All posts by Stacy Nawrocki

The live stream video begins, and the carefully prepared speaker begins addressing an audience of thousands of viewers. The presentation is going smoothly until, just a few minutes into the opening keynote, the video freezes. Some viewers sound the alert in the chat window, others try checking their own connection. But many viewers have left: On average, one in five viewers will immediately stop watching a stream with poor video quality and never return.

Most of the time, common live streaming video mistakes—poor sound quality and a broken (or unattended) chat function, among others—are easily avoided with careful advance work. Organizations new to streaming video should heed this advice from Jeff Irwin, customer success manager for IBM Watson Media. In the process of helping customers implement and manage streaming video, Irwin has identified common mistakes that stand in the way of streaming events and their viewers. So follow these 13 tips to avoid any unlucky mishaps on your next broadcast.

Note that this list assumes that you are using a platform that is scalable, able to reach large audiences without crashing, and is mobile friendly, having adaptive bitrate delivery. If not, these would be priorities as well.

1. Failing to account for variables
2. Ignoring audio quality
3. Not checking your audio
4. Forgetting to confirm adequate bandwidth
5. Discounting the importance of your location
6. Having no lighting plan
7. Failing to promote the event
8. Being late
9. Not running pre-show content
10. Making a weak first impression
11. Not engaging your audience
12. Skipping the chat moderators
13. No follow up, CTA or post event strategy

There’s a gold mine of data in live video streams — data that can guide communications programs and help organizations refine future presentations. Important engagement clues are buried deep in the data: How long are viewers actually tuning in to company video? Are they responding to calls to action? How often are they engaging?

During any live stream, metrics are key for assessing performance, spotting trends and honing everything from a video’s message to its quality. Here are four impactful (and often overlooked) data points to collect from your live video analytics to get a complete picture of the event’s success.

Looking for ways to build collaboration and engagement among your employees? Live streaming company events like all-hands meetings can be a great tool to bring your team together. But internal streams are only effective if employees can actually watch the video. Too often, a network bottlenecks occur when employees use the same ISP to view a live stream. Because video is bandwidth-intensive and puts a strain on your internal network, streaming video can cause the Internet to crash, slow other applications running on-site — or both.

This article discuses strategies to avoid delivery issues to large, locally confined audiences. It approaches this from the need to keep content secure, for internal audiences only, but to successfully deliver that content as well, sometimes across a variety of different viewing devices. For those looking for a use case example of scaling internal video delivery, check out this How to Scale Your Corporate Video Communications webinar that details how IBM’s CIO office manages their own internal video needs.

With the rapid pace of technological innovation affecting virtually every industry, there are few professionals who need to stay more informed than those within the medical community. New information and procedures have the potential to save lives and end suffering, so it’s easy to see the need for practical and accessible knowledge transfer. Luckily, virtual audiences today can witness a procedure or get trained miles from the nearest medical facility, thanks to innovation within live streaming technology.

Below, we’ve outlined three live streaming benefits for medical education. This includes how live streaming technology has increased accessibility, affordability, and will continue to inform the future of the industry. Furthermore, this can all be done while securing video assets to intended parties.

U.S. employers spent more than $70 billion on workforce training in 2016, and video was a top technology investment. But no matter how much budget a company allocates to video training, employees won’t learn and retain information needed to do their jobs if the content isn’t engaging. And there’s another side effect: The business won’t see the benefits of effective staff training — increased productivity, higher sales and improved compliance for training assets, among others.

To develop online video content for training and communication that will educate and entertain employees, take a page from retail brands finding creative ways to use live video events to engage customers. In a recent webcast, Fritz Brumder, CEO and founder of interactive video platform Brandlive, joined me to discuss how companies successfully use streaming video. Here are a few tips for engaging employees with live video:

SEE ALSO: 5 Ways to Use Live Streaming Video to Boost Brand Marketing