Live Streaming: The Basics, Benefits and Costs

What is live streaming?

Live-streaming services is an integral component of an event tech mix. Its popularity has surged over recent years, and it is now a crucial component of events, digital campaigns, and brand strategies. Here’s a breakdown of what it is, how it can be used, and what costs are associated with it.

In its simplest form, live-streaming is the broadcasting of live video to an audience in real-time over the internet.

Popular live stream platforms include social channels like Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok, as well as Vimeo, YouTube, and Twitch, or you can live stream direct to a webpage on your website.

Live-streaming differs from playing pre-recorded videos to a live audience in that it is live, watched by your audience in real-time, and allows for live interaction, creating a valuable dialogue with your audience.

Why use live-streaming for your brand?

Live-streaming has a number of benefits. Live video is one of, if not the most engaging means of communication. Added to that, live-streaming offers live interaction with your audience, helping to boost brand sentiment, brand authenticity, and the strength of the relationship with your followers. Here are a few of the key benefits of live-streaming:

1. Increasing your event audience

Events typically now include a virtual component. If you’re producing a hybrid event, live-streaming is a crucial component that allows the virtual audience to view and interact with the content from the physical event space.

Enabling virtual participation can hugely increase the reach and attendance rates of your events. This includes entertainment events too, such as music events, sporting events, and gaming, all of which can be live-streamed to a global audience.

As well as hybrid events, live-streaming can play an important role in virtual events too. Using green screen technology, live-streaming allows you to superimpose your speakers, or an event host, onto a branded environment that can then be watched in real-time within the event platform by your virtual audience.

This gives a completely different look and feel to your event and creates a more interactive experience, which is great for audience engagement, especially for events aimed at a younger audience.

2. Building a social community

Live-streaming is at the heart of social and a brilliant tool to increase brand authenticity.

From raw user-generated style content on TikTok to broadcast-quality educational LinkedIn Live events, or driving exposure of your launch or brand campaign on Instagram Live, social live-streaming has rapidly become a key comms channel for both B2B, B2C, and internal comms.

Key to the success of social live-streaming is live interaction and collaboration with your audience. Using features such as Q&As, comments, and polls, your audience can help shape your video content in real-time, giving it an unrivalled ability to engage.

Perhaps because of this, it can feel much more authentic than pre-recorded content, or advertisements, which often leads to increased view times, and increased interaction, because it is a more balanced value-exchange environment.

3. Post-event engagement

Your live-streamed content can be used in several ways to continue the conversation and increase post-event engagement with your audience. You could make your content available for any time viewing, or create highlights, video shorts, or GIFs to be used over your comms channels.

These shareable assets are great tools for continued interaction with your audience and increase exposure to your brand.