3 Key Technologies that Support Audience Growth

Your company is implementing a new webinar program, and you’ve been instructed to develop strategies for audience growth. When you picture what this might entail, what comes to mind?

If you’re working with a marketing mindsight, then you’re likely thinking of outreach efforts via social media, email campaigns, website pop-ups, and more. You’re imagining ways to boost the visibility of your upcoming webinars through paid advertisements and networking. You’re maybe even cooking up some incentives to encourage people to sign up and attend. And why not? All of these are valid strategies that should be part of your overall plan.

The trouble is truly effective audience growth is about more than marketing outreach. Only focusing on the former is tantamount to hosting a 50-person barbeque and only having enough food for 20. Sure, people showed up, but will they be happy about it? Will they come back next time with their friends?

I think we all know the answers to those questions. So let’s talk about how audience growth is as much about being prepared and providing a positive experience as it is about getting the word out.

 

Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Generally speaking, a scalable stream starts with a reliable video CDN. CDNs are comprised of a central server that communicates with a network of edge servers, each of which is strategically located in different geographic areas. When you request to view a stream, your request pings the closest edge server to your location, which then delivers the content to your computer (provided it has that content cached). If it doesn’t have the requested content, it pings the central server and saves or caches the content for you and future audiences.

The first guiding principle for CDNs and why they work is that distance matters for all journeys, even ones in the cloud. A stream coming from a single server located very far away will be less reliable than one coming from a server closer to home.

The second guiding principal for CDNs is that teamwork makes the dreamwork, so to speak. Why make one server bear the load of thousands or even millions of streams when it can have a team of servers help through a process called load balancing? This reduces server strain and by extension the likelihood that a given stream will fail.

 

CDN and Audience Growth

So how does having a CDN in your streaming arsenal aid audience growth? It makes the most of all that strong marketing work you’ve put in by ensuring your stream can handle the increase in viewership. Consider CDNs part of the long-game for audience growth as viewers appreciate the quality and reliability of your streams and opt to spread the word.

DID YOU KNOW that Wowza powers one third of CDNs worldwide?

 

Live Transcoding

Let’s start here by understanding transcoding and the role it plays in a streaming workflow. Your video streams start their journey as raw video files that get encoded, or compressed, for delivery across a network. These files are often sent to an intermediary media server for storage or preparation before going on to the viewer’s device. Transcoding happens in this middle space and is the act of decompressing these files and recompressing them at new sizes (transize) or bitrates (transrate).

Transcoding could happen at any point as video files are prepped and stored for future streams, or it could happen live, actively altering video files as they are being pushed to viewers. Live transcoding helps facilitate adaptive bitrate streaming (ABR), which dynamically adjusts video files being sent to individual viewers in response to feedback about those viewers’ bandwidths.

 

Live Transcoding and Audience Growth

If we could borrow the barbecue analogy again, imagine preparing amazing food only to find that some of your guests can’t enjoy it due to food allergies. No matter how hard to you try to make something good, you can’t control individual viewer limitations. Live transcoding and ABR help you accommodate these needs across a range of viewer devices and bandwidths while still providing exceedingly high-quality experiences to those who can handle it.  

As your audience grows, you’ll need to contend with more varied needs and ensure you’re delivering the best possible quality to keep them coming back (and bringing their friends).

DID YOU KNOW that Wowza is one of the most powerful transcoders in the business, transcoding an average of over 20 million hours of video each month?

 

Audience and Stream Health Analytics

Ok, maybe don’t apply this one to your next block party barbecue lest you get slapped with a restraining order, but some things true of streaming are not necessarily true of social gatherings.

Learn all you can about your audience. What devices are they streaming from? Where are they located geographically? What time of day or they tuning in? You could even get information about age, gender, and more to tell you what demographics are engaging most with what types of content.

Learn all you can about your audience’s experience. What bitrate are they typically streaming at? Are they experiencing any significant latency or stream failure? How long did they watch for and at what point did they leave?

 

Analytics and Audience Growth

Up to now, we’ve been talking about technologies that will help you accommodate rising viewership and provide a positive experience to encourage continued growth. Audience analytics plays both sides of the fence, helping you improve the viewership experience while also providing audience insights to inform marketing outreach.  

It provides important information about who is viewing your streams and from where, as well as what content appeals the most across various locations and demographics. Use this information to refine your ad targeting as you work to expand your viewership. It also provides important stream health data that you can use to improve your streaming infrastructure or workflow and keep those viewers coming back.

DID YOU KNOW that Wowza recently expanded their analytics capabilities, including more robust player analytics and audience engagement metrics?

 

Wowza and Audience Growth

Grow with your audience by finding a streaming platform provider that grows with you. Wowza grows with online video platforms (OVPs), live event broadcasters, and more by offering:

• Access to a robust global CDN.
• The most powerful transcoder in the business, including live and high-density transcoding.
• End-to-end analytics that we continue to expand on and improve.
• Flexible deployment models to help you adapt and expand your streaming infrastructure.
• Transparent pricing to make it easy to predict total cost of ownership (TCO) now and in the future.
• Live event support to keep your next big broadcast running smoothly.

DID YOU KNOW that Wowza powers 60% of OVPs worldwide? Sounds like you should be inviting us to your next barbecue.