Today social media allows businesses and brands to build a quality audience from scratch by sharing original relevant content or collaborating with bloggers and influencers. One of the most effective social media tools that can significantly increase awareness and strengthen relations with a brand is simultaneous broadcasting or simulcasting.
What is simulcasting?
According to a Livestream survey conducted with New York Magazine, around 82% of users prefer live video from brands to social posts. Simulcasting or multistreaming allows you to stream 100% live video to multiple platforms at the same time. Why is it cool for business? Because the more social media channels you use for live communication, the more chances you have to reach a wider audience. You can share a backstage of workflow, a tutorial, a demo presentation or an interview. Moreover, it saves time and resources for creating and publishing.
Recently, our team discussed the development of a simulcasting solution with one of the most popular music distribution platforms: our client wanted to provide not only publishing music on popular distribution platforms but also simulcasting on popular social networks. During R&D we had to solve some typical challenges of multistreaming solutions implementation.
What challenges can you face and what should you consider?
If you don’t have your own media streaming product, you can start with one of the ready-made streaming solutions and create MVP to test your idea. This way you can get a working prototype and optimize your resources. Such option we chose with stakeholders of the music distribution platform: we studied business goals, identified possible problems in the functionality implementation and selected a streaming platform according to determined criteria.
Our team analyzed popular ready-made solutions as Ant Media, Wowza, Red5 Pro and AWS Media Service. We were searching for a solution to broadcast directly to at least 5 popular social networks with low latency. What things should we consider to deliver a prototype meeting the needs of our customer?
- Selection of social media platforms
You should determine what channels you need to stream to in advance. Different social media platforms can have different frame rates, resolution and requirements for receiving third-party streams that’s why the list of social media is critical for creating an all-in-one solution. - Video Latency
Latency is the time of delay between request and start of transferring a video stream. When you stream to multiple platforms slow video streaming and high latency often become a problem. Speaking about live video streaming, low latency is usually defined as less than 100 milliseconds (ms). - Cost of ready-made solution
Since we create MVP to optimize resources, the cost of a media streaming solution that is the basis for development is important. Usually, platforms offer different types of licenses with different pricing depending on your needs. By the way, sometimes for testing business ideas even free plans can be enough.
For our use case, we selected the Ant Media platform because it was the most effective and profitable option in terms of the specified criteria. Based on Ant, we created a prototype of a solution that allowed broadcasting directly to 5 popular social networks with low latency: Twitch, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. The prototype was successfully presented to the client and his stakeholders.
Simulcasting is a great opportunity for companies
Simulcasting is a great opportunity for companies to strengthen marketing campaigns, reach new audiences and increase sales. The Exposit team is skilled in creating complex Media Streaming solutions that scale your business and bring profit engaging your target audience. Contact us to discuss your idea with a reliable team of IT specialists.
