Next Big Thing In Video Streaming Platform. Understand The Live Sports Event Trends
Live video streaming isn’t new, but thanks to apps like Periscope, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram, you no longer need a complicated stack of technologies to access it for day-to-day life. A smartphone and a good internet connection is all you need to stream a live video feed on these social media platforms.
However, video streaming is not just a fun activity; it has a plethora of potentials from a business point of view, too. The sphere of video streaming is evolving with each day marking something new and unique. Whether it is social media, live product launch events, or live streaming of music concerts, we have seen an array of applications until now. So what’s the next big thing in the live streaming industry?
It has to be sports!
The MO of attending live sports events has changed dramatically over the recent few years, and with the advent of online sports streaming, it is just a matter of few clicks to get instant access to live sports events. Similar to in-stadium experiences, event organizers are devising dedicated strategies for engaging fans on live-streaming platforms, too.
According to NBC, over 6.5 billion sporting events were streamed live through OTT in 2018. However, the scene for live streaming through OTT was not this common until the last couple of years. Major sports leagues were holding out, forcing viewers to remain wired to their cable subscriptions.
The tides are changing and a big wave is coming for live streaming sports in the years ahead. Increasingly, sports enthusiasts will expect to watch their favorite sports events whenever and wherever they want. With 5G’s rolling out soon, both sports broadcasters and viewers will have new experiences to create and enjoy the content. If you want to learn about the significance of starting sport live streaming, you are in the right place.
Let’s understand the live sports trends, their impact in the industry and how to explore excellent business opportunities it has to offer.
Value of Video Potential in 2019
Video continues to be the most effective element in marketing strategies for a good reason. People find videos more entertaining, engaging, and memorable. Hence, they are more popular compared to other types of content on the internet. Videos offer a sense of storytelling and if you want to increase conversion, video marketing is the best way to go for it.
Source: filmora.wondershare.com
Let’s explore some more valuable statistics to prove the power of using video in increasing brand awareness.
- Videos attract 300% more traffic and help to nurture leads.
- A website is 50 times more likely to make it to the front page of Google if it includes videos.
- Including a video on your landing page can boost your conversion rate by at least 80%
- Over 50% of customers check out the product or service videos before visiting a store.
- Videos have the capability to improve organic search on a website by 157%.
- 25% of brands publish videos every week.
Different Types of Videos Every Business Must Have to Thrive
There are different types of videos you can create for your business. From how-to videos to explainers, Q & A, and case studies – the options are practically endless. Additionally, for every type of video you want to create, there are different styles you can approach it from different orientations. Here are some of the video types you must include meeting the different needs of your customers.
Explainer Videos
Explainer videos work great if you want to educate your customers about your products and services, and illustrate why they need it. Product explainer videos are a useful for explaining the working of complicated products or services and enhancing positive brand awareness. They are a high-level outlook on how particular products or services solve a customer issue. These videos have the potential to be shareable content assets, so aim to make them more engaging by connecting with viewers on a deeper level.
Teaser Videos
If you want to create brand awareness, increase traffic to a specific landing page, and generate leads, focus on creating teaser or highlight videos. Most businesses follow text-based content marketing to achieve the above-discussed elements. However, if you are into video marketing, create fun videos to promote more downloads. This works great for big events and conferences. When finding new content for videos, consider highlighting the bigger story you can pack in these.
Leadership Videos
Leadership videos are great to build thought leadership within your business or industry. It helps to establish a human connection and to share a unique perspective to build trust and user following. Leadership videos must be authentic and should focus on a specific point. Sharing the experience of professionals and starting a conversation with your target audience is the key.
Webinars
Webinars are good to educate potential customers about products and about the issues that exist in the industry. When planning new webinars, think about how to repurpose the old videos you have. Design your webinar in such a way that bite-sized video clips can be included in that.
Live Streaming Video Business Opportunities
Live streaming hasn’t been with us for long, but it is quickly gaining significance and attention among people and brands who are looking for innovative ways to deliver content to the audience. Live streaming is a powerful channel to deliver content to your viewers if you are planning about starting a sports business. As with any other marketing channels, it comes with its own challenges. However, the challenges offered by live streaming dominates the benefits it offers. Besides the benefits, live streaming offers a sense of excitement for viewers. It makes the audience feel exclusive and inclusive at the same time.
Viewers Consume Videos on Your Time
The biggest advantage of live streaming for businesses is that the audience consumes content on your time, not on their time. This implies that you are engaging with the audience who care about your brand and find your video content extremely beneficial. You are automatically targeting content at an audience that is more likely to follow and convert. No other tool is capable of achieving what live streaming does.
Reach Highly Targeted Niches
As already said, viewing a live stream needs more commitment from your followers just because they have to tune in on your time regardless of whether it’s the right time for you. This helps to keep the unrelated audiences away and reach a highly targeted audience without any additional efforts.
