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How to Build Interactive Live Streams Correctly

CMMA Blog

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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Growing OTT Ad Revenue Without Losing User Engagement

CMMA Blog

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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Making QoE Actionable for Video Streaming

CMMA Blog

Earning trust is at the core of Brightcove’s efforts to grow our leadership position in the streaming technology industry. That’s why we launched QoE Analytics, a suite of features focused specifically on Quality of Experience (QoE). There’s no better way to build trust with our customers than helping them monitor our performance in the arena where it matters most: the viewing experience.
Why Monitor QoE?
Quality of Service (QoS) and QoE are often lumped together, which can seem like a lot for many media companies to take on, both in complexity and cost. However, they are fundamentally different. QoS focuses on key network performance metrics at an operations level, while QoE provides a sense of the viewing experience from a user perspective.
We believe that QoE is more meaningful and often more actionable for most media companies, given the direct correlation to user satisfaction.
What QoE Metrics Are Important?
Brightcove collects a massive amount of data on behalf of our customers. This allowed us to narrow our QoE measurements down to the ones with the most significant correlations. We then cross-checked these findings with our own research team as well as several leading media companies who have studied this carefully. Based on this, we believe the following four metrics are the most important to track over time.
1) Video start time
Video start time measures the average number of seconds elapsed between the play request and the stream start. High start times correlate with abandonment before streaming even starts and can indicate issues with the CDN, player plug-ins, and initial stream bitrate where intervention makes sense. Low video start times mean your audience is watching video quickly, which is what they expect.
2) Stall Rate
Stall rate is the average number of stalls per hour, calculated by comparing total stalls to total hours viewed in the selected time range. Unlike other rebuffering events, video stalls directly affect playback. This can manifest as single stalls of significant length or frequent stalls of varying length. Thus, a low stall rate means smoother playback and a better viewer experience.
3) Error Rate
Error rate is the percentage of all play requests with errors preventing playback (as opposed to background errors the viewer doesn’t notice). These errors typically occur before playback begins, but they can also happen during playback. Low error rates mean that customers are usually able to watch the content they select.
4) Upscaling Time
Upscaling time measures the average number of seconds per hour of viewing that is spent in an upscaled state. Upscaling occurs when a video rendition is streamed at a lower resolution than the playback device can display, often resulting in fuzziness or pixelation. This is particularly noticeable when a lower resolution stream is played on a large-screen device. Low upscaling time generally means your viewers are enjoying smooth, crisp video playback.
While upscaling time is critical in monitoring quality of experience, there are times when it may not affect the viewer. For example, upscaling often happens when high resolution content is streamed to a 4K TV but not encoded at 4K. Since most viewers won’t notice this, it’s important to dig into the data to determine the reasons behind low upscaling times.
What Dimensions Affect QoE?
QoE metrics can be affected by a number of different factors, from mobile app updates to content delivery network (CDN) changes. Breaking down those metrics by different dimensions makes it easy to compare performance and identify issues and opportunities.
Device Type
Looking at metrics by device category allows you to see device-specific issues and trends over time. The imaginary example below shows a spike in error rate for Android devices that could be correlated to a recent app update.

Stream Type
By comparing the QoE metrics of VOD against livestreams, you can isolate mode-specific issues or trends. In the fictional example below, there was a jump in upscaling around a live event that resolved quickly.

Player
Looking at QOE metrics broken out by player is a great way to isolate player-specific issues. For example, there can be significant differences in load time, depending on the plugins that load at play request. There can also be issues in specific players that result in increased error rates. Seeing these differences makes them easier to isolate and act on.
Country
For customers who operate internationally, viewing QoE metrics by country can assist in isolating regional issues. Imagine a media company adopted a new content delivery network for their Asian consumers. From the example below, it’s clear that the CDN underperformed when looking at the stall rate.

QoE Analytics in Context
To properly track trends, it’s also important to see metrics and dimensions in context with each other. For example, Brightcove’s QoE solution not only provides charts for each metric, it includes a table with all metrics for a more comprehensive view. In addition to the key metrics, it also includes view count, video resolution breakdown, rebuffering time, and average bitrate for additional context.
The table is sortable by any of the columns and responsive to dimension selection, making it easy to explore and identify outliers. In the fictional example below, the device dimension was selected.

Quality of Experience You Can Trust
On most days, Quality of Experience reporting will be a testament to the high quality video streaming that Brightcove is known for. However, issues can arise and we want to ensure that we’re helping our customers see them. This is a big step forward in our mission to be the most trusted streaming technology company in the world.

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The Dawn of the Producer Economy

CMMA Blog

The internet and streaming have democratized the landscape of video creation and distribution on a broad scale.
Creators can produce and distribute video to the masses with little or no cost. Major film, TV, news, and sports producers can reach their audiences much more directly. Even brands are beginning to share their stories with their audiences through video.
But something else is emerging and defining itself adjacent to these trends: the producer economy.
The Democratization of Video
The democratization of video has been facilitated by three things.

