Customer Stories

What do you do when you are on track for over 300 people registering to attend, 10 sponsors setup to exhibit, nearly 100 speakers committed to present… and 6 weeks before the event you learn all of these people now can’t leave their homes?

For the MER Conference, the solution was to quickly pivot to a digital experience; one that could engage audiences remotely while placing them in front of experts and thought leaders. This case study outlines their transitional story, of shifting the conference, in just 6 weeks, to the new format. In the end, the team executed a seamless digital event experience and achieved an increase in year over year registrations by about 45%. Here’s how they did it.

Pivoting in-person events to digital experiences in three weeks time

COVID-19 caused companies to pivot toward new digital solutions to do business.  These practices are ones that must stand up to remote working and restrictions on travel and lockdown facilities.

What do you do, though, when your organization focuses on community and building a strong network of companies through in-person events?

For Digital Hub Logistics Hamburg, they innovated by adopting a digital strategy through technology from IBM. This was done with an eye on speed: quickly being able to introduce video streaming to their community to keep them engaged from earlier events while reaping success through greatly expanding their reach.

Salesforce was ranked by Fortune in 2019 as the number one best place to work among large companies¹ and was recently named in Forbes’ 2020 World’s Most Admired Companies,² so it’s no wonder they are growing at a rapid clip. But, as more employees join the Salesforce team of Trailblazers, the demands of communicating effectively across the organization, and making employees feel valued increase. Jo-ann Olsovsky, Executive Vice President and CIO at Salesforce, and her team are tasked with providing effective and reliable ways to connect people across the organization and make sure they continue to feel a part of the team regardless of where they are located around the world.

IBM and Salesforce have partnered together on live video streaming projects for many years, most notably to extend the reach of Dreamforce sessions to customers and interested parties that can’t make it to the event in San Francisco each year. In 2019, Salesforce decided to expand its video streaming work with IBM to include internal employee communications as well. Being able to continue to grow and scale communications and do it in a way that doesn’t impact other applications running on the corporate network is a significant priority. In this video story, Jo-ann talks about the importance of video, the impact on Salesforce employees and company culture…the “Salesforce Ohana³,” and where she sees video technology headed in the future.

When executed at the highest level, golf appears beautifully simple. The greatest competitors in the sport swing a club with seemingly effortless grace, sending the ball on a perfect flight between towering pines and rolling along manicured greens toward a flag flapping in the Georgia breeze.

In these moments, we don’t see the countless hours of practice. We don’t see the history of injuries, exhaustion or frustration. Yet although we can’t see it, all that time and effort was necessary to create this seamless moment, tirelessly earned and presented as a gift to patrons of the sport.

These glimpses of simple perfection are why millions will watch the Masters Tournament this April. Delivering these moments in a seamless viewing experience to patrons around the world requires the right infrastructure—a solution architected using both technological innovation and human expertise.

The Salesforce platform provides users a 360 degree view of their customers, helping them connect and nurture relationships in a whole new way. An initiative at the company is Salesforce Live, which has webcasts, productions and events, including a live broadcast of Dreamforce.

Hosted in downtown San Francisco by Salesforce, Dreamforce is an annual, massively attended conference. Bringing together a mixture of thought leaders and professionals, the event has historically attracted over 170,000 people to attend. The focus of the show is often on keynote addresses, training sessions and networking events among many other activities that take place at the conference.

When it came to the topic of expanding the audience for the venue, online proved a natural fit. “Streaming is a huge part of Dreamforce, has been for many years,” said Michael Rivo, Business Director of Salesforce Live. “We put a big effort into driving large audiences for our Dreamforce broadcast. For the past several years we’ve had millions of viewers in real time watching the live stream of the broadcast.”

To help achieve this goal, the underlying technology had to be accessible and reliable while creating an overall high quality production for online viewers. For more information on the infrastructure used to support the large audiences, be sure to download this Live Video Delivery System Built for Scalability white paper as well.