Takes Less Time to Implement
Implementing live stream takes less time as it just takes a button click. Unlike traditional video production like vlogs or shows, it exactly takes 5 minutes to create a 5-minute video. That’s it. However, if you are not using social media platforms to live steam, it takes a one-time effort to make a video sharing website and you will be ready to live stream anytime, anywhere.
Grow Your Audience
Maybe the best thing about live streaming is that, you can grow your audience surpassing the geographical limits. The larger your audience is; the more chance you get to convert them into customers. If you want to implement live streaming solution for sports, it will help to expand your follower base considerably.
Real-Time Engagement
One of the major reasons why live streaming is continuously making an impact on marketing is due to its ability to offer real-time user engagement and join direct communication with the influencer. Whenever you see a pre-reordered video, you are viewing the work of the past. However, live streaming facilitates real-time engagement benefits for users as it happens in the now. Not just real-time engagement, it also provides the opportunity to offer Q&A sessions, live support, and a lot more. You can effectively convey your brand’s story in real-time.
Ability To Repurpose Content
Though this point applies to any type of content, live videos can also be easily converted to other types of content such as a published video transcript on your website or as a reproduced video on YouTube. The options are limitless. Whatever is the case, it is always recommended to repurpose content for a broader reach of your brand message.
A Great Way To Cultivate Trust
Live streaming is surprisingly beneficial to create a close bond with your target audience. As you will be talking with your viewers in the most natural and real way, they feel as if they are being part of authentic interaction. Yes! Even authentic than pre-recorded and edited videos, which are well scripted. Businesses can increase trustworthiness with the help of live streaming, which leads to a great influence across the social space and helps in better conversion when promoting products and services. This will also have a direct impact on customer retention and loyalty, allowing the delivery of high-quality content immediately.
Facilitates High-Quality Content Delivery
Considering the nature of live streaming videos in general, it helps businesses to deliver the best quality content to their viewers in a convenient way. Be it news, product releases, business events, live streams bring them to the attention of followers instantaneously. Brands can also run product promotions through live streaming and offer exclusive access to viewers for a limited time- a very effective way to increase conversions and revenue. The sense of urgency created by live streaming makes it compelling to watch, making it ideal for the flash sales of products and services.
Plenty of Opportunities For Monetization
Source: streamingvideoprovider.com
For businesses that focus on generating income from websites and social channels, live streaming unveils some great monetization opportunities to monetize live sports events.
Some of the best strategies to monetize live streaming are as follows.
– Charging viewers for exclusive access to webinars
-Offering paid product reviews and getting sponsorships
-Driving traffic to your existing website or affiliate offer
-Insert Ads in the live streaming broadcast
-Selling your own products
-Selling the entire broadcast to other publishers.
Better Brand Exposure
Live streaming solution for sports is not just about highlighting your brand in front of your potential customers; you actually get a chance to educate your audience about your brand and the services you offer. This manages to bring some amazing opportunities that can be very rewarding at the end. It helps to promote your business like never before with an outcome much appreciated.
Why Video Streaming is Important
Video streaming services have changed the way people consume sports events and it is for the better. Here are some of the benefits of video streaming.
Instant Playback
Whether it is sports videos or any other videos in general, video streaming allows instant playback. Compared to the old days when people had to tune to into TV alone to watch shows and sports events, online streaming makes the content available in real-time and can be accessed by viewers regardless of their location.
Cheap
Given that there is no additional cost involved when choosing the delivery medium, videos can be cheaply distributed over the web. Even if some exclusive videos are offered for a price, it is much cheaper when compared to the other entertainment channels. Learning how to stream sports online can be of great significance as it is one of the affordable marketing tools.
More Options To Explore
With video-on-demand platforms like YouTube, Netflix, and Hulu, today’s audience has a broad range of options when it comes to the choice of online video content. Earlier if you wanted to watch the shows, you had to purchase or buy DVDs. It was required to watch what you have rented or purchased completely but now it is very easy to preview a show and decide whether to watch it or not, without having to pay extra costs. If you looking for how to start a sports website, ensure that incorporate similar features to make it easier for viewers to choose content.
Make Event Coverage Easier
These days, social media platforms like Instagram or Facebook is used to live stream, as it is easy for brands to broadcast their events without having to pay anything extra. This very significant technology helps to make event coverages easier than ever. You can also start a sports business online to make event coverages easier.
Discourages Content Piracy
The creative video industry has been suffering from piracy issues for a very long time. Many new solutions to combat piracy issues are enforced by brands, but affordability was always a problem. However, online video streaming makes entertainment very convenient and affordable. For the same reason, viewers prefer to subscribe to video streaming websites than watching pirated copies of videos and media. Hence if you are looking for different ways on how to start a sports website, now is the right time as the industry is thriving.
What You Need To Know About OTT Networks
Over the top or OTT is the term used for the delivery of TV and film content via the internet. Traditionally viewers were required to subscribe to a traditional cable network to watch favorite shows and movies at home. However, with the emergence of OTT platforms like YouTube, and Netflix, it changed how people consume entertainment.
