Distributing 360 Content Across Platforms and Publishers
The conversation around virtual reality almost always inevitably circles back to the question of distribution. How can a medium, meant to create immersive experiences, widely circulate in the same way that other videos do?
Reserving virtual reality content for viewing on headsets can be both an asset and a limitation — while it ensures the quality of experience, it is limited to a smaller audience. At Contrast VR, a large part of our philosophy rests on the democratization of technology and storytelling, and distributing our content as widely as possible through various social channels, and desktop and mobile platforms. Instead of focusing solely on the virtual reality documentary, we create an ecosystem of content that surrounds the issue, including short linear video clips, online articles, behind the scene blogs, and photo galleries.
Contrast VR, as Al Jazeera’s immersive media arm, is positioned uniquely in a vast and extensive network that spans over several channels, brands and programmes. For our two latest virtual reality documentaries, Stories After Syria and Yemen’s Skies of Terror, we were able to use our network to reach different audiences such as the English speaking audiences of Al Jazeera English and AJ+ as well as Arabic speaking languages through Al Jazeera Arabic. We also engaged with a wide social audience through Facebook, Youtube and other online platforms. Here’s a breakdown of how we did it.
Contrast VR Website:
For our major projects such as Yemen’s Skies of Terror and our My People Our Stories initiatives, we prefer building a standalone web page for the content. Because we have so many avenues for distribution, it’s important that we also have one centralized location where our content can be accessed and viewed. Here, we also include our photos, our text, and our videos, and creates a more in-depth viewing experience for whoever wishes to engage with our content.
For publishing to our website, the process is quite simple but requires some prerequisite skills.
The first stage is to upload the video to Omnivirt, an online video player specialized in 360 and VR videos. We use this tool as it is able to function on any desktop platforms, but it will also work on all mobile browsers, such as Safari, which at the moment will not play other 360 video platforms such as YouTube.
Al Jazeera English
During our post production phase, we sent a pitch along to Al Jazeera English social team and a pitch to their website team. After the final documentaries were viewed by the Al Jazeera English team and approved for distribution, we developed strategies for different platforms.
With their website team that runs www.aljazeera.com, we discussed ways to expand the 360 content into article format. For Stories After Syria, we decided on having two write-ups and one photogallery, to be released at various times over the course of two weeks. Each publication embedded the 360 documentary as another way to reach a different audience. For Yemen’s Skies of Terror, we also included an article write-up that embedded the documentary.
We also approached the social team for the Facebook, Twitter and Instagram platforms. For Facebook, Contrast VR uploaded the content natively to our platform, and enabled crossposting for Al Jazeera English, which allowed them to distribute our video on their page. On Twitter, Al Jazeera English tweeted out the different articles that brought the viewer back to our content. On Instagram, we created an Instagram story for Al Jazeera English’s page that also led back to our landing page.
Al Jazeera Arabic
The process for distributing on Al Jazeera Arabic was similar, following the lead that we took with Al Jazeera English. First, we created Arabic language versions of the virtual reality documentaries Stories After Syria and Yemen’s Skies of Terror.
For the website team, www.aljazeera.net, we sent over the text and material written for the Al Jazeera English site, after which they translated and also published. They embedded the virtual reality documentaries on the website.
For their social team, we sent over the video files with Arabic subtitles. They uploaded and shared Stories After Syria and Yemen’s Skies of Terror on their Facebook page, which has over 22 million followers.
AJ+:
For AJ+, we focused on a social platform based approach. The process for distributing on AJ+’s Facebook page is the same as Al Jazeera’s; we upload the content natively to our page, and enable crossposting capabilities for AJ+. In this way, the same video (uploaded to our page) will be shared across AJ+ and Al Jazeera English, aggregating all of the video views from across the three different pages onto one video. AJ+ also tweets out our content through linking to our YouTube and/or Vimeo video.
Headsets:
Of course, we also publish on headset platforms so viewers can also get the complete immersive experience. These headset platforms include the HTC Vive, Oculus, Samsung VR, and Jaunt. Each process of publishing to these platforms is relatively the same, although different platforms may require different assets. The reason we distribute across these different platforms is that each unlock a different audience based on the hardware they own.
Ideally, these platforms create the best quality experiences as it allows the viewer to unlock the full immersive potential. However, due to hardware limitations, not everyone has access to these type of experiences, hence why we also rely on other distribution platforms.
As seen above, distributing through headsets is only a small part of our distribution strategy. In today’s digital era, it’s not uncommon to implement a cross-platform approach in publishing content. By publishing across the social Facebook pages of Al Jazeera English, AJ+, and Al Jazeera Arabic, we have the potential to reach combined audiences of 40+ million people, not to mention the millions who visit the website monthly. With virtual reality content and 360 video, we need to be even more conscious of how each platform offers different experiences, as well practice an a multimedia approach, utilizing photo galleries, written articles, and short linear videos alongside the immersive content to engage our audience.
Written by Joi Lee and Sebastien Billard.
