Lessons in live verticalisation and dual-aspect streaming
Image courtesy of StreamTek
Marketers often say that you have to meet your audience where they are. But these days, half of your potential viewers are streaming on laptops, desktops, or TVs in landscape, and they aren’t going to rotate their devices to watch vertically oriented content. The other half of the audience, attuned to flicking through reels and vertical dramas on phones or tablets in “portrait” mode, won’t rotate to landscape for you either.
So, how do you meet your audience “where they are” if you don’t know where they’ll be when they see your video? You stream it both ways at the same time, and you leverage technology to re-orient your content automatically.
I did this myself, recently, utilising new cloud tech that let me produce in landscape and portrait modes simultaneously. Now, I didn’t also leverage AI to excerpt and push reels, but that’s part of the offering as well. The reason this is possible today is that the cloud tools can evolve and deploy faster than individual apps can. Automated multi-format production is definitely beyond the capabilities of standalone hardware video mixers that just started to be able to be switched to vertical delivery at all. Cloud solutions can code once, for their system, and everybody gets it.
I understand that there’s a portion of the audience that still bemoans creators filming in portrait. But I guarantee those same people watch vertical reels on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Linked In, Facebook, etc. Even for purists, content is the draw, along with the convenience of watching it cropped for the device they happen to be on.
For my weekly live show about live streaming technology, I produce in landscape. My PiP is me to the side of a window showing another source, like my overhead camera or screen output. For many months I also used a second device to simultaneously produce a portrait version for Instagram. However, I didn’t live-switch the feeds in the vertical programme. The view was always my head above the landscape “second” shot at the bottom.
Today, cloud production makes it easy to have multiple “scenes” we can design for portrait and landscape. Then, when we switch between scenes, we’re simultaneously switching both the portrait and landscape shows. When we bring up a viewer comment, it’s formatted perfectly for both portrait and landscape. Any guests we bring on or other graphics created in the cloud studio are handled for us for each version of the programme. That’s the magic of these multi-format production solutions today.
Moreover, you can not only decide which platform gets which version of the show; some platforms, like YouTube, accept both versions at the same time and will deliver the appropriate stream to the appropriate viewer depending on their device. You don’t even have to know in advance! The platform handles that part for you. The speed with which people get used to convenience means that soon they will refuse to engage with content or systems that make it hard for them to enjoy what they want, the way they want.
The last piece is having the system automatically clip your stream, live, put captions on the video, and automatically post it to your connected shorts and reels while you’re still live. This can potentially grab people who aren’t tuned in to the live programme, but who are online and flicking through reels and then—BAM!—you meet them where they are! Now they can click through to watch and engage with the live experience.
Are you meeting your audience where they are? Because your audience won’t go out of their way to meet you where you are; they’ll stay where they are and watch the content that’s made easy for them to watch. Whether you choose to leverage available tech to gain audience is a decision you are going to have to make in the near future.