Streaming Tech Sweden is an annual conference in Stockholm based around video streaming technology. Organised by the independent media consultant firm Eyevinn Technology, as well as a host of successful Swedish start-ups in the field, speakers from Netflix, Google, Youtube, Swedish Television, Ericsson and more have also shared educational and inspirational talks at recent events. To further build engagement and ramp up audiences for future events, the organisers decided to launch their own streaming service, Streaming Tech TV+, to be the home for the recorded presentations from their own event and with the ambition to include presentations from other events around the world that would fit its audience.
In the current conference industry and further afield the common route to do this is via a YouTube channel. However, Streaming Tech Sweden decided to use Red Bee Media’s White-Label Proposition to go another route and build out its own dedicated website for hosting its growing video content offering.
“YouTube has a lot of good content, no doubt about that, and just uploading the recorded presentations to YouTube was an option we considered,” explains Alexander Björneheim, CEO at Eyevinn Technology. “What made us take the decision to not do that is that we wanted to have some control in what context our content is placed. We understand the reach YouTube has and we use YouTube together with LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook as a marketing tool for Streaming Tech TV+ and indirectly for Streaming Tech Sweden. The audience we want to target though is a small niche of tech-savvy people that are interested in video and streaming and our ambition is that this site will be the home for this niche.”
For the embryonic Streaming Tech TV+, creating a brand experience was seen as one of the key differentiators for the project. Visitors to the website are presented with a wide variety of curated content sorted into specific categories in a classically side-scrolling UI. Categories include trailers for the next event, interviews, country-specific content, and different technology subjects such as low latency and codecs. All content is curated and controlled by Streaming Tech TV+ with no distractions imposed by a third-party service provider and gated content available for attendees.
“Functionality-wise we only need the standard functionality that you expect from most streaming services today, but it is important that our brand is recognisable,” says Björneheim. “We could, of course, have built our own website from scratch but that would have required development costs that our budget and strategy didn’t allow.”
As well as the fully branded experience, building its own website using the White-Label Proposition allows Streaming Tech TV+ to take advantage of the ongoing work that Red Bee Media is putting into the service’s continual development to keep it abreast of evolving platform usage. This allows the site to offer a state-of-the-art user experience at no additional cost, and, for example, includes recently released native solutions for iPhone and iPad, with Apple TV, Android TV, and Android mobile solutions currently in beta.
“We are very excited about these plans and we are very happy to be part of the beta program where we have been able to try things out and provide feedback when it comes to both functionality and the processes surrounding it,” says Björneheim. “It’s impressive to see how fast product updates are made available, sometimes several times per week. And to be able to offer Streaming Tech TV+ at the best user experience that a native app can provide, without any investments in application development from our side is truly amazing.”
Streaming Tech TV+ can be found at https://plus.streamingtech.se. The service is fully built on Red Bee Media’s Managed OTT platform and the White-Label Proposition.
