset that can continue to drive value over and over again.
For creators looking to take their interactive experiences to the next level, developer events and APIs allow you to customize and build upon these features.
With the rich analytics on both a user and aggregate level, you’ll be able to understand which of these interactive elements are driving the most engagement.
Challenges of Live Interactive Events
Clearly integrating live interactivity into video content offers significant benefits and opportunities. However, it’s important to be aware of the challenges and pitfalls that could occur when incorrectly implemented.
First, it’s important to strike the right balance. While incorporating interactive elements is appealing, overuse or poor implementation can distract viewers from your content. It can also inhibit the actions you want viewers to take as a result of viewing the content.
You should also keep in mind that interactivity goes well beyond merely incorporating shoppable video within a player. The most effective interactive experiences are those that integrate seamlessly within the user’s journey across your digital properties. Interactive elements shouldn’t be jarring or overly apparent, but designed to subtly enhance the user experience and gently guide them towards desired actions on your site.
Live Interactivity Done Right
Successfully implementing live interactivity requires having the right mindset that focuses on creating a seamless user experience. In addition to the right technology, it also requires that all of the systems work together harmoniously. Brightcove Live Interactivity offers a comprehensive solution that delivers everything you need to enhance audience engagement and create captivating interactive experiences in your live events. By leveraging Brightcove’s powerful features and adopting a user-centric approach, you’ll unlock the full potential of live interactivity to help achieve your goals.

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Today, we are witnessing the equivalent of cable “cord cutting” when it comes to users forgoing purely subscription-based streaming in exchange for AVOD (Advertising-based Video on Demand).
More and more users are increasingly choosing to watch ads in exchange for discounted or free streaming video content. In fact, by the end of 2023, over half of all U.S. internet users (50.7%) will be engaging with content via AVOD services .
Further, Deloitte Global predicts that almost two-thirds of consumers in developed countries will use at least one AVOD service monthly by 2023’s end . A year after that, half of major streaming providers are expected to have launched a free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) service.
As OTT providers adjust to this new reality, ad sensitivity has become front and center in the conversation on how to cater to today’s budget-conscious viewers.
The New Challenges of OTT
In the rapidly expanding AVOD landscape, Ad Ops teams must find the right balance. On one hand, they need to maximize the opportunity by increasing the frequency of ads and ad pod duration. On the other, they must ensure any changes in ad policy don’t alienate the loyal viewers they depend on to maintain and increase the price of their ad inventory.
But striking this balance can present challenges as platforms strive to maximize ad revenue and increase user engagement.
For starters, Ad Ops teams are faced with the challenge of navigating non-uniform tech stacks. They’re forced to try to piece together data from a variety of tools like Google Analytics and other measurement tools to get a complete picture from multiple data sets. This lack of uniformity creates inefficiencies and further adds to the operational burden for those in charge of cleansing, normalizing, and actioning the data.
Additionally, the OTT advertising landscape is continuously evolving. The specialized technical and business expertise needed to stay competitive creates additional challenges as teams struggle to keep up with the latest developments, tech updates, and best practices.
Unfortunately for many, the issues go beyond being challenges and evolve into insurmountable barriers. As noted in research from Caretta , the complexity of ad tech systems and the sales process can cause streaming services to forgo AVOD, and the potential revenue it can generate, entirely. And for those who attempt yet fail to overcome these challenges, the impact can be equally damaging. Poorly executed ad strategies can lead to buffering and excessive ad loading and repetition, causing viewers to abandon the content and potentially the streaming service altogether.
The research points to how services like Brightcove Ad Monetization help platform operators transition into ad-funded streaming quickly while minimizing cost and risk. This Revenue-As-A-Service, as they call it, bridges gaps for newer platforms by combining industry expertise with the insights needed to help avoid common pitfalls.
A Holistic Approach to Overcoming the Challenges
To overcome these challenges and maximize revenue, OTT and Ad Ops teams need a streamlined approach that can provide unified yet robust analytics to optimize and balance their ad strategies.
However, the best approach will offer more than normalized data and unified measurement. Actionable insights are needed to understand the effects of ad policies on both revenue and viewer experience. In particular, a clear understanding of ad sensitivity will be critical for ongoing success.
In its simplest form, ad sensitivity is a measurement of the optimal number of ad breaks, the quantity and length of ad pods, and various playback conditions that minimize ad abandonment. Clearly, ad sensitivity will vary across different segments and content , as Deloitte noted way back in 2018. But it nonetheless affects user engagement, loyalty, and, ultimately, potential ad revenue. And with this foundation, the most effective ad policies can deliver a triple win: increased revenue, better ROI for advertisers, and the best experience for viewers.

It’s for these reasons that ad sensitivity is a key metric in Ad Insights, a core component of Brightcove’s Ad Monetization service. Ad Insights correlates ad frequency/intensity and session length/session return frequency to help you measure and assess the changes to your ad policies. So, not only can you easily measure ad sensitivity, you can achieve the optimal balance between ad frequency, ad pod duration, and viewer engagement.
By consolidating ad measurement, Brightcove Ad Insights simplifies ad strategy optimization and the implementation of timely changes, all from within Brightcove. No more endless and unreconciled spreadsheets. Ad Insights intuitive visualizations show how advertising policy affects audience engagement over time and across dimensions like playback device, content length, viewer region, and more. This enables users to dial in a yield-optimized ad policy tailored to the viewer experience that maximizes engagement.
A Better Approach to OTT
Incorporating Brightcove Ad Insights into your OTT advertising can bring a variety of benefits, including increased revenues, better user engagement, and more demand from advertisers.
By utilizing the insights to optimize your advertising strategies, you’ll have much better visibility into which advertising strategies align best with audience preferences and content types. This delivers a more engaging viewer experience that leads to a higher consumption of content. In turn, you’ll see higher returns on your ad inventory from advertisers who are willing to spend more for an engaged audience. It’s a truly effective way to deliver the triple-win scenario for your advertisers, engaged viewers, and your bottom line.

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