“The ESPN of technology.” That’s how Jeff Frick, general manager and host of theCUBE, describes his interview show. Founded in 2010 by tech media company SiliconANGLE, theCUBE streams news and interviews from events in Silicon Valley and beyond, and these days it has become must-see programming for tech fans everywhere.

“We go to the big tech events, drop in a live studio and interview the ‘tech athletes,'” says Frick. In 2017, theCUBE will conduct approximately 1,500 interviews from over 100 events. At major annual conferences like AWS re:Invent and VMworld, Frick and his production team will interview as many as 70 tech leaders.

The vast majority of theCUBE’s on-location interviews are streamed live and are also available on demand, along with other in-studio interviews. Some fans of theCUBE tune in via computers or mobile devices for an entire day’s coverage while they’re at work, jumping back to the site when noteworthy tech figures and keynote speakers appear. Event attendees, meanwhile, watch theCUBE interviews when they return from the conference to get additional insight from various executives and customers, Frick says.

In the spirit of Thanksgiving, I would like to take the time to thank each of our customers.  Thank you for using our video platform.  Thank you for streaming with us and for pushing creative boundaries to come up with great content and innovative use cases for streaming.  And, thank you for your support as we’ve transitioned into the IBM family of offerings.    

And, an enormous thank you goes out to the 68 of you who took the time this year to write a review about your use of our technology on Trust Radius (3rd party review website). The products we offer started as a way to help people connect with other people in a dynamic way, in real time, and it’s very satisfying to read your stories and understand how our technology is helping you to do great things that engage your customers and employees.

Viewers worldwide are cancelling their cable TV packages and turning to online broadcasts at a steady rate. In the U.S. alone, nearly 25 million households lacked cable by the end of 2015. More than 1 million American households are expected to cut the cord this year, and they will be joined by millions more households across the globe.

But it’s not just weekday sitcoms, made-for-TV movies and daily news that are migrating online. Sports fans are clamoring to stream their favorite teams—and that’s where Footters, which launched this month, sees an opportunity.

Based in Spain, Footters is an online streaming company providing a platform for federated soccer clubs—the semi-professional and even professional players who are part of clubs worldwide that aren’t popular enough to merit the blanket television coverage given to the English Premier League or La Liga, Spain’s top professional soccer association. These minor league clubs might not be powerful enough to ink their own television deals, but they have a large, largely underserved audience. With an estimated 24 million clubs comprising 270 million players around the world, Footters’ potential reach is enormous.

Video moves people.  The human brain absorbs video with much less work than it takes to process text.  As a result, we’d rather watch than read, and we end up sharing videos more than almost any other type of content on the internet. Leading organizations are recognizing this, and they’re expanding their use of video as a tool for driving better business outcomes.

The streaming video success stories infographic below illustrates eight great results that organizations are achieving using streaming video.  Click on the infographic and it will open in PDF format, with each result linking to a two-minute video that explains how it was achieved.  Which result is most relevant to your goals?

For the fastest path to results, tell us the type of impact you need from streaming video, and we can coach you on the best practices most relevant to delivering it.

Point your camera at a religious service, touch the “Go Live” button, and your stream could reach dozens or even thousands of people in places you’ve never heard of.  You can’t be sure what effect it might have on your audience.

Maybe you’re a rabbi sitting in front of a webcam in your office, about to play guitar and chat online with visitors to your weekly online-only synagogue. Or maybe you’re behind a camera that will sweep across 4,000 parishioners in a megachurch and send the service out to 50,000 viewers around the world.

Both these examples are among the roughly one thousand religious organizations that share their services on Ustream.tv each week. Whether the audience is vast or small, each producer wants to offer a high-quality, reliable video stream that is a gift for viewers to receive.

We asked experienced producers who stream religious services to share with us the top tips that make their work successful and rewarding. Read on to get their advice.  And get started free with IBM Watson Media to stream your own religious service.

1. Start with an abundance of bandwidth
2. Harness social media
3. Emphasize audio to build your impact
4. Make viewers feel present
5. Connect everyone with the chat module
6. The biggest impact might come with the smallest audience