Advanced Television

Brightcove: Live video skyrockets in 2013

December 31, 2013

By Colin Mann

Recognising that anecdotally, live streaming has surged in popularity, global provider of cloud content services Brightcove wanted to check its own customer data sets to understand just how much more prominent live streaming has become in recent years.

Writing in the company blog, Brenna Fitzgerald, PR and Marketing Manager, reports that Brightcove recruited its analytics team to do some quick number crunching, with the findings indicating that live events produced by its customers saw:

  • A 5x increase from 2011-2012
  • Another 5x increase from 2012-2013
  • Translating to a 27x increase between 2011 and 2013

“That’s massive,” she declares.” This very quick analysis of our data suggests that live video streaming is a priority for our diverse set of customers–across media, sports and entertainment, television, enterprises and beyond. 2013 was a particularly banner year for live streaming given tentpole, shared events (i.e. President Obama’s second Inauguration, the birth of the royal baby Prince George). And with the Winter Olympics in Sochi and the World Cup in Brazil quickly approaching, consumer demand and expectation for immediate, high-quality access to live video content will only continue to grow,” she predicts.

“Our view is that a commitment to live streaming by our customers is essentially table stakes at this juncture. What’s most important now is a commitment to ensuring that live video works across multiple screens, integrates fully with advertising systems for monetisation opportunities, syncs with analytics platforms and offers social-sharing functionality. Live stream quality should be as strong as video on-demand, without buffering but with a faster route to monetisation (via live ad insertion or pay-per-view-only access)” she recommends.

“We’re incredibly excited by the power of live and what it can do for our customers’ brand building and content delivery plans in 2014,” she concludes.

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