Stream UK is the trusted partner for webcasting, live streaming, online video platforms, radio streaming and encoding for over 150 broadcast media, FTSE 100 and public sector clients.

Client Portfolio

•McFly – live from Wembley to paid for mobile app•Everything Everything – live from Union Chapel to free mobile app (first ever!)•Justin Bieber – live from Madame Tussauds to web and idevices•All GMG radio streaming to 25+ web and mobile devices•BBC Worldwide via iphone app•Live ingest and streaming of online TV channels inc JML and Argos

Project and ChallengesOnce upon a time, a small audience of Microsoft engineers were invited to the Laban Theatre in London – to take part in what would become the ‘Microsoft PFE Virtual All Hands event’. Yellow Spanner have long been a trusted production partner of Microsoft, and the aim for this All Hands was to advance the technology used: to produce an on-demand show that would present the key messages for the next year within a virtual studio environment, allowing web viewers around the world to feel like they were there in the theatre for the event itself. Stream UK were charged with designing a bespoke and secure website, mixing and encoding the footage, and delivering it at the highest possible quality.

The technical challenges to creating a realistic 3-D environment are multiple – stage design must map carefully with the angles and dimensions of the virtual set, cameras and lighting must be carefully manipulated to create a realistic-looking chroma key.

 

ResultsYellow Spanner shot all the live presentations against a green screen using three fixed camera positions, and then, using the Tricaster system, Stream UK mixed all the inputs to create the final edit. In terms of content delivery, different office locations had different bandwidth capabilities, so we needed to ensure all viewers could get the best possible experience

•Thousands of global views•Increased engagement

•Fantastic feedback form engineers•A unique and valuable ongoing resource

Since September 2007 Stream UK have been at the helm of the hugely successful Red Bull Bedroom Jam for the last 4 seasons. The annual RRBJ provides exposure and, as demonstrated by the success of previous winners - and Best British Newcomer nominees for Kerrang!’s 2009 polls - My Passion, a make-or-break kick start to the careers of the UK’s best emerging young music talent through its epic four-stage battle of the bands.

Wannabes upload videos of their gigs ready for fans to watch and rate them on the Bedroom Jam website, and the crème de la crème of hopefuls are given the unique chance to stream a live performance straight from their angst-ridden bedrooms’ to the eyeballs and eardrums of the web 2.0 generation; and providing the behind-the-scenes techie know-how? The live video and webcasting? The platform for the delivery of all the juicy on-demand video content (since 2007 no less)? We’ll, that’ll be Stream UK.

Results

Project & Challenges

The series runs for up 20 weeks a season. For each and every one, our team have succeeded in creating a ‘live’ venue inside the bands bedroom. With no time for recces, we never know what we’ll get as a ‘studio’ – sometimes little more than a cupboard!

Communications agency, Que Pasa, was asked to to revitalise Red Bull’s Bedroom Jam proposition, driving online traffic, video uploads, video streams, user retention and user interaction – all key engagement metrics with stringent year-on-year growth targets.

With Stream UK delivering all elements of the weekly sessions, these were the results:-•over 410,000 videos watched•over 70,000 votes cast•95,000 user comments.

All targets exceeded.

Oh, and the culmination of the year came when the first of the chosen bands stepped past Foo Fighter Dave Grohl, backstage at the Red Bull Bedroom Jam tent, to play the first Bedroom Jam show of the summer.

2011 season now in progress!

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During the month of September KitKat in conjunction with Rock Feedback organized a series of pop-up break time gigs throughout the UK. The free one off gigs were to encourage people to make the most of their breaks, playing on the famous KitKat branding ‘have a break, have a KitKat’. Unfortunately for us, the venues were often not decided until days before. And with responsibility for connectivity, vision mixing encoding and getting the stream out, that meant some quick thinking and fast action.

Over the four weeks we traversed the country (and sometimes walls) and saw acts including Scouting for Girls, Hadouken and the Hoosiers.

Results

Project & Challenges

All events went out live and on time, seamlessly delivered around the globe to watching fans. With coverage on the homepage of MySpace, KitKat got maximum coverage and achieved the impact they desired.

Those that couldn’t make the event didn’t miss out on the action as the gigs are all up online, still getting watched. On the back of this success, we’re doing another 4 secret events over the coming weeks.

