How Live Streaming Is Helping Businesses During The Coronavirus Crisis?

The World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 as a global pandemic, which means that it is an infectious disease passing from person to person in many parts of the world at the same time. The maximum cases have been reported in China where it originated and has more than 245,463 confirmed cases across the world. While China has quickly coped with the situation and reported zero new locally transmitted cases, Italy has become the epicenter with over 41,035 cases. As Governments have halted flights from affected countries, shut down businesses and entire cities, people are being insisted to stay at home to contain the spread.

The global situation in the past few weeks seem straight out of a Hollywood apocalyptic movie. But it presents a blessing in disguise to businesses that are both cost-effective and positively impactful. While live streaming events have gained momentum in view of better technologies, the COVID 19 pandemic has become the catalyst to fast forward it to the next decade.

How Live Streaming Can Benefit Different Business Verticals?

Businesses are fighting the spread of COVID-19 with social distancing measures like remote working, live-streamed collaborations and digital tools. But the economic impact is further worsened by logistical issues relating to employees working from home. So what businesses are getting the most from this opportunity?

Media & Broadcasters

Digital properties are being used to identify the issues and local affiliate stations’ streams are being played on national streaming feeds to keep audiences informed. A prime example of how live streaming is being used in this regard is the Q&A session by ABC News’s chief medical correspondent Jennifer Ashton about coronavirus after meeting with Vice President Mike Pence.

Reasons to Consider Why Live Streaming is Important for Broadcasters

1. Better marketing efforts can be made by re-purposing the content.
2. Live broadcasts boost interaction between you and your potential audience.
3. Stream to multiple devices like phones, tablets, TVs, and computers.
4. Enable push notifications when your live broadcast begins.
5. Auto-save the broadcast and enable social media sharing.

To Know More: Live Streaming for Broadcasters

Religious & Faith

While religious institutions offering live-streaming has been growing in the past decade, doubts about recreating the experience of attending in the physical world had been a deterrent. But just like businesses, education and medicine, people of all faiths and denominations around the world are attending virtual conventions in times of the pandemic.

Reasons to Consider Why Live Streaming is Important for Religious

1. Reduces the need for large spaces to accommodate the audience
2. Live streaming builds greater engagement among members
3. It helps you reach audiences who are sick or unable to travel
4. Availability of video streams after the service
5. Amplifies your outreach events

To Know More: Live Streaming for Religious

Events & Concerts

While Disneyland and Broadway closed down and the NBA suspended its season, scheduled events are being live-streamed. In fact, musicians like John Legend and Chris Martin are streaming concerts from their living room to enthrall fans in this period of self-isolation and quarantine. The challenges that the shutdown poses has to an extent been offset by the success of the streaming.

Reasons to Consider Why Live Streaming is Important for Events

1. Live stream makes events affordable
2. Event attendance is not limited to the size of your venue
3. Utilize a pay-per-view pay wall on your live webcast to monetize the event
4. Leverage your options to increase audience engagement.

To Know More: Live Streaming for Events

Enterprise & Internal Communication

While country-hopping for global collaborations are no longer in fashion, enterprises are not stepping off the gas to grow the business. From live streaming meetings to having an entire organization to join virtual town halls to implement urgent policy measures, the opportunity for platforms has zoomed like never before.

Reasons to Consider Why Live Streaming is Important for Enterprise

1. Live streaming helps you understand your audience preferences
2. It allows businesses to deliver high-quality content faster
3. Make live announcements and host online meetings with teams and customers.
4. Live streaming is an excellent way to capture unique and engaging content
5. Live streaming opens the scope for monetization

Health & Fitness

While gyms are closing, people do not want to lose out on fitness. But prominent chains like Planet Fitness, Gold’s Gym and CorePower Yoga are taking their clients’ fitness goals seriously by video streaming short workout sessions conducted by certified trainers on their own platforms integrated with social media channels.

Reasons to Consider Why Live Streaming is Important for Health & Fitness

1. The benefit of a personal coach.
2. No commuting involved and is accessible
3. Flexible and inexpensive pricing
4. Convenient schedules for live-streamed classes
5. Higher incentive to work out

To Know More: Live Streaming for Fitness

Education

From K-12 schools to world-renowned universities like Stanford, the learning would have stopped had it not been for video streamed classes and coursework. Alibaba’s DingTalk has built a platform for teachers in China to stream to up to 300 participants at a time. While there are accessibility issues streaming can play a beneficial role in transforming the learning process.

Reasons to Consider Why Live Streaming is Important for Education

1. Wider transmission without limitations on distance or financial viability.
2. Increased digital literacy
3. A flexible and highly productive way to learn
4. Higher retention rates than face-to-face learning.
5. Process of evaluation and feedback is also more efficient and easy to track in case of e-learning

To Know More: Live Streaming for Education

Entertainment

Despite any official statements, the Netflix app has seen 34% more installation in Spain and 57% in Italy. Disney was also not far behind. It released “Frozen 2” on its streaming services much ahead of schedule. As more countries are insisting on a clampdown and asking people to stay at home to curb the spread of the Coronavirus, entertainment platforms are also gearing up their capacity.

Reasons to Consider Why Live Streaming is Important for Entertainment

1. Better parental control over video content viewed
2. Discourages piracy and unauthorized access
3. Almost instant playback
4. More scope to innovate and use unique formats for content
5. Better interaction through live chats and social media sharing

To Know More: Live Streaming for Entertainment

Conclusion

In-person interactions to manage businesses cannot be done away in one stroke. But through the use of tools to boost productivity, business continuity can be ensured in times of pandemics of the current scale. COVID-19 is forcing many businesses to rethink their workflow efficiency. To this end industry leaders are considering how companies will function in the case of global business disruptions in the future.

If you are thinking that the need to live-stream classes is a temporary surge, think again. As more and more sectors go virtual, digitally aided tools to collaborate are gaining popularity. While being first to the scene may not be relevant, a constantly evolving platform can turn the tide in your favor.

Vplayed facilitates building a dynamic and scalable live streaming platform that can stream to a wide variety of devices through transcoding technology. Stand apart from the crowd with HD quality and low latency visuals over an HLS player with adaptive bitrate streaming. In-stream security is enabled through technology like DRM, watermarking and encryption which protects your content even while being played as offline streams.

Article originally published in the Vplayed Blog