Mobile evolution. It put a computer connected to the internet in everyone’s hands.
Connected TV explosion. It put the internet in our living rooms and has us engaging in a different, mostly passive lean-back capacity.
Social media revolution. It connected us all and made it a conversation instead of a monologue. Many-to-many, versus one-to-many.

We now have much broader access to all types of content, including content from our friends, from influencers, from creators. All on-demand, all the time, via the internet. As a result, three significant trends have coalesced over the past decade.

Creator economy. Anyone could express themselves, share it socially, have an algorithm amplify it, and make money on it via automated advertising on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and more.
Streaming wars. As new streaming platforms like Netflix were born, they stepped in between studios and networks and combined those into one. Eventually, every media company followed rather than be disintermediated.
Brand wave. Brands and companies initially jumped on board the social media train, some with video. Now they’re beginning to build robust, video-first content strategies to tell their stories.

Each of these trends began because democratization allowed them to bypass traditional middlemen and reach consumers more directly.
For example, look at the music business and independent musicians like Macklemore or Doja Cat. They honed their craft, created amazing work, released it directly, got discovered, and built a following—all through YouTube.
YouTube creates massive amounts of value for many artists and creators, but is it truly democratized? Or did the music industry trade a certain type of middleman, a label, for another one that’s based on algorithms and programmatic advertising?
The Twilight of the Creator Economy
Creators have had a good run. Millions are out there, and thousands of them are making real money.
With most major social platforms, those revenue-sharing agreements come out to roughly half for the creator. This makes sense for small upstarts building their audience. There are no technology costs, no marketing costs—they can just launch it. And if you hit the social graph and the algorithm just right, the money follows.
But not everyone can be Mr. Beast and build billion-dollar businesses. Further, it’s not clear that those large YouTube audiences can help creators do what Mr. Beast has done and launch other businesses, like his burger chain. It’s more likely that creators will need to diversify.
To insulate themselves from changing algorithms, content guidelines, monetization policies, and other fluctuations, what if creators built multi-channel businesses across multiple platforms on social media? What if they created their own direct-to-consumer channels, from apps to FAST channels?
The Future of Creating is Producing
Here’s where the producer comes in.
Producers generally supervise a production and are responsible for raising the money and hiring the artists, technicians, staff, and other resources needed to stage it. But we might expand this a little: Producers are now the creators of the creator economy.
They’re the showrunners and creators of major TV shows. They’re the film directors. They’re the CMOs deciding how to represent their brand in videos distributed broadly on social media. And they’re the production team inside your company making videos for internal and external use.
What the internet and streaming have done is create the ability for all of these producers to have a voice and real agency in the distribution of their stories.
So if you’re a producer with meaningful brand awareness and audience following, what’s holding you back? The audience is there. The technology is there too.
Streaming is a robust market, but it can also change quickly. A platform can update an algorithm any time, changing the audience. A funder of content can cancel a show and move on to the next one. (Just ask all those one- or two-season-and-out creators on Netflix). Brands need to tell their stories with video content soon, or they won’t have the customers they have today.
Producers can own their content and their distribution and monetization too. It’s not just for Hollywood anymore. Creators can do it. Companies and brands can do it. All of these producers have the opportunity to reach their audiences on multiple platforms, including directly. This is the producer economy, where producers own their own digital future.
[Watch the full episode on PlayTV.](https://www.brightcove.com/en/resources/resource-center/videos/dawn-of-producer-economy/ “Stream “The Dawn of the Producer Economy” on PlayTV”)

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Grow Audience Loyalty with Accessible Video

CMMA Blog

For today’s creators, video accessibility has become much more than a checklist item for regulation and compliance.
With diverse audiences of varying abilities, languages, and viewing environments, delivering accessible videos is a clear indicator of your respect and commitment to your viewers. It demonstrates that you are dedicated to championing inclusivity, embracing non-native speakers, and providing the best possible user experience (UX).
Content producers understand that these experiences are the core of building a strong sense of loyalty and appreciation among viewers, customers, and the public at large. When viewers feel valued and included, they are more likely to become dedicated fans, engage with the content, and share it with others.
What Makes a Great User Experience?
But what creates an engaging, yet accessible UX? In Peter Morville’s user experience honeycomb , he outlines seven qualities:

Useful
Usable
Desirable
Findable
Accessible
Credible
Valuable

While he intended it for website experiences, many have used his framework for a variety of user experiences. For example, a number of these qualities can be applied to premium video platforms like Brightcove. Our ad monetization solution is useful, our Player V7 update makes our product more usable, and our industry-vetted ROI makes our platform valuable.
In the same way, Brightcove’s partnership with 3Play Media helps our customers make their content more accessible, furthering our commitment to providing the best user experience. In fact, Brightcove customers can achieve true, accessible equivalency by ordering accessible video services from 3Play directly within our platform.
Serving over 10,000 existing customers, 3Play Media is the premier media accessibility provider in North America, delivering services with 99% accuracy and SLA-guaranteed turnaround. Content creators with a global audience can also receive localization support through 3Play’s translation and subtitling services in over 45 languages.
What are the Key Components of Video Accessibility?
Digging a bit deeper into the services you now have at your fingertips, let’s look at four ways you can start today to enhance your videos accessibility.
Closed Captioning
A key feature that improves accessibility for those who are deaf or hard of hearing, closed captions provide an on-screen transcript of the audio content. Additionally, it increases engagement by allowing viewers in noisy environments, or those watching with the sound off, a way to still experience the video.
Closed Captions File Example
Example of a Web.VTT Closed Captions File
Live Captioning
Depending on your use case, you can consider two different types of live captioning: Automatic and Professional.

