6. Project and Challenges Orange has been a headline sponsor of the Glastonbury Festival for the last 10 years. In 2007 Poke were charged with an interesting and engaging way of giving away tickets. Something to help cement their relationship with the Glastonbury Festival in people‘s minds. Glastonbury is surrounded by fields with cows, so they ran Spot the Bull . A contest where you had to guess where Derek the GPS enabled bull was standing at 3pm each day. It went well and people liked it. The challenge for 2008 was to evolve this project to something even more unique and exciting. Derek the Bull was replaced by his son, Winston – younger and faster-paced, he would be more difficult to keep track of. Stream UK were charged filming, encoding, and delivering a constant stream so that viewers could always see him. The logistics meant that cameras needed to be high in the air – and our production team had to build a thirty foot scaffold and film through rain so bad that there was a real danger that the bull would have to be taken away! Results This campaign was always set to be huge, with advertising within MSN messenger and word of mouth spreading fast, so the live video stream needed to be clear, stable, and able to cope with hundreds of thousands over the weeks. Poke’s interactive site included real time stats, weather and bull tracking, as well as individual and team play options. Averaging over 1000 concurrents with peaks much higher, unique visitors were up 50% on 2007 and average time spent onsite more than doubled. The multi-cam streaming was our largest live flash webcast at that time, and proved the resilience of our Wowza infrastructure. On top of which the campaign successfully took home a range of awards!
7. Results Stream UK broadcast a live, two-day event from London to hubs in New Jersey, Chicago, Tokyo, Singapore, Dubai, São Paolo and Buenos Aires viewed through a custom Dove-branded Flash player available at 600kbps and 1.5mbps with bandwidth selection dependent on the individual hub’s connectivity. “ A big thank you for the behind-the-scenes team here and all the technology that’s made this happen.” Steve Miles SVP Marketing, Dove In March 2011 we completed our third event for Unilever internal communications. Project & Challenges Dove is one of Unilever’s cornerstone brands and the way in which it articulates the nuances of its brand is key. Unilever routinely webcasts obligatory IR content, however they perceived that webcasting was expensive and too complex for an internal communication. The challenge in moving forward on this project was to demonstrate that with live stream testing and advance preparation with the international hubs, webcasting a time-critical communication is a hugely valuable and cost-effective tool to have in the corporate communications’ arsenal.
8. Project and Challenges IET is one of the world's leading professional societies for the engineering and technology community. IET.tv ( http://tv.theiet.org ) is their web-based service, delivering synchronised, multimedia content to web users anytime, anywhere. The over-arching aim of the partnership with Stream UK was to maximise the potential value of this content, streamline the process of content management and distribution. In addition, IET provide webcasting services to hundreds of leading global companies and brands , and needed a partner to deliver market-leading webcasting production and software. The challenge was to standardise all assets and allow rapid categorisation and distribution on IET.tv Results Stream UK are currently in the process of migrating all content – thousands off assets - onto the Stream UK Crowdsourcer platform, which will then be used to drive IET.tv’s channel-based site structure. Combining automated transcoding with intuitive moderation and distribution tools, it can be used retrospectively with existing media as well as providing advanced content management for the future. As a result of the new partnership in terms of events, webcasts are now being delivered (both live and on demand) with Stream Connect , benefitting from the tool’s interactive options, automatic archiving, and reliable delivery platform.
9. Project and Challenges In 2008, Reuters and Sony Electronics joined forces to launch a cutting edge campaign for Sony’s cutting edge technology. For example, the Sony HDR -CX12 made use of the company’s “Smile Shutter” technology, which detects and takes a photo when your subject smiles without having to switch to photo mode or press a photo button. This HD camcorder, which uses Memory Stick Pro Duo media for storage, can record full 1920 x 1080 video and 10-megapixel photos - and the campaign needed to make the most of such capabilities. The project required a slick and interactive campaign allowing Sony users to capture images of themselves anywhere, for display in Times Square. With a high visibility, it was key to provide stable service with a high quality end-product. Results The Stream Crowdsourcer was selected because of it’s stability and flexibility platform met all these challenges. Reuters used the ingest, moderation and transcoding capabilities of the Newsdesk Transcoder to power the Times Square billboard as part of a campaign they named ‘Everyday Smiles’. The system allowed users anywhere to send in photos directly from their phone. The best were then selected by moderators and these were converted into an RSS feed which fed the sign directly. Users were given confirmation of their choice by SMS and the images on the sign were captured for use within the online galleries.