The evolution of live video has spawned new and engaging ways for brands, organizations and people to connect with their audience. Whether it’s participating in a team meeting held remotely, hosting a virtual conference for hundreds of people all over the world, demo-ing a new product to customers via a webinar, or broadcasting a live stream of an event, there is no question live video is now becoming a standard feature in any business or entrepreneur’s communication toolkit.
Traditional conferencing tools come with their user experience challenges. Even after clicking several links, completing registration forms and downloading software, the main event itself often misses a huge opportunity to interact with and learn from a tuned-in audience.
Enter Crowdcast, a video conferencing service that aims to make taking part in a live video event as simple and seamless as ordering an Uber. Using Crowdcast, anyone can host a live video event from webinars to town halls, virtual conferences or live streams. Crowdcast transforms live broadcasting events into completely interactive experiences where host and audience can all engage in real-time via live video and voice.
During a Crowdcast, hosts can click on any viewer’s profile to learn who is in the room, invite viewers into the screen where they can chat face-to-face. Hosts can also review audience analytics and follow up so engagement lives on long after the event. From an audience perspective, they can upvote questions, respond to polls and chat with one another in a rolling pane.
But what makes Crowdcast really special is the user experience. Built on top of TokBox’s Broadcast platform, you can register with one click, launch and run virtual events from one-to-one meetings to large scale virtual conferences. No downloads. No plug ins. No forms. No delays. All pre and post event activity happens on the one single URL. Better still, the event is recorded automatically for those who weren’t able to make it live. In fact, Crowdcast keeps track of when each of the audience’s questions were answered so that you can simply click on a question to jump to the moment in the video where it was answered.
The results have been outstanding, with hosts reporting 40% or higher conversion rates of registered attendees showing up live.
Why OpenTok?
“User experience is at the heart of Crowdcast. Our mission is to design a simple, seamless and interactive broadcasting experience for our users. Before integrating with OpenTok, we built Crowdcast’s live video off of Google Hangout’s APIs. It was a great start and helped us get to where we are today, but trying to shoehorn a custom widget to integrate Hangouts wasn’t going to deliver the seamless single-click experience we envisaged for virtual events.
There are plenty of live video platforms for small meetings, but when you want to host a large scale virtual event, the problems are endless. WebRTC and the OpenTok platform has enabled us to build a platform with reliable live video that scales, whether you’re running a large scale virtual conference with hundreds or even thousands of people, hosting a webinar or a demo for just a few people.”
Cy Hossain, co-founder and CEO at Crowdcast
We’re thrilled to partner with Crowdcast as they create one of the many platforms embedding live video to create all new interactive, seamless and collaborative experiences that WebRTC – and TokBox – are powering.