Interactive Live Streaming: What you need to know before you start
The hottest buzzword of 2021 seems to be “Interactive Live Streaming.” In 2020, due to COVID-19 pandemic, people were mostly focused on the transition from offline to online events. Now that organisations in Europe have solved the most essential challenges related to live streaming, they are searching for solutions to maximize the potential of virtual live events — namely by adding interactivity.
This trend, which transforms passive viewers into active participants during a live stream, originated in Asia. Interactivity has been shown to increase viewer retention, reach, and the average revenue per viewer. Our traditional second-screen solution achieved a viewer engagement rate of 5–20%, and by merging video and interactivity into a single experience, that figure jumped to 80–95%. These numbers are based on the analytical data collected by the Livery team.
While companies are keen on the opportunities interactive streaming can provide, they’ve been struggling with implementation. Many organizations use existing communication tools like Zoom, Meets, and Teams, or they combine live streaming solutions like Vimeo and Youtube with collaboration tools that were not designed with live video in mind.
We are predicting that 2022 will be the year where Interactive Live Streaming will finally take hold in Western markets. The US is already trying to catch up with Asia, and is expected to attain a market value of $11 billion by the end of 2021 ($25 billion by 2023). Europe is expected to follow in their footsteps.
In this article, we’ll be exploring the signs, bottlenecks, and opportunities of virtual interactive live experiences, and the markets that are poised to lead the global adoption.
Before we move on, let’s cover the basics. When we talk about interactive live streaming, we mean the following:
Real-time broadcasts in which the structured actions of the participants affect the content of the live stream.
This video from Taobao is a great example of this technology in action. The video explains how Taobao uses an interactive layer on top of an ultra-low latency live stream for their e-commerce events. The interactive layer allows viewers to actively participate via chat, share their “live sentiment,” and take advantage of on-screen product offers. The “experience shopping” trend is becoming increasingly popular among Western e-commerce platforms, and we have seen a significant increase in demand among Livery customers who want to achieve similar results. To learn more about experience shopping, check out this post from my colleague Jeroen Doucet.
If you want to maximize engagement, you’ll need to combine interactivity with a full feedback loop. In the Taobao example, the hosts/sellers use multiple interaction types to collect feedback from the viewers, like asking questions via chat or initiating structured interactions like polls. As the hosts showcase different product offers, they are featured on the interactive layer in real-time. Direct deeplinks allow viewers to purchase on-screen items without leaving the stream. With this setup, Taobao was able to hit $7.5 billion in sales during the first 30 minutes of the 2020 Singles’ Day presale.
Setting up a live streaming studio
The latest advancements in technology have reduced the startup costs for a basic live stream studio, lowering the barrier to entry for streamers. In the past, a proper studio started at $50k and could run into the millions. Now, as demonstrated in the Taobao video, all you need is a smartphone to get started.
Beyond your smartphone, a few key investments can bring your stream from baseline to professional: a high-quality camera, microphone, and proper lighting. When it comes to the average Livery customer, we work with a setup that includes the following:
- A soundproof room
- A green screen for chroma key or branded backdrop
- An HD Camera with SDI/HDMI output
- One or more external directional microphones
- A tripod
- A laptop/PC with mixing and interaction software
- Three-point lighting: Lights on the presenter, Lights behind the presenter & Lights to illuminate the green screen
Depending on the situation, we may also use a teleprompter to display the presenter text, communicate viewer data directly with the host, and display real-time results in-studio.
A key component when it comes to video streaming is the internet connection upload speed — it needs to be efficient enough to deliver a high-quality multi-bitrate stream. Livery’s customers are located all over the world, and in 95% of cases, a copper or fiber-optic connection is efficient enough to deliver high-quality video. The good news is, the limitations of cable are being removed as we speak: the rollout of 5G which is expected to reach 60% of the world’s population in 2026.
It is recommended to use an internet connection with an upload speed that is at least twice as fast as the total bitrate that is going to be streamed. For example, if you have a multi-bitrate stream with two different video qualities (5Mbps and 1Mbps) and 96 Kbit audio quality, you would need an internet connection with an upload speed of at least 12.2Mbps. The extra buffer is necessary to properly handle any fluctuations with the internet connection.
Select the proper streaming platform
In addition to hardware accessibility, video delivery solutions have become mainstream as well. Platforms like Twitch, Facebook Live, and YouTube Live are easy-to-use tools that bring live-streaming capabilities to the masses. A simple SRT/RTMP ingest URL allows you to send live video to one of these cloud platforms. Over 7 Million unique streamers go live on Twitch every month, and Twitch wasn’t even the largest live streaming platform in 2020!
When moving from live streaming to interactive live streaming, the major social streaming platforms start to crack for two main reasons: technical limitations and “terms of service” limitations.
Understand the technology behind the platform
Most streaming providers do not support any interactive capabilities, since they were built with structured interaction in mind. These scalable platforms use a HLS and/or DASH stream with small 2-second segments that deliver video with a glass-to-glass latency of 8–16 seconds. The latency required for a full feedback loop cannot be more than 5 seconds. WebRTC-based platforms are able to deliver live video with sub-second latency, but they lack quality and the ability to scale. Scalable WebRTC solutions are very costly and require an in-depth knowledge of video technology to set up, making them inaccessible to most streamers. The following post contains more info about this topic.
