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There is no way around it: attending in-person events is both time-intensive and costly. In our current economic and health climate, we are all reassessing how to maximize experiences.
While live in-person events were more popular in the past, consumers are now embracing live virtual events - with 65% of consumers reporting that virtual events are more convenient. Because virtual events are still in the early stages of popularity and innovation, brands have the unique opportunity to engage audiences in a compelling way. That’s why we built Twilio Live!
Twilio Live provides the API toolkits to build the customized live streaming experiences necessary to reimagine the virtual event experience.
Interactive Live Streaming
Twilio Live is an API platform that delivers interactive live streaming experiences to audiences across the globe. According to Encoding.com, traditional streaming technologies typically have latencies (or time delays) of 30 seconds to 2 minutes. High latency reduces the possibility of audience interactions, leading to audience disengagement. Twilio Live is a low latency streaming platform that can deliver media content screen-to-screen in as fast as 2 seconds. This low latency delivery allows audiences to interact with the speakers “on-stage” via text chat, reactions, and voting. It is even possible for audience members to get promoted to speaker on-stage.
Delivering an on-brand experience is critical for event organizers. Twilio Live is an API platform that can be seamlessly integrated into new or existing applications. There are APIs, SDKs, and sample code available for iOS, Android, and all major internet browsers. Developers can create a truly custom experience with APIs for the audience. The best-in-class documentation and developer toolkits accelerate time to market for the event solution.
Audience sizes for live events can range from intimate 30-person community discussions to viewerships in the millions. As the organizer of the event, you want to be able to accommodate an audience of any size. Twilio Live is globally distributed and scales to any audience size while maintaining high quality and low latency.
Given how much work goes into preparing a live event, it is critical that the event takes place without a hitch. Twilio is committed to delivering premier reliability, security and privacy for its cloud-based services. That’s why brands like Reddit, Lisnic, and Weve rely on Twilio to power their customer engagement solutions.
Live Events
Since we launched Twilio Live in October 2021, we have seen developers create unique live event experiences across a number of different use cases. Various types of event content can be consumed from the comfort of your home, from corporate events to shopping and educational experiences. It’s all possible with live streaming.
Corporate & Marketing Events
Developers are building the next generation of marketing and digital engagement events. These events take the form of virtual conferences, product launches, brand events, and webinars. Live virtual events are a great way for companies to deliver the brand experience they want and engage with customers in an interactive way to drive leads.
Our customer Weve has built a virtual team-building platform to drive engagement and collaboration across remote teams. With Twilio Live, Weve is able to offer over 100 games in their library, supporting anywhere from 10 to 10,000 attendees.
Social
Video chat has played a key role in keeping friends and families connected over the last few years. More recently, however, we’ve seen new forms of community building emerge with interactive live streaming. In this scenario, you have a large community that is watching or listening to a set of speakers on stage. A moderator can promote members of the community on-stage to join the conversation. This approach can also be used for political debates and town halls.
Reddit has leveraged Twilio Live to launch Reddit Talk, a new way for Redditors to host AMAs and Q&As or to just hang out and have fun. Since integrating with Twilio Live, Reddit has seen more than 250% growth in daily active listeners of Reddit Talk.
“Twilio Live helped our team bring voice to community conversation through our key live audio feature, Reddit Talk. We’ve been pleased with the quality of the audio capabilities & the proactive support that allowed for a speedy integration.” - Anand Paka, Senior Director of Product
Live Shopping
Live Shopping is quickly catching on with brands and consumers alike around the globe. Businesses like Hypno are building live shopping platforms to craft experimental marketing experiences. Typically mobile-first, these live shopping applications allow brands to showcase products in unique ways and connect with their target audience. Live shopping experiences have high production quality and the shoppers can interact with the hosts via chat. This combination of entertainment, social media, and retail provides a compelling experience for the shopper.
Fitness
Though TV-based workout classes have been around for a long time, the COVID-19 pandemic has pushed many fitness brands to expand their at-home, digital offerings. These experiences have traditionally been static one-way conversations from the trainers to the consumers. Now, developers are building streaming fitness services that are live, dynamic, interactive, and engaging. Consumers can still exercise in the comfort of their homes, but now they can get individual encouragement from the trainer, feel part of a community, and have new sessions every day.
Education and Training
The hallmark of a high quality education and training experience is the level of participant engagement. Online seminars traditionally supported large numbers of students but with limited student engagement. With Twilio Live, you no longer have to make the compromise between class sizes and engagement levels. You can maintain interactivity and Q&A sessions regardless of the number of students. Supporting large numbers of students can make lessons very cost effective and education accessible.
Lisnic uses Twilio Live to host business training sessions with experts around the world. Lisnic needed a scalable platform to provide richer interactive experiences that included text-based chat, audience polls, and the ability to invite audience members to speak for over one million global viewers.
“The polls we’ve done during webinars have been very popular, as well as the live chat and screen-sharing functions. Since there are so many features that Twilio has, we’ve got to promote them more to our attendees so they can take advantage of them.” Lisa Teh, Co-founder
Next Steps
Interested in building interactive live streaming into your apps? Learn how to Build a Livestream Application or get started with a Twilio Live account today!
We can’t want to see what kind of interactive live streaming experience you build!