Project and ChallengesOrange has been a headline sponsor of the Glastonbury Festival for the last 10 years. In 2007 Poke were charged with an interesting and engaging way of giving away tickets. Something to help cement their relationship with the Glastonbury Festival in people‘s minds.

Glastonbury is surrounded by fields with cows, so they ran Spot the Bull. A contest where you had to guess where Derek the GPS enabled bull was standing at 3pm each day. It went well and people liked it. The challenge for 2008 was to evolve this project to something even more unique and exciting.

Derek the Bull was replaced by his son, Winston – younger and faster-paced, he would be more difficult to keep track of. Stream UK were charged filming, encoding, and delivering a constant stream so that viewers could always see him. The logistics meant that cameras needed to be high in the air – and our production team had to build a thirty foot scaffold and film through rain so bad that there was a real danger that the bull would have to be taken away!

ResultsThis campaign was always set to be huge, with advertising within MSN messenger and word of mouth spreading fast, so the live video stream needed to be clear, stable, and able to cope with hundreds of thousands over the weeks.

Poke’s interactive site included real time stats, weather and bull tracking, as well as individual and team play options. Averaging over 1000 concurrents with peaks much higher, unique visitors were up 50% on 2007 and average time spent onsite more than doubled. The multi-cam streaming was our largest live flash webcast at that time, and proved the resilience of our Wowza infrastructure.

On top of which the campaign successfully took home a range of awards!

ResultsStream UK broadcast a live, two-day event from London to hubs in New Jersey, Chicago, Tokyo, Singapore, Dubai, São Paolo and Buenos Aires viewed through a custom Dove-branded Flash player available at 600kbps and 1.5mbps with bandwidth selection dependent on the individual hub’s connectivity.

“A big thank you for the behind-the-scenes team here and all the technology that’s made this happen.”

Steve MilesSVP Marketing, Dove

In March 2011 we completed our third event for Unilever internal communications.

Project & ChallengesDove is one of Unilever’s cornerstone brands and the way in which it articulates the nuances of its brand is key.

Unilever routinely webcasts obligatory IR content, however they perceived that webcasting was expensive and too complex for an internal communication. The challenge in moving forward on this project was to demonstrate that with live stream testing and advance preparation with the international hubs, webcasting a time-critical communication is a hugely valuable and cost-effective tool to have in the corporate communications’ arsenal.

Project and Challenges

IET is one of the world's leading professional societies for the engineering and technology community. IET.tv (http://tv.theiet.org) is their web-based service, delivering synchronised, multimedia content to web users anytime, anywhere.

The over-arching aim of the partnership with Stream UK was to maximise the potential value of this content, streamline the process of content management and distribution. In addition, IET provide webcasting services to hundreds of leading global companies and brands , and needed a partner to deliver market-leading webcasting production and software. The challenge was to standardise all assets and allow rapid categorisation and distribution on IET.tv

ResultsStream UK are currently in the process of migrating all content – thousands off assets - onto the Stream UK Crowdsourcer platform, which will then be used to drive IET.tv’s channel-based site structure. Combining automated transcoding with intuitive moderation and distribution tools, it can be used retrospectively with existing media as well as providing advanced content management for the future.

As a result of the new partnership in terms of events, webcasts are now being delivered (both live and on demand) with Stream Connect, benefitting from the tool’s interactive options, automatic archiving, and reliable delivery platform.

Project and ChallengesIn 2008, Reuters and Sony Electronics joined forces to launch a cutting edge campaign for Sony’s cutting edge technology.

For example, the Sony HDR -CX12 made use of the company’s “Smile Shutter” technology, which detects and takes a photo when your subject smiles without having to switch to photo mode or press a photo button. This HD camcorder, which uses Memory Stick Pro Duo media for storage, can record full 1920 x 1080 video and 10-megapixel photos - and the campaign needed to make the most of such capabilities.

The project required a slick and interactive campaign allowing Sony users to capture images of themselves anywhere, for display in Times Square. With a high visibility, it was key to provide stable service with a high quality end-product.

ResultsThe Stream Crowdsourcer was selected because of it’s stability and flexibility platform met all these challenges. Reuters used the ingest, moderation and transcoding capabilities of the Newsdesk Transcoder to power the Times Square billboard as part of a campaign they named ‘Everyday Smiles’.

The system allowed users anywhere to send in photos directly from their phone. The best were then selected by moderators and these were converted into an RSS feed which fed the sign directly. Users were given confirmation of their choice by SMS and the images on the sign were captured for use within the online galleries.