How to create an HQ-Style Live Trivia Stream

I’d like to let everyone in on a secret recipe for creating engaging and more importantly educational video content that I have come across over the past few months! As you may know, the goal for most professionals creating video is to educate an audience. Throughout this process, you can help your audience better understand your company, your product or your service. Video is an incredibly powerful tool in education we can use to make our presentations more impactful, interactive and increase mindshare at scale.

Video conferencing and live streaming technologies are providing businesses with the presentations tools needed to host create face-to-face or one-to-many experiences with people from around the world. We have effectively flattened the world of door-to-door sales and expanded our addressable audience by leaps and bounds.

Salman Khan the founder of Khan Academy has a famous TED talk titled “Let’s use video to reinvent education”. The talk has inspired many educational institutions to seriously consider the way they are using audiovisuals in their curriculum. The benefits are so far reaching that they affect student motivation, development, and even areas of teamwork and communication skills (as outlined by the University of Queensland study). Many colleges and universities have already embraced what Khan calls the “flipped classroom” which allows students to digest information at their own pace and encourages active learning through the use of educational video.

Now I would like to take this concept of the “Flipped Classroom” and think about the implications for business presentations. How can we engage with our audiences and encourage active learning? First, it’s important to note that content is more important than production value. But we have all heard the phrase “death by powerpoint” and we understand that even the best content can be delivered to deaf ears.

What I have learned after hosting over 250 live streams and webinars is that there is a sweet spot between education and entertainment. You will know exactly when you have entered the sweet spot when your audience starts engaging with your content. Engagement is the key to success with video marketing for so many reasons but especially for live video. When you are live streaming, engagement with your content is expected and your audience can actually interact with the video presentation being made. This process provides social proof to live viewers around the world and reinforces the fact that the presenter cares about your audience’s thoughts, responses and/or concerns. Sharing live comments during a broadcast also allows viewers the ability to learn from their peers and consider different perspectives. Many viewers may be too shy or not ready to ask questions. Engagement a peer is often a great way to encourage audience members to take the next step in the learning process. Viewers can start to internalize your presentation by asking themselves key questions about your presentation and asking viewing the way others are responding to your presentation.

One easy way to get your audience to engage with your content to is ask a question. This is perhaps the oldest trick in the book. Have you ever been to a conference where the presenter asks for a “show of hands”? Today we can use much more sophisticated polling and trivia tools using the internet. We can make answers anonymous or create a friendly competition reaching viewers around the world. On our live show, we use a live trivia tool called Crowdpurr that allows us to share live leaderboards and incentive engagement. After using live trivia in our weekly live broadcasts it has quickly become clear that along with education and entertainment, we can leverage friendly competition and incentives to boost our user engagement.

“I always thought that engaging audiences online with live streaming for businesses was about a careful balance between education and entertainment,” says StreamGeeks Chief Streaming Officer Paul Richards. “Working with Crowdpurr and including live trivia inside our weekly broadcasts has opened my eyes to the value of friendly competition and incentives,” says Richards.

“In this day and age of mobile connected devices, you can now engage your audience in a personal and interactive way unlike ever before. Our app-free crowd trivia solution allows your crowd participants to jump in easily on their mobile devices and start having fun by competing against other participants whether in your live audience or viewing remotely online. With Crowdpurr, you’re able to gamify and incentivize your brand content in an educational and entertaining new format that your audience will absolutely respond to when prizes and bragging rights are on the line!” says Ross Newton, Crowdpurr Product Manager.

Adding Live Trivia to your Live Streaming Software

From a technical perspective integrating a live trivia into our video production software could not have been easier. Crowdpurr is a cloud-based solution that operates in real-time and allows our team full control over the flow of our show. If you are using a live streaming software such as OBS, xSplit, Wirecast or vMix, you will be happy to know that you only need to capture the trivia game using a “web browser” input. Viewers from around the world can easily log-in using any smartphone or computer with internet access. To reduce user friction we only require that users enter their first name but the trivia game can require more information for lead capture such as an email or phone number.

Another tip you should seriously consider when you are hosting live trivia is about latency. When you are live streaming to a CDN (Content Delivery Network) there is always a little bit of latency that you should take into consideration. If you are live streaming to multiple platforms such as Facebook and YouTube you will never get the example same video delivery time to your entire audience. Luckily, YouTube does offer three settings for low latency live streaming. You can choose from normal latency, low-latency and ultra low-latency. If you are hoping to have real time interactions with your audience than ultra low-latency is ideal. When you are setting up your YouTube live stream for low latency live streaming don’t forget to go into the advanced settings and check the low latency setting. The only major trade off with ultra low-latency streaming on YouTube is the fact that it does not support DVR. This mean once your live stream is over it has not been recorded in the cloud. Other tradeoff’s include no closed captions and higher resolution streaming at 1440p and 4K.

Conclusion:

Creating a live streaming show that can facilitate learning for your partners, prospects, and customers is a powerful tool for sales and marketing. In the past few weeks, we have been able to identify our most knowledgeable audience members and encourage a friendly competition surrounding the educational content that we create. I would highly suggest downloading our guide to integrating trivia into a live show available at https://streamgeeks.us/trivia

This will be the topic of our upcoming Monday live show embedded below. If you have questions or would like to join in the fun consider subscribing to our YouTube channel to stay in the know about everything we are doing in the live streaming industry.

Sincerely,

Paul Richards

Chief Streaming Officer

paul.richards@streamgeeks.us

Live Show Engagement Tips

 

• Tips for Bringing Energy to your live show – here

 

• How to interview guests on your live show – here

• Transitioning from recorded video to live content – here

• Tips from 7 live streaming industry professionals – here

• 10 Steps to gaining more Facebook Live Viewers – here

• Here’s how you can add live Trivia to your broadcast – here
• The art of live storytelling from Ariel Viera – here.