Popular video streaming services made it possible to deliver video service over the top of the Internet rather than through expensive broadcasters and telecom providers. That is why it is significant to create a website like YouTube, Netflix, ESPN, or Twitch if you are into content production or event organization.
How Do OTT Platforms Deliver Content to Viewers?
In general, OTT platforms use an online video platform or back-end, which typically handles all the media, subscriptions, users, security and rights, etc. of the platform. The back-end is what communicates with different customer devices. The most common hardware devices used for the stream are streaming boxes or TV followed by smart TVs and internet-connected gaming consoles.
There are several development challenges involved to deliver your content to every device because each device comes with its own development stacks to create apps. A good video-sharing CMS will help to run your own video blog and it comes with additional features like SEO optimization, inbuilt security, tracking system, and a lot more.
What are the Biggest OTT Opportunities?
With video streaming services on the rise globally, OTT technology has immense potential with brands like YouTube and Netflix expanding internationally. Beyond global adoption rates, major opportunities exist in both entertainment and non-entertainment markets. Recent surveys show that over 50% of OTT subscribers pay for educational content in the form of instructional streaming platforms. Streams that focus on health-based content and children’s programming hold a lot of potentials.
OTT platforms must also consider the advantages of tired monetization. Even though most OTT solutions are subscription-based, over 20% of subscribers also made in-app purchases last year. If you plan to start a sports business online, casting a couple of monetization methods can help your OTT solution to grow in the years ahead.
With that said, as the OTT sector has moved towards live programming, sports have also become an increasingly significant part of it. The arrival of online video content without the addition of sports was a big thing several years ago. However, today we are seeing the insertion of sports into the mix by major OTT providers. With cloud-based live sports streaming software now capable of handling live content day in and out, there is an increasing amount of interest shown in carrying live events. We are currently seeing the growing trends for sports brands to go OTT themselves to reach their audience is also being a clear indicator of changing TV viewing habits.
For example, Formula One has revealed its own OTT service will expand to eight new territories in 2019.
When it comes to established OTT players, while Netflix denies taking any interest, Amazon is rapidly becoming a major force in sports. This itself is showing the NFL’s Thursday Night Football on both Prime and its Twitch subsidiary. Twitch is already a leader in the broadcast of game live streaming and eSports competitions.
If you are thinking about how to make a sports streaming website, now is the right time to enter the market with your sports streaming platform. The opportunity has never been greater with cloud-based technology helping sports brands and organizations to launch new OTT services directly targeting customers at a greater speed and much lower cost than just a few years ago.
E-sport Trends in the Video Streaming Industry
A new era of sports viewing is here and sports media companies are focused on delivering what customers really want- High quality and a reliable live stream of their favorite sports events. If you want to learn about how to stream sports online, understanding top industry trends can help.
Let’s see some of the current e-sports trends in the video streaming market.
Viewers Willing to Pay for Streaming
Sports fans are ready to spend money on a sport-streaming website than watching it on TV networks. On average, fans are ready to pay around $23 per month for unlimited access to live sports on any platform. With that said, the majority of sports fans prefer interactive content that offers the ability to chat with other fans while watching live sports.
More Focus on Latency
Earlier, the negative effects of latency used to affect the quality of live streams. Imagine you are watching a major game online and there is a lag in audio and video synchronization, which will ruin the whole viewing experience. Even as online streaming continues to grow in popularity, there are cases of broadcast feeds arriving a couple of seconds before the online feeds which are becoming a great problem. For the same reason, solving latency issues is one of the hit industry trends for 2019. Many digital media brands use the best sports streaming software integrated with CDN to offer a great viewing experience to the audience without any lags.
Solving Piracy Issues
While the shift to OTT is great, it also increases the danger of piracy. Researches shows over 50 unique illegal streamers were active during the UEFA Champions League knockout stages. Brands are increasingly becoming aware of the piracy threats and started to offer security features to streamers. In the coming years, we will see active collaboration between content owners and content protection technology brands to maintain the value of sports content by combating piracy threats.
Live Interviews With Athletes
Sport streaming websites facilitate real-time communication with sportsmen and women to increase fan engagement at sports events. An opportunity to meet their favorite sports star is enough to encourage most fans to attend more games and tournaments. Live experiences or being in the moment is just as significant as engaging with the game itself. If you are thinking about starting a sports business, ensure you incorporate live sessions with popular sports stars.
Conclusion
It’s encouraging to see how technology is influencing live streaming space as more platforms enter the industry. OTT grows in popularity among audiences, and brands are seeking innovative ways to ensure that regulatory measures are being met. However, what it ultimately comes down to is the ability to deliver the best possible experience to viewers. A professional live sports streaming software can help you deliver top-quality streaming services to your audience.
If you are a sports enthusiast wishing to build your own sports live stream setup, contact us for robust live sports streaming services with custom application development.
