Tag: Popular

Promote Brands Using Live Streaming Video

Why You Should Care About Live Streaming in 2019: Gaming

We surely aren’t the first ones to tell you that Live Streaming has become the newest trend in Audience Engagement and Marketing on social platforms. You’ve seen Marketing Gurus try to sell you on their book before to maximize your digital presence and leverage Influencer Marketing like a boss. Well.. we aren’t that different, to be honest.

As a business, you may wonder why we are better suited than anyone to help you grow through captivating narratives achieved with live streaming. Well, it’s true that our background roots are anchored in gaming, not in business. And this is precisely the reason we are the best suited to help your business start live streaming to gain brand exposure!

Streaming is big. But you knew that.

The number of growing communities we’ve seen stem from a single gamer has truly been a spectacle to witness. Here we are, in 2019, where the popularity of #1 global game Fortnite has mainly been driven by notable Twitch Influencers, like that popular Samurai guy (love your content btw!).

Brand Exposure

But it goes deeper than that, the streamed content itself has become a marketing platform of its own! Whether in the form of traditional logos and branding exposure on stream, as well as event venues being sponsored by the likes of Coca-Cola, Taco Bell, and the whole gamut, brands seem to have found a new avenue for reaching key demographics and target audiences with somewhat of a guarantee on time exposure compared to traditional media. Game launches now even plan close to no Marketing Strategy pre-launch and instead, spend a hefty amount on launch day for influencers to promote the game.

Brand Collaboration: Uniting Pop Culture

But there’s more! You may have heard of the collaboration between Marvel Studios and Epic Games to bring an Avengers time-limited game mode to Fortnite. It’s a win-win for both: the game studio gets viral content, while Marvel gains exposure (not that they need it) and more importantly, capture a fan base that is of a young age. The brand association to a game builds a rapport with your audience through emotions, end-users also believe in a sense of belonging to a community, not simply looking up to influencers, but feeling like one of their own. Brands and businesses have all realized this by now, and if they haven’t, they’re missing out.

Beyond the Entertainment Industry

Most recently, and in my eyes, potentially one of the most interesting from a marketing standpoint, is the Nike Jordan collaboration with Epic Games. Now, I don’t have the sales figures and they probably will never be released, but I am willing to bet that they will sell more virtual pairs of Jordan sneakers through Fortnite than their last retail drop. In addition to creating brand affinity, they are also capturing a potentially younger audience who may not have the means to afford their own physical pair of shoes, but that will undoubtedly rep the brand in a digital form, and will most likely start looking up physical pairs when they can. Mark my words, if three years from now, we see 16-18 year olds have no idea who adidas or puma is, it will be because of Nike Jordan’s foresight and bold tactic to reach new audiences through unconventional means.

What does this mean outside of Gaming?

Now, what is the main takeaway from all this? You might not be a game developer, so why should you care? Because Live Streaming isn’t exclusive to gamers and it should be part of your Marketing Channels, and incorporate your brand strategy. Sure, live streaming can be used as a one-off type campaign to create exposure and hype (eg. Apex Legends) and it can be quite successful at that. But looking at how Epic Games have built a vision for the long-haul, and how other brands can then leverage the platform for their own marketing, is truly a revolution in the industry of marketing and communicating with your audiences. Don’t look at live streaming as a banner advertorial, or a way to get your logo on there, but think of ways in which you can reinforce a sense of community, through advocates and influencers to boost social media brand exposure.

Have you been able to successfully leverage live-streaming in more than just an ROI capacity on advertorial? Do let us know what you have achieved, or even failed to achieve. and how you improved from there.

We’d love to discuss more topics about the industry, so please let us know if you’d like us to cover a story and we’ll do our best to shed some light and bust some myths.

If you’re looking for a solution fro simple screen recording or professional broadcast streams, check out XSplit Broadcaster.

If you’re a gamer that simply wants to test the water for game streaming, do give XSplit Gamecaster a try, it’s super easy to test out in a few minutes.

XSplit Broadcaster 3.8 Features

So far we’ve managed to keep up with our release schedule of a major release every two months with PTR releases in between. We’ve just released 3.8 into the wild where everyone now has access to the brand new in-game HUD amongst other features. The purpose of 3.8 was to bring something new to the table whilst also adding additional features that have been asked for. Oh and did I mention? Resize source hotkeys are back!