Read the Terms of Use of the tools you are going to use
Free (or mostly free) streaming platforms often have some nasty statements in their Terms of Use. We recommend reading them carefully before you sign up in order to make sure that you:
- Maintain ownership of your content and therefore prevent the platform from making money off of your content.
- Maintain the ownership of your fanbase and therefore bar the platform from removing your access to your audience.
- Are not charged any additional fees if you draw a large audience and therefore use more bandwidth than most users.
- Are able to monetize your content.
The following terms have been pulled from the T&C documentation of the major free streaming platforms:
- You are not allowed to sell any advertising, sponsorships, or promotions placed on, around, or within the service or content.
- You grant the service the right to monetize your content on the service.
- The service provider may suspend or terminate your access, your account(s), to all or part of the service.
- You hereby grant to us a non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide licence to host, use, distribute, modify, run, copy, publicly perform or display, translate and create derivative works of your content.
- If your aggregate bandwidth usage (across all accounts you control) is higher than 99% of self-serve users on our platform in any calendar month, we may, in our discretion, charge fees for excessive usage, require you to upgrade to a more suitable plan, or terminate your account(s) upon advance written notice.
You can find all kinds of stories on the internet from streamers who lost all of their earnings due to bans or restrictions enforced by streaming services. And it’s not just independent influencers — major companies have been affected as well.
In early 2021, a number of companies using Vimeo moved over to Livery upon receiving large bills for violating the Fair-Use policy. Major game publishers struggle with the fact that eSports tournaments power game streaming platforms, and they are not able to work with their own sponsors due to the restrictions in the terms. Additionally, eCommerce activities are often a grey zone — are they considered to be advertisements or sponsorships?
The potential of Interactive Live Streaming
Early adopters of interactive live streaming technology know that it is an emerging method for brands to advertise products, increase user engagement, and connect with new target audiences. However, a combination of technological limitations and disadvantageous terms and conditions limit streamers’ creative freedom and potential success
To address the limitations that are inherent to existing streaming solutions, innovators in the field of interactive live video are collaborating with video specialists and development teams to tweak existing solutions or build tailor-made solutions from scratch. In the following post we take a look at the technical challenges we faced when building an Interactive Live Streaming Platform. While live streaming hardware has become commonplace, the distribution of interactive live streams has proven itself to be a bottleneck for global adoption.
Ex Machina, a company based in Amsterdam and an early adopter in the space, decided to create an interactive live streaming platform to power their own products. Their second-screen experiences were already reaching millions of users around the globe, and they saw an opportunity to merge the first and second screens into a single-screen experience.
In 2021, Ex Machina made their interactive live streaming services accessible to the outside world under a new name: Livery Video. Livery is the first end-to-end interactive live streaming solution powered by the Akamai content distribution network. It is a turnkey solution that comes with its own ULL-CMAF video streaming capabilities, as well as a white label interactive engine that offers a wide variety of interaction types. This budding technology is set to empower brands to tap in a potentially billion-dollar market.
The growth opportunity in the interactive streaming market is mainly based on migrations of existing organisations and horizontal adoption due to reduced complexity.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, physical gatherings like conferences, live concerts, and events were forced online. A sector worth $1,135.4 billion in 2019 was now searching for alternative solutions to continue doing business. During this period, when most people around the world were asked to stay home, virtual events became an invaluable asset for the industry. Now that we are slowly moving towards “the new normal,” many are opting for hybrid events: a combination of virtual and in-person experiences to cater to a wide range of audiences.
Taobao reinvented at-home shopping with their proprietary interactive live streaming platform and saw triple-digit growth in its number of daily active users in 2020. By simplifying interactive live streaming, Taobao has been able to scale horizontally, increasing the number of merchants using the Taobao Live platform by 220% in 2020. Lockdows led to a small uptick in live streaming e-commerce activities in Europe, but it was nothing compared to China, where lockdowns skyrocketed the use of interactive live streaming for brands and consumers. Experts expect sales to reach $423 billion by 2022.
The majority of European brands that understand the opportunity at hand do not have the means to launch a program in-house. The current labour shortage is also limiting their ability to seize the opportunity. So, they need a turnkey solution that will allow them to focus on what they do best, while relying on a trustworthy platform like Livery to fulfill their interactive live streaming needs.
If you enjoyed this article, we think you’ll like a few of our other insights:
- The Ultra-Low Latency video streaming roadmap: from WebRTC to CMAF Part 1 & Part 2
- Things to consider when building a large-scale interactive live streaming platform
- The next generation of live video driven by ultra-low-latency streaming and interactive video layers
Interested in learning more about the Livery Video? Get in touch! Livery provides everything you need to launch your very own interactive live stream, including concept creation, business modeling, front-end design, back-end development, and project management. Check out our website to get inspired by our portfolio and client list, or contact me directly on LinkedIn.
