The “How to Take Videos that Look Good” series explains the key points for easily shooting videos at home or in the office. We will deliver one-point advice over a total of eight installments. The theme of the third installment is “lighting”.
The “How to Take Videos that Look Good” series explains the key points for easily taking videos at home or in the office. We will deliver one-point advice over a total of eight installments. The theme of the second installment is “framing”. We will convey four key points.
Brightcove will be delivering eight episodes of one-point advice on how to shoot high-quality videos at home or in the office, under the title “How to Shoot Videos that Look Great”.
Forced by necessity and driven by creativity, performing arts organizations today are embracing a hybrid model and finding innovative ways to use video to engage existing audiences and make new ones in every corner of the globe. This transformation was already underway when the pandemic kicked it into high gear. With theatres lowering their curtains, stadiums closing their gates, and film sets shutting down indefinitely, it was critical for the entertainment industry to adapt by leveraging digital solutions.
Rising to the challenges of the past year, performing arts groups all over the world had to find new ways to engage fans, monetise content, and grow audiences in response to many in-person seasons being cancelled.
With a mission to bring the power and beauty of orchestral music to more people in more places, the Sydney Symphony Orchestra has been using video to grow its audience and share performances with people who might not be able to attend the symphony in person.
During the lockdown, the SSO smoothly transitioned to video and made pre-recorded concerts and productions available on demand to audiences across the globe. Of course, for an orchestra, delivering high-quality performances with exceptional sound is critical, so they use Brightcove to deliver first-rate video experiences that capture every nuance of the music and keep their audiences coming back for more.
Live streaming performances on a platform like Brightcove’s allows arts groups to deliver unmatched viewing experiences for virtually any size audience – and everyone gets a front-row seat from the comfort of their own home. But lovers of the performing arts have insatiable appetites for cultural content, and video provides them with immersive experiences that can take them backstage, let them peek into rehearsals, or participate in a Q&A session with a favorite artist.
In response, video has become an integral part of many arts and entertainment organizations as they seek to offer both in-person and digital experiences.
For example, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra recently launched MSO.LIVE, their digital platform to deliver accessible, affordable, world-class digital experiences to all audiences, to support their 2021 season. Offering 24-hour entertainment, both live and pre-recorded, MSO.LIVE delivers premium content as an alternative to traditional, in-person orchestral experiences.
The orchestra has been able to attract new audiences from around the world with the MSO.LIVE platform, and they are continually enhancing their video content by releasing new performances each month and partnering with other world-class orchestras.
While 2020 made it urgent to pivot to new digital video experiences in response to the pandemic and its impact, many arts and entertainment organisations are now embracing these experiences as a long-term growth strategy.
Video has literally opened up a new world of opportunity for these organisations to attract and engage new fans. No longer limited by their physical location or geographic borders, their performances and associated content can now be viewed virtually anywhere by anyone and at any time.
As the world opens up once again and in-person performances return, the focus will shift to how video can be used to enhance and supplement these performances as well as how it can be used to create unique and enhanced experiences for a deeply engaged digital audience. Arts organisations can look forward to a hybrid future built on the twin pillars of in-person and video.
And artists and fans can anticipate more of the connections that make performances and everything that surrounds them so powerful and meaningful.
It’s been a challenging year for retailers, and one in which the acceleration of digital initiatives has never been quicker. One of the strongest things that has come out of 2020 is the adaptability of the retail sector and their ability to pivot and deliver online solutions to bridge the physical gap with their customers.
Retailers and brands have adapted their business models to leverage Direct-to-Consumer (D2C) and focused on e-commerce as a way to drive revenue, maintain a competitive advantage, and reach and engage customers in the absence of traditional retail channels. While this was partly borne out of necessity due to the pandemic, there is now a more permanent shift to how consumers will purchase in the future.
The convergence of live streaming and e-commerce has been largely driven out of China and is also gaining strong traction in the US with research projecting live streaming in both markets to be worth billions. With live streaming, geographical location is no longer a barrier to access, helping to bridge the gap between social, entertainment and commerce through a sensory, real-time experience between the shopper and the seller.
What is interesting, however, is that brands are emerging as the stalwarts of live streaming. And while they may be ‘testing the waters’ so to speak, global brands like KitKat are experimenting with live streaming as an avenue to drive mindshare, build loyalty and deliver experiences for customers that will ultimately drive sales. Established global brands, such as Nike and Adidas, have recognised the merit of D2C and are now focused on generating at least 50 percent of their revenue directly engaging their customers.
