Live Social Broadcasting vs. Unique Live Streaming Experiences

By Jason Cronkhite on September 1, 2010 in Educate, Video Marketing

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Hopefully this post is educational for those of you considering live streaming or collaborative video experiences as means to market your businesses. For full disclosure, one of clients is a live streaming video software company, Kulabyte, and the idea for this post came about while working with some of their customers that are trying to startup a new streaming channel, event, or make the shift from using social streaming tools to creating unique branded streaming experiences.

When considering a live video streaming experience you should know that there are numerous solutions available but, for the sake of simplicity we can break the options down into two categories; a) Social Broadcasting and Streaming Platforms and b) Unique Experience Services. Both types of solutions have advantages and limitations; therefore choosing a technology direction depends completely upon your objective.

Considering that your objective may be to maximize visibility and grow an audience, live social broadcasting platforms like UStream, LiveStream, Kyte and JustinTV are great for providing you a standard set of tools and an audience base by which you may be able to grow viewership. These tools are inexpensive and simple to set-up. Plus, these tools provide you the capability to propagate your content into other social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Dogster and others ( Hey, I’m tired of only hearing about The Facebook & The Twitter . These solutions can also provide you the ability to design what I’ll call low-level custom solutions however; there is only so far that you can take their tools in most cases but some allow more flexibility than others.

In the case where the objective is to create a highly unique user experience there are a myriad of tools and options to consider from building your own video production and streaming architecture to developing customized dynamic (adaptive bitrate) video players and selecting media content management systems. Creating a unique experience is undeniably more costly but provides you more control from a brand differentiation and experience perspective, which is typically a direction for more professionalized content productions or large companies or organizations that can afford to spend available capital in these areas. However, this is not to say that creating a unique experience is not possible with the social broadcasting platforms – it just depends upon the level of customization, what you can bring to the production and your business objectives. Social broadcasting platforms can be utilized in conjunction with a customized solution to broaden the reach and add value for the unique experience.

So, what exactly is a unique streaming experience? Consider live streaming experiences such as; Fox’s Online Motor Sports Property SpeedTV.com, the classical music web property Medici.TV, or business think tank conferences like TED.com. All of these web properties have custom designed production workflows, streaming architecture, unique user interfaces and backend content management systems that must be assembled. Below is a diagram of what one must consider if they wanted to produce a unique event experience with the equipment and assets required to produce content on the web, over mobile devices and set-top-boxes.

Video CMS’ run the gamet from Brightcove, Ooyala, Kaltura, MediaSilo, Kyte and more. Then, you have to consider your Web CMS such as; Drupal, Expression Engine, WordPress and others. The reason I point these things out is because many, many startups or businesses that are trying to extend their marketing awareness are jumping into the streaming video space without much knowledge of what goes into managing the live and post-production video creation process. Another thing we have not even touched on is the content distribution networks and their value but instead me explaining I’d rather send you here to read more about CDN’s and their value. Since I’ve touched on a number of things here, I’d like to do a follow-up post based on questions and feedback as to what is important for you and your streaming video requirements or assumptions. Chime in below and let me know what’s on your mind. I think what I might cover on my next video marketing track is discuss video engagement technologies for business.