Live event streaming: How live streaming experiences will consume our digital future
There was a time when people argued that the 2020 acceleration of global digital transformation was temporary – a short-term reaction among the masses to “get online” due to the pandemic. Today, it looks more like a step function driving a sustained shift in consumer and business behavior alike. Everyone is spending more time in the digital world, according to Statista. The number of minutes we spend on the internet will keep increasing slowly without a dip or the beginning of a reversal trend.
Nowhere is this more evident than in media & communications, especially live event streaming. And no, we’re not talking about on-demand services like Netflix. The growth of live streaming (as opposed to OTT platforms) continues to be, simply put, astonishing. Hold your horses, metaverse fans…we’ll get to that another time.
Just look at these live event streaming numbers:
- Consumption: Around 3 billion hours of
live event streaming content was watched every month in 2021, up 16%
compared to the height of pandemic lockdowns in 2020. (StreamLabs)
Fun math: Using an average life expectancy of 77 years, that’s precisely 4444 lifetimes worth of live content consumed monthly and growing. - Internet traffic share. Live event streaming now accounts for 17% of all internet traffic and has grown 15X, according to Cisco’s latest Visual Networking Index. (Source).
- Futureproofing. 63% of Millennials watch live streaming content regularly, making them the largest group of consumers of live content (Source).
Where there is demand, comes the supply!
Why do innovative brands use live event streaming to drive revenue?
Innovative businesses are taking advantage and producing more live content, boosting their presence on live streaming platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitch.
The reasons for adopting live event streaming are multiple:
- It’s video, and people love it. Cisco’s Visual Networking Index (VNI) forecast predicts that by 2022, 82% of all internet traffic will be video, and that video will make up 79% of all mobile traffic by 2022.
- According to Forrester, viewers watch live content 10 to 20 times longer than on-demand content.
- Live event streaming is a highly effective way to connect with your audience. The bi-directional and real-time engagement allows the audience to really tune in and engage authentically. Marketers seek this emotional connection that drives sales. Adweek reports that “70% of users who feel a connection to a brand spend twice as much as those who don’t.”
- Live streaming is a channel that is always on. When the pandemic hit in 2020, marketers increased their Facebook Live content by 32%, where video content was already being used. Today, 26% of video marketers plan to include Facebook live in their video marketing strategy.
Here’s the million (or perhaps billion) dollar question: What if businesses did not have to rely on these giant services for live event streaming? What if they had the power, with a few lines of code, to turn an existing app into its own streaming platform?
In-app live streaming made easy.
How can you keep users in your app? Turn your app into a live event streaming platform!
This is why Sendbird is bullish on the launch of Sendbird Live. The live event streaming use case is so flexible and applicable to any business seeking an edge to deepen engagement and increase conversion opportunities with their audience.
How so? Here are just a few of the many ways Sendbird customers plan on experimenting with Sendbird Live:
- A fintech platform wants to increase trading volume by live streaming financial analysts’ reporting walkthroughs.
- A media & entertainment customer is building fan loyalty and communities by live streaming concerts, augmented by rich private/open chat experiences.
- A healthcare customer spreads awareness of new medicine availability by live streaming doctor and wellness coach reviews.
Other community-based customers want to give a voice to their audience and turn users into influencers. For example:
- A fitness platform allows coaches to stream classes to groups.
- A marketplace wants its merchants to be able to promote to their customers live reviews and demos of their products.
- An investing platform broadcasts power users who share their investment thesis.
- An amateur sports platform lets teams stream their matches live to their fan base.
True to our mission of helping to build connections in a digital world, we believe that people should be free to interact with one another wherever and whenever they’d like. At the same time, businesses should have the power to curate the experience they want their customers to enjoy in their own branded environment. Why lose hard-earned customers to someone else?
How to take control of UX, data, and build brand equity with in-app live event streaming
Digital interactions, whether through chat, voice, and/or video, shouldn’t be confined to a few third-party services. These are convenient and free but have hidden costs. These services:
- Minimize your brand equity by building theirs
- They set the rules on data management
- Impose an ad-based monetization model, which negatively affects the user experience
Sendbird’s highly abstracted APIs and developer SDKs enable you to build an experience at the same high standard as 3rd-party platforms while having none of the hidden costs above. It’s a win-win situation for you and your business!
Sendbird Live presents your brand with a fantastic opportunity to
- Engage your audience anytime, anywhere
- Innovate with chat automation, moderation, and marketing campaigns available on the Sendbird platform to drive customer engagement, pipeline, and sales.
- Create authentic emotional connections that boost users’ LTV.
Take in-app engagement to the next level with live event streaming
The future of our interactions will inevitably continue to be digital. Still, it will keep improving by adding a critical factor to the initial convenience and ubiquity of our dematerialized experiences: the social dimension that our human nature craves. Always more visual and instantaneous, our digital future will be live and this vision will be more simply realized with Sendbird Live.
To try Sendbird Live, contact us.