This sharp shift towards embracing all things digital has created a new omnichannel experience for consumers – one that is personalised, seamless and experiential across both online and offline touchpoints. From a customer’s point of view, this means increased convenience that allows them to shop whenever, wherever, on any device, creating an incredibly seamless experience from the first click to the last.
For retailers, this means increased exposure and reach, which allows them to:
With video, retailers are able to establish a richer connection directly with their target audience.
Retailers must continue to understand the behaviours of consumers both in-store and beyond to attract new prospects while retaining loyal customers. In order to do this, brands must be agile to adapt and innovate, leveraging relevant technologies and solutions, such as video, to support them in this endeavour.
Over the past year, there has been significant growth in the use of video at all levels of the customer journey to create an immersive customer experience.
As we see more retailers looking to differentiate and use new and unique ways to engage and interact with consumers via the channel of their preference, video analytics is one of the most useful tools for measurement.
This goes beyond the traditional impressions and clicks and dives into actual audience behaviour. Robust video analytics provides retailers:
Using an end-to-end online video platform like Brightcove also allows retailers to easily integrate with e-commerce platforms such as Adobe Magento Commerce and Salesforce Commerce Cloud B2C.
The digital habits consumers developed during the pandemic lockdown will continue to persist. If you’re a retail business, we’d love the chance to help you adopt and unlock the power of video across your online and offline channels to create a robust omnichannel experience for your customers. Get in touch with us here.
This content was originally featured in “Livestream and E-Commerce: A Total Breakdown with Greg Armshaw from Brightcove,” by Power Retail.
It is common knowledge that broad access to the e-commerce market is a key component of a comprehensive e-commerce strategy. To support our customers in reaching their key audience, Brightcove is excited to introduce the ability to deliver video into China through a partnership with global e-commerce giant Alibaba. As the first video provider to offer this capability, our customers are able to reach a vast new market and significantly grow their e-commerce opportunity.
The past year has only heightened the importance of a strategic approach to e-commerce which includes the use of video, expansion to all markets and leverage social for awareness. In fact, global e-commerce sales in 2020 jumped 27.6% compared to the previous year, reaching $4.280 trillion – far ahead of eMarketer’s mid-pandemic assessment of 16.5% growth.
Now that we’re almost halfway through 2021, brands with merely adequate e-commerce experiences have to offer more: experiences that are captivating, engaging, and that increase cart conversions like never before. But where do you begin? With these 3 steps:
Video connects with customers way more than still pictures or text on a page. With video they can see how clothing moves when someone wears it…or how to install an appliance…or the meals they can cook with the spices they’re buying. Video brings products to vibrant life and entices people to buy – why else would so many social media influencers turn to video first to sell their products? Video is versatile, too: no matter where a prospect is on her customer journey, there’s a type of video that will move her closer to a purchase. You can share video across social channels to expand your audience and attract new customers, add videos to product pages to encourage viewers to add it to their cart, and create areas where customers can learn more about a product or watch testimonials and reviews from actual users. Video is the thread that can weave your brand, your tone, and your mission throughout the sales process.
As we noted above, e-commerce saw significant growth globally in 2020 – but China made history, and it doesn’t look to be slowing down any time soon. Recent studies have shown that China accounts for over 50% of global e-commerce transactions. Think about that: more than half of all e-commerce sales around the world occur in China. It goes without saying that brands need to ensure that their e-commerce experiences are as engaging in mainland China as they are in the rest of the world, but this has been a challenge due to Chinese regulations…until now. Brands looking for a partner to reach this vast and enthusiastic market can turn to Brightcove. Our solution allows you to easily create a single video strategy and workflow that works around the world, including China. And it’s all backed by the reliability, scalability, and security of the Brightcove platform to bring you the extraordinary growth opportunities the Chinese market offers.
Though the fate of social commerce is still up in the air, social media continues to shine (and grow) when it comes to product discovery, education, and consideration. Instead of focusing on social commerce experiences, brands should use social media for top-of-funnel brand awareness and demand generation. We all know at least someone who found a brand on social media and made a purchase – I, for example, bought my wedding flowers on Instagram – but it’s an ever-evolving channel, with new platforms being introduced (hello, TikTok!) and viewer trends constantly shifting. Our favorite tip from marketing gurus is to learn from the experts: categories like fashion and beauty have already been successful at driving conversions on social media, especially with limited-edition product launches with a short path to purchase. Can other categories build on their success? That remains to be seen.
With these three tips, every marketer can benefit from the e-commerce explosion – but remember, it all starts with the most powerful way to connect with customers: video.
