Facebook Goes To The Red Carpet With Live Video For American Music Awards – Noticing a trend yet with Live Video broadcasts with integrated real-time commenting (i.e. Social TV)?
Via an earlier Techcrunch article, Shakira just livestreamed her latest music video via Ustream and Facebook. This is another major artist helping to validate both Social TV and the livestream format. I’m sure U2′s recent live concert on YouTube made this decision easier (10 million streams might do that), but 2009 is definitely shaping up to be the year the masses started embracing Social TV – at least online. What will be interesting is to see how Traditional Media tries to screw this up…
I’ve been pretty critical of YouTube in the past in regards to YouTube needing to embrace live video or let Ustream, Justin.TV, and other Livestreaming sites become the new video communities on the web. Well I’m keeping my mouth shut for awhile because YouTube and U2 have just put on the most impressive display of Livestreaming yet. Streaming live from the Rose Bowl, U2′s concert was impressive from both an audio and visual standpoint. The live stream was pretty stable throughout the event and the audio was on par with what you would expect from watching a live concert on the web. It will be interesting to see the traffic numbers released from YouTube because on my end there was little to no hiccups with the stream itself. (UPDATE: 10 Million streams!!!!)
In terms of interactivity though, outside a real-time Twitter page embedded on the U2′s YouTube Home Page, there wasn’t much. There were multiple cameras views throughout the live video event, so I can understand given the anticipated traffic for the event that there wouldn’t be any user control of different live video feeds, but no other interactivity? I also noticed a lack on advertising anywhere on the page or video, so also surprised that there wasn’t any type of sponsor or other branded interactive feature.
Outside of that, this was an impressive outing from YouTube and U2. No, actually this was was the best Livestream large scale event I’ve seen yet. From the Twitter stream itself, you could see that this was indeed a live worldwide event happening in real-time bringing U2 fans together for an experience. This was the next best thing to actually being at the concert and one could argue given the multiple camera angles, visual/audio quality and integration of worldwide fans that it was something a little more special…
(If you haven’t been able to tell yet, I’m a complete U2 Homer to the point one of my old class projects in 1997 was using U2 imagery and music to do my very first Premiere project…)
“partnered with Ustream.tv and have set up online town hall forums on Ustream and on facebook. We’ll be emailing out invites to our first online town hall on Monday.”
I love this use of social media and interactive video. It will be interesting to see how it’s ultimately executed and how the audience engages with this opportunity. At any rate, I think that in the future we will see more politicians, organizations, and businesses using these emerging pieces of media to to create genuine value (and engagement) for themselves, and their various audience(s)… experiences can now be created on a scale that were never possible before.
So, obviously Mayor Newsom knows what he’s doing, and President Obama famously used interactive channels during his campaign… but who else? Any other politicians killing it in interactive?
We’ve been very big advocates of Social TV for awhile, so it was quite surprising to see a recent high profile Social TV launch fail. Fast Company has the details here. Cliff notes version:
“Fox ran reruns of Fringe with Twitter integration so people watching the show could comment on the show in real-time. The Twitter overlay took up 1/3 of the bottom portion of the screen and as would be expected, drew outrage from viewers.”
While Fringe has been a show that’s not afraid to use the latest innovative interactive marketing programs such as ARG’s, it did seem odd that a show built on the success of these types of innovative and alternate interactive marketing initiatives would receive the backlash it did. However, it’s not the idea that’s the problem here but rather the execution.
As the screenshot above shows, Fox was going for a VH-1 Pop-Up Video Style Integration. Big mistake. Anybody who’s ever watched this show (which is basically X-Files 2.0) knows that you have to pay attention to keep up with the plot so any type of animated interruption in the form of oversized graphical tweets, is of course, going to hinder versus enhance the interactive viewing experience.
Fox should be commended for recognizing a trend with Social TV and trying it out with one of their most popular new shows. However, Fox does need to revisit how they’re using Social TV with a program (and genre) like Fringe. I don’t think just reducing the size of the Twitter integration and focusing on Fringe trivia will help overall. Nor will using viewer’s Twitter conversations that are just feeds pumped into and overlaid on the broadcast itself.
Fox should be using Twitter integration (ala Social TV) to provide sub-stories on the characters in Fringe and continue using alternative marketing methods that appeal to the core demographic. Fringe is a unique show (like Lost and the upcoming Flash Forward) that has a built-in audience that is expecting to find and participate in alternative story lines, engaging puzzles and other enhanced content to create a richer, more satisfying interactive story driven experience.
On a side note, I thought the Observer / MLB All-Star Game integration was great and showed how a subtle cross promotion can help spread awareness and build an audience for television series such as Fringe.
We Are Organized Chaos (WAOC) is Zugara’s (www.zugara.com) interactive marketing and advertising blog where we’ll be featuring some great projects and discussing upcoming trends in the digital world. Work — good and bad — will be critiqued. Hope you’ll enjoy reading our insights and thoughts on interactive.
