Blackbird will be exhibiting at The SVG College Summit, Booth 218 to showcase the Blackbird cloud video platform. Video content can be created, edited, produced and delivered rapidly, for the ultimate fan experience. Blackbird improves workflow efficiencies, leaving you to work on telling the story ! Visit our booth for a Blackbird demonstration, and see why National Leagues use Blackbird – the power is in the performance.

Our Blackbird consultant, Richie Murray will be speaking on the panel discussion at 10:50 on Thursday, May 31st – “Mid-Major Magic:  How “Smaller” Video Teams Pav a Road to Video Success.

Visit Blackbird on Booth 218, or email svg@blackbird.video to set up your meeting, today.

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• Behind-the-scenes video 

Fans go absolutely crazy for exclusive behind-the-scenes content. It’s getting the glimpse of the human side of performers that is exhilarating. Reward your social media followers with exclusive videos of the making of your show. With a cloud video editor you can piece together the best bits of what happens off stage. You’ll see the results as your fans will react and share the video with their friends. Every share of your video increases your exposure as the video reaches fresh audiences.

• Live video streams

Live video is becoming as popular as ever with major events such as the Super Bowl LI. It even has a powerful marketing appeal as 82% of social media audiences prefer live video from a brand to conventional posts. Luckily, it’s becoming even easier to share your own live streams from mobile devices. Why not stream post-event moments with your musicians? Perhaps they’re writing new material or answering quick-fire questions. Whatever the content, it will attract fans to your pages for video they can’t get anywhere else.

• User-generated video content

Because how better to engage with fans than video interaction? ‘Selfie’ videos have become a popular way of sharing opinions on everything from lunch boxes to trending artists. Collect videos from collaborating fans to create great, relatable promotional videos. Don’t sweat – getting rights to user-generated content doesn’t have to be difficult. There are so many ways – from running social media incentives to building official apps. Once you have all your fan-generated content archived in one place, you can edit them into a captivating branded video.

Here at Forscene, we’re dedicated to helping companies exploit their video content. Get in touch with our team to find out how Forscene can help maximise your fan engagement.

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Images are out, videos are in

If you want to be top of your game and make sure that your live events are the most talked about – get fans to share your videos. Video on social media now generates 1200% more shares than text and images combined. Now let that sink in. Drop the captioned pictures and instead create a video announcing your next competition or big news. Fans will respond and share your video with their friends and followers, putting your live events on the map.

And it’s not just a case of simply sharing YouTube links anymore. If you upload a video straight to Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, these platforms now have the autoplay function. This means that your videos will play automatically in timelines as your followers scroll over them. It’s the perfect tool for sharing thumb-stopping promos to increase interest in your live events.

Go behind-the-scenes

If there’s one type of video fans love the most, it’s behind-the-scenes video. This is also a great way to engage with fans both during and after your live events. If you’re producing a music gig and there’s a break in between sets, hype it up with pre-recorded videos of what’s happening off stage. By using a cloud-based editing platform, you can produce professional video content that fans will be eager for. Stream your live content from previous sets or cut together sequences of the footage quickly and efficiently. Alternatively, use your social platforms after the live events to promote hot, exclusive content.

Monetise live events video content

ROI – that’s your bottom line. It’s actually been proven that organisations using video content grow their company revenue 49% faster than those who don’t. So with live events being a prime market to make lots of visual content from, video is a revenue generating tool you need to exploit. It creates more organic traffic from search engines to your live events pages, driving fans to your social media accounts for further content.

Give it a try and watch those tickets fly! Forscene is the leading cloud video platform for uploading, editing and distributing professional video content. Designed by professional video editors, it has been used by TV and sports broadcasters worldwide. Get in touch with a Forscene product specialist to find out what Forscene can do for your live events.

The post Are you engaging with your fans for your live events? appeared first on Blackbird.

YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine and the third most visited site after Google and Facebook. What does that tell you? People love to watch, comment and share videos with their friends and followers. Video is powerful.

Social media for record labels

For a record label, video content is a vital way to grow your brand. If you have an established presence on YouTube, you’re essentially showcasing all of your assets. However you need other social media engagement for further exposure. Creating short promos and teaser videos for new songs and albums is a great way to hype up fans before release dates. There is also a growing trend of record labels engaging with rising social media stars as their key influencers. These are people who have made a name for themselves by vlogging or posting other self-promotion content on Instagram and YouTube. Getting them to endorse your band or artist will instantly result in a fresh flock of new fans following their direction.

Social media for music PR companies

An imaginative and well-executed PR strategy can do wonders for a musician or band. The advent of social media in the last decade has made it a lot easier for PR companies to reach fans, but the quality and tone of message has to be performed right. A lot of your time is spent tailoring content to each social channel. Due to the demand for video content, it now has a solid place across all social media platforms. This potentially makes your job easier, and guarantees immediate reactions from fans. There’s no such thing as bad PR, right!

Social media for event venues

Venues can capitalize on social media by posting behind-the-scenes videos featuring the latest performers. This type of content is a fan favourite, giving your venue a new edge and putting it out on the map. On social media, the more reactions your content gains, the more it gets circulated. It’s the pinnacle of voyeurism, showing the reality behind the show. It gives fans the sense that they are getting to know the real humans behind the name, as well as being great promotional video for your business.

Do it all in the cloud

If your business has already got a lot of digital assets, you’ve probably heard of cloud storage and you’re most likely even using it. Cloud storage is a great way to access everything from multiple locations and devices. But even so, here’s a question for you. If you wanted to make a striking video for social media, how long would it take you to find everything you need, edit it and then upload it to Facebook? You can stop sweating now. Forscene is a professional video editor based on a cloud platform, and it’s a huge time-saver. In the Forscene cloud you can archive, edit and distribute videos across social media in minutes – yes, I really did say minutes – regardless of your internet connection, on any device. It has been used by top sports broadcasters and TV production companies and dramatically improved their workflow.