As someone who was in the video technology space a few years before the world went on lockdown, I feel like I understand it pretty well. For example, I know basic stuff like the difference between a meeting solution and a streaming platform. I also know more complicated ‘techie’ things like what video ingest entails, and how video security and video encryption are two very different concepts. And of course I know the “Touch Up My Appearance” slider is quite literally the best feature ever added to a video conferencing application. At least for me, anyway.
There is no doubt the massive changes in video use due to office virtualizations, reductions in business travel and virtual event participation are significant, and it would be difficult for anyone to deny that. For enterprises across the globe it’s both culture-changing and transformational, and it may have even permanently modified the economy as we know it. But it’s not the ‘new normal’ as so many have claimed.
This past year truly represented the pinnacle when it came to marketing around video solutions. On one hand we had technology companies treating the pandemic like The Gold Rush, claiming their platforms could address ‘emerging’ workplace issues like remote collaboration, distributed employee engagement and video burnout. And on the other hand, we had the largest organizations in the world scrambling to buy and implement every video technology they could get their hands on. It was the perfect storm of chaos and confusion, even for those who understood exactly what was happening.
In April, to help cut through the madness, Inc.com published an article titled No Office, No Problem: 125 Companies Proving That Virtual Companies Can Thrive. But some of you may be surprised to know the article in question was actually published in April of 2015 . . . over six years ago. The point is, office virtualization and remote work are not new challenges being faced by enterprises. The video technology required to virtualize nearly all forms of corporate communication has existed for the better part of two decades. But up until the year 2020 many companies simply hadn’t bothered to adopt much if any of it.
Since business travel was invented, companies have allowed staff to rent cars, book train passes or jump on planes whenever they sensed a customer was unhappy, or a prospect was speaking with a competitor. But if there’s one thing last year taught all of us as a business community, it’s that a physical presence is not always mandatory to re-engage with a customer or close a deal. Unless of course you are a CFO, in which case you have suspected this for a very long time.
You see, CFOs already knew that spending $2,000 on a last-minute plane ticket to send a support rep to a customer site was bad for cash flow. They were also painfully aware that paying $50,000 in T&E annually per Sales Rep made for some really uncomfortable conversations during the annual audit. Corporate travel has been broken for a long time, and the pandemic did not force organizations to re-evaluate it. The pandemic simply gave organizations the proof they needed to move some of their travel investment to video-based technologies that help employees accomplish the same goals—at a significantly lower cost to the organization.
A few weeks back I was reading a round table-style interview with a group of high profile marketing executives. In that article, one participant made the comment that rising momentum in people attending virtual educational conferences and seminars was something “no one could have anticipated.” As a marketer I would normally agree with this statement wholeheartedly . . . aside from the fact that I was invited to participate in my first virtual conference nearly 15 years ago.
The conference in question claimed to offer attendee networking, virtual trade show booths, sponsor interactivity and even virtual prospecting. My company participated, and admittedly it was mostly a terrible experience at the time. But the idea of being able to participate in an event at low cost and time commitment–without having to put eight people on a plane or invest in yet another 30 x 30 booth display—was spot-on. And the potential in the emerging world of virtual event technology should have been clear to anyone who was paying close enough attention.
What we are experiencing today with the use of video in organizations is not a “new normal” as so many have claimed and continue to claim. What enterprises and brands are experiencing is the acceleration of a normal that was already headed our way. And whether or not we saw this normal coming, it’s time for enterprises and brands to start investing in proven, comprehensive video platform solutions that support remote work, the minimization of business travel, and self-service execution of virtual events.
Launching a global over-the-top (OTT) streaming service can be daunting. There’s so much to consider: content rights, languages, currencies, payment gateways, and more.
Brightcove recently sat down with a panel of experts to uncover the things you should think about if you’re planning an OTT service of your own:
Paolo Cuttorelli, VP APAC, Middle East and Africa at Evergent. Evergent provides an integrated revenue and user management application used by many of the world’s leading communication and media companies.
Moustapha Bekheet, VP and Managing Director at WatchiT!. Launched in 2019, WatchiT! is the first SVOD in the Arab world, reaching a global audience of 400 million people from its Egyptian headquarters.
Becca Paoletti, Co-Founder and CEO of CakeWorks. New York City-based video agency CakeWorks helps content creators, media companies, publishers, and startups around the world with challenges like how to monetize effectively.
Here are some of the insights they shared:
Study the market and launch with exclusive or niche content. When you’re faced with the challenge of trying to launch a subscription-based service in a traditionally free-to-air market, focus on offering viewers content they can’t get anywhere else. If viewers are going to pay for content, exclusivity equals value.
Know your audience – and your competition. Get to know your potential audience inside out: Who are they? What are they watching? What are their interests? What platforms are they on today, and how much are they spending? In the US, people are already paying for four to five streaming platforms. Understand the difference between content viewers will pay a premium for versus content that is available for free on platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok.
