On the West Coast in the middle of April, most people are thinking about the start of a new baseball season or the NBA playoffs. Will the Warriors earn back-to-back championships after making history in the regular season? How will I, as a fan, deal with the fact that Vin Scully will not be the voice of the Dodgers after this season?
However, for tech-developers and enthusiasts in San Francisco, their eyes veer away from the baseball diamond and AT&T Ballpark to look towards F8, Facebook’s annual Developer Conference, where Facebook’s enormous network of developers come together to share in celebrating the newest products and innovations for one of the largest companies in the world.
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Grabyo, an online social video service, was at the forefront of this year’s F8 conference, where it was announced that they would become the live streaming partner of Facebook to help further the Facebook Live initiative.
The real-time video editing company launched its platform in London in 2013, and has since expanded throughout Europe, North America and Asia. It runs on the cloud, and allows broadcasters and other rights holders to stream, edit, publish and share real-time video clips, and now live streams, across a range of networks, devices and platforms.
Grabyo’s services allow fans to see content in real-time, and provide numerous monetary opportunities for the rights holders and broadcasters that publish them. With the amount of fan engagement that is already going on across social media today, ranging from fans tweeting about a buzzer-beater to win the NCAA tournament (I’m looking at you, Kris Jenkins) to snapchatting their TV on rewind as their favorite player scores a touchdown, there are plenty of fans online yearning for every single piece of content they can get their hands on.
Live, legal streaming is exactly what the fans want and crave, and to see it come from their favorite broadcasters just makes it all the more appetizing. In a recent interview with SportTechie, Grabyo CEO Gareth Capon stated: “We are focused on providing tools for rights holders that allow them to distribute key moments directly to where the fans are – which means mobile and social. There will be more than 3 billion new mobile phone users across the globe by 2020, which is an incredible audience and fan opportunity for sports. These consumers will use mobile as their primary device for video. Providing the tools to go live on social platforms, and enhance the experience with clips of highlights is the way to engage this audience.”
The online social video startup has four major areas of service: video creation and distribution, collaboration, efficiency and fan engagement. Since Grabyo’s platform is cloud-based, publishers and creators can edit live video from anywhere in the nation, as well as from their mobile devices, along with their fellow team members who may be halfway across the country while working on the same project, and can distribute their content across a wide variety of social media and mobile applications at the same time.
Additionally, because Grabyo collaborates with multiple social media networks, publishers can engage audiences with videos that fit the screen they are watching on, meaning horizontal videos for YouTube, square videos for Instagram and even vertical videos for Facebook. Capon explained, “Grabyo is an enterprise platform providing tools for rights holders, broadcasters and publishers to simplify the process of live streaming and sharing instant highlight clips to social platforms in real-time. The Grabyo platform is not just for live video, we also support VOD and videos created on mobile (using the Grabyo mobile app) and we enable customers to edit and distribute video in horizontal, square (e.g. Instagram) and vertical (e.g. Snapchat) formats.”
This optimization feature of Grabyo is one of the key factors that brings it to the top of the real-time video ladder. Grabyo is customized to work for everyone and anyone that wants to use it, as well as all the fans that enjoy and search for the content that is pushed through this platform.
Furthermore, Grabyo allows content holders to add sponsors and promotions to their video clips, growing advertising revenue for the company, the content holder, the published content itself and Grabyo simultaneously, while still providing new and improved content for fans to enjoy and interact with.
With Grabyo’s announcement as the official live streaming partner for Facebook Live, the company, according to Capon, “now provides the fastest and easiest way for media partners to deliver broadcast-quality live streaming, combined with instant highlights of all the best moments, on the world’s largest social platform.” With Facebook Live’s platform of 1.6 billion users, Grabyo gains the ability to expand its content reach exponentially, providing content distributors with more room for fan engagement, and more advertising revenues for their sponsors. Facebook Live has the ability to tell a good portion of its social network when their favorite team or event is live on its network, providing fans with quick access to their content. Facebook Live is “already generating over 1 billion people to log on to Facebook and watch more than 100 millions hours of video daily. Live video is an important development as live content generates 3x longer viewing times and 10x more comments.”
Grabyo’s CEO is very excited about the new endeavor for his company, and sees a logical alliance for Grabyo and Facebook, commenting in the announcement that “It is becoming increasingly clear that social video is the new TV. Facebook has an unparalleled ability to find an audience of potentially millions of consumers. Grabyo provides the fastest and easiest way for TV networks, rights owners and event producers to publish broadcast-quality live streams to Facebook and leverage its extensive global audience.”
Grabyo has already worked with Facebook in the past, becoming its Video API partner in March of 2015 and its Media Solutions Video Partner in October of 2015. Additionally, the company worked with FOX Sports in 2015 during the FIFA Women’s World Cup to broadcast content directly to Facebook and other social networks. This display was Grabyo’s way of showing Facebook that it was capable of doing what Facebook was trying to accomplish: put live content directly on its users’ News Feeds.
According to Capon, “the clips generated millions of views, thousands of ‘engagements’ (clicks, shares and comments) and broad distribution on Facebook. Our partnership with Facebook for live streaming means that in addition to the clips shared in real-time, FOX Sports can also broadcast the games live on Facebook to a global audience – with the potential to reach a fan community larger than that on TV. The capability now exists to create unique, interactive live experiences on Facebook, which can be enhanced with clips, highlights and other VOD/archive content.”
By evolving from the beginning phases of content distribution in the form of short clips that made sites like YouTube and BuzzFeed so popular, Grabyo gives rights holders a bevy of new opportunities to sell their content and interact with their fans. “Now, rights holders can offer a combination of unique live experiences, key moments from games shared in real-time, exclusive access to content and the chance for fans to participate and interact with a broadcast when it is happening,” commented Capon.
Fans can use Facebook to watch games that are out of market for them, blacked out due to their location or if the content isn’t being distributed to television. Additionally, teams can take advantage of this opportunity, using Grabyo to publish and distribute their press conferences, media days, workouts, inside the locker room content and much more. Fans can become more engaged with their favorite teams, and will be more knowledgeable about what really goes on behind-the-scenes.
However, broadcasting rights for live televised games are very expensive and highly sought after, so most companies are not going to want to share their feeds free. Although sometimes fans may not be able to see the live game itself, this format “creates new content experiences and unique events on Facebook,” noted Capon. “User data from social platforms shows that there is a huge spike in user engagement directly before, and especially after, live games – this is the perfect opportunity to go live on Facebook and provide a unique content experience which extends the lifetime of the broadcast (live game) and gives fans a more interactive experience of the action.”
Additionally, by using Facebook Live as the streaming platform, rights holders get an immediate reaction to their content through the amount of likes and shares they get on the stream, showing them what works and what doesn’t. With the interactive component of Facebook Live, broadcasters have the chance to talk with the fans during these live experiences, enhancing the fan engagement aspect that Grabyo aims to satisfy. Furthermore, fans will feel like they are inside the booth, the locker room or on the field, wherever the content may be coming from, because they are receiving direct, one-on-one communication with the broadcasters of the content they are watching.
The future of online video streaming holds many monetization possibilities for rights holders and content producers. Grabyo has subsequently taken a giant leap in the space by furthering its union with Facebook. Before long, it seems that watching TV on an actual television will be a way of the past, as the content being distributed online continues to get closer and closer to the real thing, and soon will surely surpass it.
For an example of Grabyo’s content on Facebook, click here.