The in-game HUD allows you to both control XSplit Broadcaster from inside your game (similar to XSplit Gamecaster) but also allows you to manage your stream. You’re able to see chat and stream events whilst you play in the form of pinned widgets without the need for a second monitor. Widgets that you pin will only be visible to you and won’t be visible on your stream or recording when using Game Capture. That means you have complete freedom on how you position them without affecting viewer experience. We hope to expand on the HUD functionality overtime and provide even more functionality.

Whilst the HUD takes most of the limelight, we’ve added additional features such as the Scene source which allows you to add one scene to another. At first you might not necessarily see the point but if you think of a scene like a block that you can build and then add across as many scenes as you want, you create a really easy way to add repeatable elements to a scene and only have to edit it in one place. That’s not the only use case for this feature and I’ve seen many creative uses of it so give it a try and see how it can make your life easier or increase creativity.

Not sure what just happened? Replay Source allows you to play back what just happened on stream for a short period of time. We created the replay source to allow flexibility in how you use it. You can use it on an already existing scene as picture in picture and then use a hotkey to trigger it. Alternatively you can dedicate an entire scene to it and then have it automatically play when you switch to that scene. Once again, this is just the initial implementation and I think there’s a lot more we can do such as storing the replays to playback at a later point or even just saving them to disk in general.

Noise Suppression is another highly requested feature and is great for those who have microphones that have more background noise than they should. Right now it’s a very generic and aggressive implementation which means while it’s supposed to serve as a one size fits all, it might not get you the results you desire, more so for those with higher end microphones. With that being said, it’s a great way to clean up unwanted noise.

So, those are the bulk of the updates in 3.8 not including the vast amount of bug fixes and improvements. What about 3.9? Our focus for the next upcoming version is primarily on putting in the ground work to better improve our audio. This means actual decibel (dB) values that you can use to balance out your audio properly. We’ll be shipping a simple audio mixer extension that will allow you to monitor audio much more easily and make adjustments as you see fit. On top of that, we’ll also be adding some monitoring in to the audio settings themselves which means you can make sure the right device is selected before closing the settings.

For those that pride themselves on organisation, we’ll be implementing source grouping in to the mix. This means that on a given scene, you’ll be able to select multiple sources, group them and then move them together. On top of that, you can also rename groups and collapse them which means being able to have some separation of concerns. This is great for things like webcam with frames and some text. Now you’ll be able to place them in a group and move them together without needing to move each individual item one by one.

A brand new feature called Scene Presets will be making its way in to the next version too. By name it doesn’t mean too much but the general idea is that you can make variations of the same scene without needing to dedicate an entirely new scene to it. An example of this could be having the webcam in a different position, having chroma key on or off or using 3D transforms in one preset and not in another. However, the most powerful part of this is that you can set a transition time between these presets which means when you switch between them, we’ll automatically animate based on the properties changed. This means if you have the opacity of an item set to 0 on one preset and 100 on another, it will look like a fading effect when you switch presets with a transition time set.

We’ll also be making a bunch of under the hood changes that you might not necessarily notice immediately but will improve the experience as a whole when using our plugins for the various streaming services. We’re tying it all together so that if you’ve ever linked your Twitch account to XSplit, adding Twitch plugins will just work out of the box. We’re aiming to apply this philosophy across the board meaning minimal setup from your end and hopefully an easier experience.

So these are the main items on the board for the next major release but that isn’t to say they’re the only features we’re working on. There are tonnes of things in the pipeline that are being worked on by the team and we’ll be sure to let you know what they are when we’re ready. In the meantime, remember you can suggest and vote for ideas you like by using our feature vote page. On top of that you can get involved in the conversation by joining our discord server or follow us on Twitter.

XSplit VCam leaves Early Access

VCam Leaves Early Access
XSplit VCam has been in Early Access since November 16, 2018. While it has been received very well by streamers, the team has been working on it non-stop – iterating and improving an already amazing background removal and manipulation software.

Today, we are officially out of Early Access! XSplit VCam is now fully launched with VCam v. 1.0!

Download XSplit VCam now.

Here’s a quick list of the changes that are being implemented.

  • New and improved background removal AI, which cuts the already low CPU usage down by up to 50%.
  • Improved onboarding experience to make it easier for newcomers to start enjoying VCam.
  • Improved calibration to better recognize you from your background.

If you have any existing XSplit license, you have full access to XSplit VCam’s premium features automatically. XSplit VCam works on practically any software that can access your webcam, which means you can still VCam even if you’re an OBS user.

Now is the best time to get your XSplit VCam premium license. To celebrate VCam leaving early access, we are going back to early access launch prices until the end of the month! Until March 31, 2019, XSplit VCam is at 50% off at $24.95.

Get XSplit VCam at 50% off!