Start lower and offer multiple options. If your technology allows it, offer tiered pricing with a low entry-level option. Then be as flexible as your platform permits. For example, if you have higher-value content, monetize it through a transactional or premium subscription package.
Reduce or remove free trials. A lot of services, like Disney+, Netflix, Curiosity Stream, and just recently, HBOMax, are doing away with them. If you really want to offer a free trial, though, limit it to seven days or less. Some of the discounts and packages our panelists had the most success with were based on periods of six months or a year. That way, you know you have a viewer who’s interested in your content and who’s willing to commit, and you’re not dealing with marketing to them throughout the duration of a free trial.
Preview content. Free episodes are a smart alternative to free trials. Someone can watch one episode of a series, and if they like it, they can subscribe for the rest.
Make the entire experience as easy as possible. Going global introduces so many potential hurdles into the viewing experience, from whether content is available in a particular region to the currencies and payment options your platform will accept. From a customer’s perspective, there’s nothing worse than going through the entire process of finding a show they want to watch and getting ready to pay, only to find at the last moment that the content isn’t available in their region, or they can’t use the credit card they were intending to pay with. You want to make things as easy as possible for them, so put any critical information that may impact their ability to enjoy your content at the beginning of the process, not at the end.
When they’re ready to pay, meet customers on their terms. Payment methods vary greatly from region to region. In Asia, for example, customers expect to be able to pay for a streaming service with a bank transfer. In developing economies, digital wallets are popular, and in some places, you can piggyback on the relationship a consumer has with their cell phone carrier. You should strive to meet customers on their own terms and give them the opportunity to pay in whichever way works for them.
Keep costs in balance. Understand your costs for content, marketing, and technology, and make sure they’re in balance. You don’t want to have the best platform with every bell and whistle without enough marketing or content to take advantage it. So if you’re starting small and you have a small content budget, go small. Put a basic platform together with some baseline marketing strategies that leverage what you can do on social with little to no money.
Understand churn to reduce it. Once you have a customer, it’s vital to keep them. Gain a deep understanding of what they expect, then exceed their expectations. Knowing exactly why viewers leave is the first step in getting them to stay.
Encourage gifting. If someone really loves your content and believes it’s a good value, they’re going to be willing to buy it to give to someone else as a gift. So give them that opportunity. Sharing your service with others is the ultimate endorsement of your content and your pricing. Let your most passionate viewers be ambassadors for your brand.
And remember, if you’re looking to launch an OTT streaming service, we can help.
Brightcove Beacon features an advanced monetization module powered by Evergent that allows your viewers to easily make payments in their local currency and with their preferred payment method – just what you need when your potential audience is the world.
Just last month, Ricardo Arjona’s “Hecho a la Antigua” show became the most watched live stream concert in the history of Latin America. More than 150,000 fans across 80 countries purchased tickets for this virtual concert, setting a new record for Arjona.
Vye was created to connect artists to virtual audiences through live stream concerts, and for the “Hecho a la Antigua” show, we partnered with Brightcove and InPlayer to confidently handle the scale we were anticipating for this performance.
Brightcove handled the live streaming, and InPlayer managed the authentication, payments, analytics and support. Both teams worked together to ensure fans could seamlessly log in and enjoy a reliable, broadcast-quality live stream while also protecting the artist’s content and revenue.
The absolute necessity of a reliable technology stack for live stream events is always important, and that’s further realized when things go wrong, which is exactly what the live events industry saw shortly after the Arjona event.
Another major Latin artist experienced technical difficulties on another video streaming platform, and ultimately ended up refunding fans and rescheduling a free performance to make up for the mishap. Unfortunate situations like this further highlight why it’s imperative to work with video technology leaders that have a history of successfully streaming large-scale events and are trusted partners throughout the process — before, during and even after a show.
At vye, we always place our artists and fans at the center of our services. We understand the cost and work that goes into a well-produced event, and we do everything we can to ensure the best experience possible for our artists and their fans.
Together, with Brightcove and InPlayer, artists can feel confident that their live stream concert will go exactly to plan, every time.
Even after the pandemic is behind us, musicians will continue to live stream shows. Live streaming has proven to be a prime opportunity for artists to play in front of a seemingly limitless crowd, around the world, and generate revenue.
As vye continues to redefine the events experience worldwide, we aim to build trust and long-term partnerships with artists everywhere to thrive in this new era of live entertainment. And with strong technology partners behind us, fans can expect a reliable, broadcast-quality live stream experience, every time.
