My BIG TAKEAWAY from live streaming #CES2016

Last week I went to Vegas in support of a customer’s live streaming need: the Consumer Technology Association (who owns and produces CES) wanted to bring more of the show experience to their CES Video Wall in real time. I wasn’t just at the largest tech show on earth, but I was working there, backstage. And it made a BIG impression on me.

I’m still processing everything I observed, but the BIG TAKEAWAY that emerged for me was how “context-aware” all this tech is becoming. I can’t predict all the implications of this, but I know at least 3 lessons I’ll be taking back to my product team now that I’m back at the office. Here’s why:

I hadn’t been there 24 hours before I saw 3 examples of some seriously context-aware technology:

• The drone. What happens when a drone is flying – follow-the-leader-style – through a large crowd, and then the guy that it’s following ducks behind a large pole? As it turns out, a context-aware drone will hover harmlessly until he reappears. No crashing. No landing. It’s smart like that. Thank goodness.

• The car. I already have a colleague with a car that auto-brakes if its front-facing cameras spot an obstacle, but at CES there was a car that could detect pedestrians at any angle, based on their heat signatures. I guess future generations won’t get why Frogger was ever a thing.

• The genes. What clinched my BIG TAKEAWAY was hearing Deepak Chopra (whom we live streamed from the CTA Stage) describe his new book, Super Genes. It turns out that even the DNA I inherited from my parents is context-aware. What the good doctor explained is that our genes express themselves differently – turning on/off/up/down their responses – based on our individual circumstances (our context). So stress, diet, and even our thoughts can change what our genes end up meaning for each of us, individually. On a personal basis, I’m not sure what I’m going to do about this new information yet, but clearly I need to think more about that. #HeavyStuff.

Then, of course, I saw firsthand how very context-aware my company’s live streaming technology needs to be. This was the key goal of my trip: observing our live streaming product’s performance in the field. We’d be partnering to distribute a strategic customer’s content to online audiences both live and VOD. The experience would give us real-world insights about conditions on the ground, ease of use, and opportunities to exceed expectations. Here’s what I took away:

• More mobile. There are times when building everything “mobile-first” can feel like a drag…but I can’t tell you how much mobile-friendliness actually saved the day while we were staffing the conference. Because the wifi just simply couldn’t keep up. There was no point in bringing laptops for video editing, because getting online just wasn’t happening. The CTA team wound up controlling the video streams entirely with their smartphones, sending start & stop signals just over their cellular networks. Over the course of the show – we got the process fine-tuned enough to cut the post-session turn-around time to just minutes. Soon, VOD sessions were appearing in near-real-time, all up on the show Video Wall. So that’s certainly a situation I’m bringing back to bake into our product team’s mindset. Mobile-first works, even when you think you’ll have plenty of tech on your side.

• More content. The second way this experience has changed my product outlook is with regard to content: you should have more than you think you’ll need. Our original goal for the trip was to support the live streaming of several key sessions. But once the CES show staff saw how easy each session was to broadcast, there was no stopping them. We ultimately streamed three times as many session as intended, and could have done more. But that’s not all: because we really could have used some great filler. I want our product to help customers throw in additional great material on-the-fly, like:

• Highlights reels on various topics
• Repeats of popular sessions
• A taste of the food, drink, and fun
• Even a live feed from a bird’s-eye view camera or drone above the floor.

• More interactive content. Then – when the stage is happening again – customers could throw the source back to the stage by just tapping their phones. And, as this is a big part of our overall live streaming vision, we’ll need to plan for all that filler content to be enriched with its own interactive video players, too. Because our vision for both live and VOD is not just standard broadcast, but a 2-way, participatory experience. Our live video players can be as interactive as any webpage, just like our VOD players are today. Staffing CES gave me a much better idea of just how much content that interactivity will overlay.

 

I can’t wait until the next CES in Las Vegas January 5-8, 2017 when I hope we’ll be bringing the online audience even more of the show. Until then, think about how your own tech can be even more context-aware than we’d have ever thought possible.