Up-and-Comers: Bulldog Digital Media Fetches Live Video Events

"Don't make it a one-phase strategy," Petrocelli advises. "Our approach is you get the live-live engagement, which is phase 1. Then, the loop of that presentation or that concert, which can be just a replay or it can be a 24-hour replay, or a couple days. And the third phase is the presentation of the VOD assets, whether it's a highlight clip, a song, a set list, et cetera. In some events, you definitely do pick up audience spikes in the VOD assets."

 

 

Bulldog’s consulting isn’t so much about creating a successful live event, but creating a successful live property. Consider the work the agency did for the AKC/Eukanuba National Championship dog show out of Orlando, Fla. Sponsored by Procter & Gamble, the event had done some live streaming in the past, but organizers came to Bulldog looking to expand the offering. Considering the name of the agency, they must have felt at home.

 

Bulldog created a long-term relationship between Ustream and Eukanuba to grow awareness of the event. It then used Ustream’s syndication service to expand the audience through partner sites around the world. Bulldog set up the arrangement quickly for the January 2013 event and says the results were successful: Not only did the live event go well, but ABC aired a 2-hour version in February that was then pushed back through Ustream. The show went from live online to recorded on TV, and then finally to recorded online.

 

 

“We now have a 12-month window to extend the sponsorship deals, expand the engagement for the consumers, and then potentially add some more engagements with the consumers leading up to the championship,” Lenox says.

 

 

One of the biggest challenges for live video events isn’t technological at all; it’s getting viewers to tune in at the right time. With so many channels on television and so many sites they could visit, getting people to remember when and where to view an event is a major challenge. The solution lies with pre-event marketing.

 

“Social media is a major help in promoting the engagement,” Petrocelli says. “Facebook is a great place for discovery, Twitter [is] also an important extension. We’re also starting to see trends like syndication. Ustream has a deep syndication strategy for their platform where live experiences now can populate websites and web properties across the marketplace, which extends significant reach.”

 

Reaching viewers is a challenge, as is keeping them satisfied. Many live events have failed when masses of viewers tuned in and were met with connection difficulties. Organizers need to provide broadcast-quality video and do it at scale. Petrocelli says that Bulldog typically manages four to seven different technologies for any given event.

 

"An important thing here is the ability for technologies to scale to multiple hundreds of thousands and, in some cases, millions of connected users," Petrocelli says. "It's important to have technologies that will scale and that will function and that will optimize experience. Typically we're managing in these engagements four to seven different technologies."

 

 

Bulldog is betting that live streamed music events will continue to grow in importance. YouTube, iTunes, Myspace, Vevo, Yahoo!, and AOL have all gotten heavily into live music events. That’s a pretty clear sign that there’s plenty of growth -- and money -- left in the area.

 

“For us, a big focus is going to be on the music festival business, because the brand has the opportunity to engage users for typically a three-day weekend,” Lennox says. “You’ve got six to eight hours of live content happening on a Friday, a Saturday, and a Sunday with replays in between, and then VOD assets being published during and right after the festival. And typically they’re hosted for 30 or 60 or 90 days. That, to us, is kind of the quintessential defining opportunity in the market.”

 

Bulldog Digital Media might be the first live online video consultancy, but with that kind of interest it won't be the last. It's also clear that while 2013 has become the year of live video events online, 2014, 2015, and beyond won't be too shabby, either.

 

This article appears in the April/May 2013 issue of Streaming Media magazine as "Up-and-Comers: This Bulldog Fetches Live Video Events."