Want to increase your fan engagement on social media with with the best video solution? Get in touch today for a Forscene demo.

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Build an online fan base using live content assets

As a digital rights holder, you want to be able to deliver a fast turnaround of live content. You want to be able to get highlights on to a web page and post to Twitter, YouTube and Facebook as soon after it happens as possible. You also want to be able to archive media for future use in interview clips, “top 10” compilations and post event highlights packages. Having the ability to produce this content with a fast turnaround hugely increases engagement with fans and they’ll keep returning to see your content.

In order to win fans over, you’ll need an editing platform that’s fast and functional and allows you to create incredible live content. Forscene adapts to whatever workflow you already have in place. It’s secure cloud infrastructure makes collaborative editing possible and shortens post-production time considerably.

Forscene’s innovative technology allows for exceptionally fast turnaround

Due to our intelligent download system, you can work on a stream that’s only a few seconds behind the live content. Get fast turnaround with direct publish to social media, as well as integrated closed captions functionality, to put you ahead of your competitors.

Go from live recording to instant recaps and clips being delivered to social media or the web in less than two minutes and before anyone else. Get in touch with a product specialist today and see what Forscene could do for you.

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As Media Partners at BVE 2015 KitPlus was responsible for recording, editing and publishing 50+ hours of video content from the event seminars, roaming reporters and studio discussions over the course of the show. With material coming from different sources, crew and post-production staff consisting largely of students with varying levels of proficiency and tight timelines thrown into the mix we needed a postproduction solution that was quick to set up, easy to learn and provided a creative and reliable solution. After chatting with Forbidden Technologies for a while we decided to use their Forscene platform.

Background

Forscene is the UK’s leading cloud-based post-production platform. Historically seen as a viewing and logging tool, the software is proving its value as an editor on broadcast projects including The Voice and Gold Rush and sporting events like The European Tour and UCI cycling. We were excited about Forscene’s ability to edit and publish video directly to social platforms and decided to put the system to test on our on-stand interview videos as well as daily highlights packages. With limited time on our side it enabled us to get content to our channels and partners in the most efficient way.

Preparation

One of our main concerns about using an unfamiliar system was whether there was enough time for our editor to familiarise himself with the interface and workflow. Add to this the fact that our editor was a media student and unavailable for training and you can imagine that we were more than slightly worried! Because Forscene is accessible from any desktop or device through a standard Internet connection we were able to give our editor immediate access to a Forscene account and he then used the online training videos and user guide to familiarise himself with the interface and workflows the weekend before the show. The Forscene team markets the product as being simple enough for producers and directors to use while offering the advanced functionality that editors demand – we were about to find out if they were telling the truth!

Workflow

Interviews and roaming footage was shot at 1080/25 ProRes and copied onto Kitplus’ media storage at various intervals during the course of each day at BVE. The Forscene desktop ingest server was then used to transcode and copy proxies of this media into the cloud via watchfolders set up on the KitPlus system. This was possible using only the 2-3mbps connection available because 15:1 proxy versions of the original media were uploaded to the Forscene cloud instead of the original high-res source. Media was available in the Forscene account while still ingesting – so the editor could begin cutting without delay. Once the edit was complete, videos were published directly from Forscene to our YouTube channel – referencing the original high-resolution source stored locally.

Result

Forscene provided a cost-effective, easy to learn, reliable solution for our needs to BVE. Being able to work with media while it ingests and publish directly from the platform to other content distribution networks and social media platforms are fantastic features for fast-turnaround projects like this one and the edit capabilities of the system are unrivalled in its class.

If you want to find out more about Forscene in the education sector, book a meeting today.

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Over the next two years we worked with our new sports partners to refine our offering, rework our business model and redesign our user interface. We worked on many successful sports projects over this time, but for me NAB 2015 was the watershed moment for Forscene in sports – when we moved from promising a revolutionary workflow to being able to demonstrate a proven solution. At NAB 2015 we presented both our Forscene / Microsoft Azure / deltatre and EVS / Forscene / T3Media workflows and how these solutions have been used by industry leaders on a variety of international sporting events since 2012. And the industry’s reaction was overwhelming.

So what is our sports virtualised post-production workflow and what makes it so great?

Our integration with Microsoft Azure enables live streams from Azure Media Services to be ingested into Forscene with a transcode latency of around 20 seconds – from ingest to an editor working with the content anywhere in the world. Along with the live streams any associated metadata also becomes available to the editor. Forscene’s integration with deltatre’s Magma graphics system means that a full highlights package can then be created using Forscene’s feature-rich NLE. Once the highlights package is complete and the metadata has been edited or added, the sequence is dropped back onto Azure (or directly to YouTube) for faster-than-real-time conform and distribution. So the entire process is virtualised – no Forscene ingest or transcode hardware is required onsite – which saves time and money and provides our clients with real scalability.

We certainly seem to have captured the industry’s interest and we’re looking forward to demonstrating Forscene at a range of events over the next couple of weeks.

At SVG Sport Tech in Manchester on the 6th & 7th of May I shared our experience of working with a key client and talked about how we’ve integrated Forscene into their suite of services to enable a complete end-to-end virtualised sports workflow.

My colleagues Jeff Krebs from our North American office & our Director of Marketing Aziz Musa, attended the SVG College Sports Summit in Atlanta last month. Read the blog post on how Forscene is the perfect partner for college sports challenges.

With an acceleration in one-off sports events and long term seasonal contracts, Forscene is now a serious player in sports post-production in 2015. I am thrilled to be a part of this amazing Forscene journey and look forward to engaging with clients, potential clients and partners in the coming months.

Jason

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