Small businesses now operate in a highly competitive “attention economy” — and it’s getting more challenging everyday to get and hold that attention. If your small business is using video, you want viewers to experience your message without any distractions which might detract from your branding. You can reduce distractions by simple removal of watermarks you don’t want, but what else can you do?
White Label Livestreaming
Part of the answer is white-labeling and crowdsourcing. Small Business Trends spoke with Will Jamieson, CEO of South Carolina-based Stream Live Inc. (Stream), an all-in-one dashboard that can be used by any brand wanting to collect user-generated content into one video stream. Stream is also a white-label solution, meaning it allows small businesses to produce live streams not containing unwanted third-party branding or labels.
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Small Business Trends: Besides Stream’s ability to let you crowdsource user-generated videos, you say it’s a white-label platform? Let’s give a refresher about what white-labeling is and then go into detail.
Jamieson: Stream is a white-labeled video platform that gives publishers, brands and rights holders the opportunity to have an unbranded live and offline video playback directly on their owned and operated properties. Our embedded players allow you to keep your traffic, instead of giving it to third-parties who’ll have their own watermark or branding, which you really don’t want.
So that’s a great example of how the white-label concept is awesome. Our customers of course don’t see our logos or anything at all in the final results — that’s true to what white-labeling is. We’re proud to be able to offer white-labeling to the livestreaming world.
Our platform is used to manage the end-to-end video workflow for each customer, whether it’s for our OVP capabilities, citizen journalism functionality, robust Media Server, or API access, our platform has you covered.
Small Business Trends: Well it sounds simple enough, but let’s summarize. And does it matter if a customer has a disjointed toolbox of different things they currently rely on?
Jamieson: With Stream, you’re leveraging your audience with easy review, approval and publishing of live content. Users tag your brand when they go live. Tagged streams are approved by you using a simple drag and drop interface; no custom code is required. Approved live video is pushed to your digital properties.
Even drones, GoPros and hardware like that are fine if you want, so no, it doesn’t matter if your current pipeline is high-end or varied or whatever. For crowdsourced live video content, an enterprise won’t find a more simple solution than ours.
Small Business Trends: How old is Stream? How did it start?
Jamieson: Stream started as a consumer application and launched at South By Southwest in 2015, but expanded to an enterprise live video platform when we realized we couldn’t spend millions on marketing like Facebook and Twitter.
We were sitting on this powerful live video technology we built 100 percent in-house with zero third-party dependencies. We knew we needed to be more than just a consumer application so we took a step back and looked at the market and identified a significant gap in enterprise video products. We invested our time and came up with a beta version that we presented at NAB, came away with an award, and realized we had our product market fit. Soon after, we launched the full-featured product and were working with professional sports teams, publishers and brands such as NASA.
Small Business Trends: You’re doing something cool with NASA in August, is that right? How should people get in touch with you?
Jamieson: On August 21, Stream will be powering NASA’s live video for the 2017 total solar eclipse. NASA will be flying weather balloons at 100,000 feet in the air and distributing the content across NASA.gov, partner sites, as well as eclipse.Stream.live. The weather balloons will fly along the path of totality as the eclipse makes its way through the US. This will be the last time this natural phenomenon will occur in our lifetime.
NASA is expecting this event to be one of the most viewed live streams of all time, surpassing 100 million unique viewers. What NASA set out to do is very technically sophisticated, and we are honored to be chosen to be their technology partner for this event. People can get in touch with me at will@stream.live or @willjamieson93 on Twitter.
Images: Will Jamieson; Pictured: Will Jamieson with Rob Fajardo/LNB TV
This article, “White Label Livestreaming Lets You Create Live Video Without a Third-Party Brand” was first published on Small Business Trends