Live Video Isn’t Glamorous. And That’s A Big Part Of Its Appeal
By Jim Bask
From Forbes.com
Live video has been through many iterations over the past several years. There was a brief period, right around the launch of Periscope and Facebook Live, when it looked like it was going to become the new new thing, but that quickly faded. Yet live video itself didn’t fade and has gone on to win over new fans while keeping the old ones.
It just didn’t become the next Snapchat, which, all things considered, might not be a bad thing.
Two areas where live video is increasingly becoming hot are e-commerce and corporate training, which is interesting in that the former is consumer-facing while the latter is strictly B2B.
E-commerce was somewhat obvious—QVC and others have been selling live over the air for a while now. But training was a surprise, mostly because it seemed way too technical for most companies. And yet, a recent study from IBM and Brandlive revealed that over 55% of corporate respondents used live video to train retail associates, 50% used it to train sales reps and over 47% used it to train customer service reps.
I spoke with Brandlive’s CEO Fritz Brumder to get some more insight into what exactly was going on there. “Companies that have gotten more comfortable with live video for social are starting to see it as more than just a gimmick and are looking for other ways to use it,” he says. “The notion of using live video for training has really been directed by our customers who love the agility of live video. And they’re telling us if we could just start using it to train people and then maybe do some kind of lightweight testing and validation to ensure that people are actually absorbing the content, then we would love to invest more in live video for training.”….read more