Live Automatic Captioning. This can be a practical approach for providing baseline accessibility when professional captions aren’t feasible. For example, internal video meetings or informal presentations and webinars don’t necessarily require human captioning. Live automatic captioning can also be beneficial for social media livestreams to make the content more accessible to a wider and more diverse audience.
Live Professional Captioning. This is an ideal approach for important and high-profile live event streams where quality and compliance are priorities. These could include academic videos where accuracy is crucial to ensure students with hearing impairments and non-native speakers can access and comprehend the content. Similarly, Live Professional Captioning can ensure all viewers of large events and conferences or investor and customer presentations can have a high-quality experience.

Translating and Subtitles
This accessibility feature is important for reaching a global audience of non-native speakers. It not only fosters inclusivity but also expands the potential audience to viewers from various backgrounds.
Audio Descriptions
For visually impaired audiences, audio descriptions are a valuable tool for making video content accessible. By providing verbal depictions of key visual elements, any viewer can understand the context and follow the narrative effectively. It not only showcases the creator’s commitment to inclusivity, it enhances the overall user experience for those who rely on alternative ways to consume visual media.
How Great UX Grows Audience Loyalty
In a digital landscape with so many content options, generating loyalty is an investment. And if one thing is clear in the creator ecosystem, it’s that audiences will invest in brands when brands invest in them. This means they are more likely to engage with your brand, share your videos, and become devoted fans or customers.
By prioritizing accessibility features, such as captions, audio descriptions, and multi-language subtitles, content creators ensure that their content caters to a diverse range of viewers. And offering them the tools and features they need to fully experience your videos is perhaps one of the most effective demonstrations of your investment in them.

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Bringing an Authentic Story to Life on Video

CMMA Blog

Siân Heder’s second feature film shattered Oscar expectations in 2022. A story about a teenage girl’s search for independence as a child of deaf adults, “CODA” won Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor, and Best Adapted Screenplay.
In an exclusive interview with Brightcove, Siân walked us through her process for telling stories and why you should never compromise when bringing an authentic story to life.
To Heder, great stories transport a viewer: “What makes a great story is something that takes you outside of yourself into someone else’s experience. And different stories speak to you at different points in your life as well.” As a filmmaker, what you produce is a marker of where you are at that particular moment in your life. And that might be different 10 years later, or five years later.
Film, cinema, and storytelling are incredible tools for empathy. When Heder evaluates stories, she looks for something that speaks to a bigger conversation about our own humanity. “Not just something that sucks me in and lets me feel what the character’s feeling, but also something that allows me to look at my own experience of the world and reflect on that in a different way.”
Alongside this evaluation is a search for catharsis. “There’s a cathartic element for me in storytelling. I think it’s a way of exploring different parts of myself and my own lived experience, and doing that through engaging with someone else’s experience of the world,” explained Heder.
Some stories don’t get told immediately. Sometimes creators have to wait, whether it’s due to financing, internal politics, or another limiting factor. “There were a lot of ways that I wanted to make ‘CODA’ that were very important to me,” said Heder. “Having deaf actors play those roles, using ASL onscreen in a big way, having a lot of silence in the film, having subtitles so that I could really let ASL exist on screen in these scenes. Sometimes, the way that you make a thing and the intention with which you make something is as important as what you are making.”
When faced with a challenging story, creators can approach it this way: “All of filmmaking is problem-solving,” said Heder. “People do things in movies all the time. You blow up a building. You figure out how you’re going to pull something off. For ‘CODA,’ we thought, how is our set going to work? How are we going to communicate? How am I going to call ‘action’ and ‘cut’ in a way that supports my actors? And these problems aren’t any different than what it would take to do a stunt on set.”
In the streaming era, the old rules of distribution need not apply. “It’s been beautiful for this movie in particular, because the pandemic forced Sundance to go virtual,” explained Heder. “At the time it felt heartbreaking. We weren’t going to be in person, and I wasn’t going to get to sit in a theater and have this premiere. Well, so many people saw ‘CODA’ at Sundance through streaming. The fisherman whose boat we used and his big Italian family in Gloucester, Massachusetts, my parents and their friends, people in the disability community who might not be able to go to Sundance and get around in the snow. So streaming just opened up the movie to so many more people who got to participate in it and see it.”
Learn more in our PLAY episode, “From Great Stories to Best Picture: A Conversation With Siân Heder.”

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