By Ken Swapp, Product Management
As you may already know, MediaPlatform publishes Broadcaster product releases nearly every other week. While we’ve kept our customers up to date, we haven’t done as good a job letting some of our other partners and friends what we’ve been up to. So, I thought I’d start this blog as a place to share some of the cool stuff we’ve been working on, from new features to partner integrations to architectural innovations that are continually being baked into our ground-breaking platform.
Here are a few of the recent new Broadcaster features that we thought might be of interest to you:
Accessibility:
To aid with content discovery, management, internationalization, and ADA compliance, we’ve added a suite of AI captioning and translation capabilities that you can use with every Broadcaster webcast.
These include:
- Human Translation, which injects real-time captions from human or AI sources into the live video stream for mission-critical, high-profile events
- AI-Assisted captioning that uses dictionary- and machine learning for higher accuracy automated captioning
- Automated captioning, an affordable option for adding live stream and overlay captions into every live webcast
- Automated, affordable translation into nearly 20 major languages and allows viewers to choose from up to four different language drop downs during any live webcast.
Production Automation:
To help production teams maximize their efficiency and productivity, we’ve enabled Event Cloning, which has been a big hit with our webcast production customers. As background, Broadcaster gives producers nearly endless possibilities for designing their webcast experiences. Each of its components (video/audio, images, slides, text, Q&A, Q&A-teleprompter, polls, surveys, iFrame) can be used and resized in a multitude of layouts that make every broadcast a dynamic experience for viewers. However, once producers have their ‘go to’ production template/layout set, they often want to take advantage of the time and effort that went into it and reuse it without having to redesign. Enter: Event Cloning. By simply clicking the new Event Cloning button on the top right of the Event Overview page, Broadcaster creates a copy of the live event and lists the new cloned even in the Event Overview Page.
Third-party Integrations:
MediaPlatform Broadcaster can now be integrated with third-party solutions using JSON Web Tokens (JWT) to allow users to register once in the third-party system and be passed securely into a Broadcaster live webcast. Customers have used this feature to integrate with popular Virtual Event platforms such as 6Connex and Cvent, with marketing automation systems such as Eloqua and Pardot, and even to display webcasts on corporate smart TV display systems.
Audience Engagement:
Our customers are always looking for the best ways to keep remote and hybrid audiences engaged. On that end, we are continually improving our interactive features – Q&A, polls, surveys and audience sentiment voting – to ensure presenters connect with their audiences. New Q&A features include in-person (vs. online) audience questions, increased question categorization options (including those pushed to presenters), and a new display capability that lets presenters view questions shared with their category in a large, ‘teleprompter’ sized display. We’ve also given producers flexibility on the location of their sentiment voting widgets within live video streams (horizontal, vertical, top/bottom), and have increased the number of polls producers can push during a live webcast to 25.
Each release contains many more subtle, ongoing usability and performance improvements so we continue to meet the needs of our Global 2000 live webcasting expert customers…ultimately, their role in our product management and success can’t be understated.
This is our inaugural version, so please let me know if this blog is of interest and how we can improve –kswapp@mediaplatform.com