Eventstream Review: Profit From Paid Live Online Video Events

Ustream, Livestream, YouTube Live, and other live streaming services are affordable and work well, but lack two key features. First, you can’t collect viewers’ contact information easily, which makes it harder to generate leads. Second, none of those services allow you to charge for your streams. Eventstream, by contrast, supplies both features by integrating the reservations and payment processing capabilities of Eventbrite with the aforementioned live streaming providers, as well as several others. As an added bonus, if you record the event, you can continue to make the on-demand version available with Eventstream.

Eventstream (and Eventbrite) are free for free events, making the combination a natural for organizations hosting webcasts or similar events for lead generation. If you’re charging for your event, you’ll have to pay Eventstream 5 to 7 percent on top of Eventbrite fees. I tested the system with a recent paid webinar and found that given Eventstream’s ease of use and functionality, it’s a price well worth paying.

Getting Started

In essence, to use Eventstream, you have to learn how to use two completely different systems: Eventstream and your selected reservation system. When I tested, Eventbrite was the only supported reservation system, but Eventstream will add other platforms soon, including Cvent and RegOnline, which are services for hosting and promoting virtual or brick-and-mortar live events. Using polished tools within the system, you create an event, build a landing page, send invitations, register attendees, collect fees for paying events, and download reports and analytics.

I first used Eventbrite for a brick-and-mortar training seminar I produced in New York City in 2013. This time, I used Eventbrite and Eventstream to produce a webinar titled “Content-Aware Encoding: Applying Lessons Learned from Netflix’s Per-Title Optimization Blog Post.” The webinar was held on Feb. 26, 2016, and we had 28 viewers who each paid $31.59 for the privilege. Not a huge sum, but testing a new platform for paying customers always adds a certain frisson that helps focus one’s attention, which makes this review all the more realistic.

At a high level, the division of labor between Eventbrite and Eventstream works like this: You create your event in Eventbrite, which handles the reservations and payment processing, culminating with a confirmation email with an order number sent to the registrant. Then you set up your event in Eventstream, which supplies a playback page and player that registrants use to watch the stream, plus a control room for managing the event. To watch the event, the registrants enter the Eventbrite order number into a field in the Eventstream viewing page, which opens the Eventstream player. Note that Eventstream also creates landing and registration pages you can use along with or instead of the Eventbrite pages.

Setting Up in Eventbrite

Start by setting up the event in Eventbrite, inputting the event title and date, filling out the landing page information, and creating the tickets (Figure 1). As you might be able to see in the figure, Eventbrite adds a fee to your ticket price, which increased my round $29 ticket price to a messier $31.59. You can juggle the ticket price to try to achieve a nice round number, but in my tests, that proved elusive; prices always seemed to add up to $31.99 or $32.01, never exactly $32.

This grumble aside, Eventbrite is a highly flexible reservation system with fabulous features, including the ability to create customizable tracking links and multiple discount codes and ticket types. You can create a ticketing widget on a Facebook page, integrate registrant data with MailChimp, and send a SurveyMonkey survey to attendees right after the event to solicit feedback. If you decide to use the Eventbrite/ Eventstream combination, budget time to learn how to leverage these Eventbrite features, since they will enable you to produce higher-quality and more profitable events.

Setting Up in Eventstream

Once you’re set up in Eventbrite, you’re ready to jump over to Eventstream to create your event and link the two there. In Eventstream, you’ll log in and create a new event. You’ll have two authentication options for the new event: password-protected or Eventbrite. To link to the Eventbrite event, you’ll select the latter, and then sync the two accounts by entering your Eventbrite name and password and enabling the sync. Once accomplished (and you’ll only need to do this once), you can select the event that you just set up in Eventbrite via a drop-down menu. Basic event information (title, time, and description) will flow in from Eventbrite, although pictures included on the Eventbrite landing page and associated formatting will not, so you’ll have to fix both.

After creating the event and importing the Eventbrite data, Eventstream will open in the Event Setup Page, where you’ll customize the Eventstream landing page and viewer. The landing page is pretty simple stuff; just reinsert any images and reformat the page as desired using a WYSIWYG HTML editor or insert the embed code from the selected live streaming platform. I used YouTube Live for my event, which meant that I had to create the event in YouTube Live, make it unlisted (YouTube doesn’t provide embed codes for private events), and then copy the embed code into the proper field in the Eventstream Viewer Configuration window. (See Figure 2.)

One criticism of the Eventstream system is that there’s very little help provided beyond three videos detailing the workflow under Support. It’s a good idea to watch these before getting started, since they are comprehensive, but skimmable text docs would be useful as well. I didn’t watch the videos (of course) and so it wasn’t clear to me which embed code Eventstream was looking for in Figure 2. Even changing “Embed Code” to “Embed Code from Live Streaming System” would have done the trick. This is a pretty minor grumble, however; watch the videos, and you should be fine.

Once you’ve completed the event setup, you’ll have the landing page shown in Figure 3 (on the previous page), which is available as a separate webpage on the Eventstream site and can also serve as the viewing page. Or you can create your own viewing page by embedding the Enter the Webcast section shown on the lower right of Figure 3 into a page on your website.