MediaPlatform is a webcasting software vendor that sells their product direct (MediaPlatform WebCaster) as well as letting other webcast service providers OEM and relabel the technology.
The company put out a press release today announcing a new capability for WebCaster. Companies can now embed the webcast viewing window on a Facebook page or a SharePoint Online team site.
This is a nice feature for companies taking advantage of those social collaboration platforms. For enterprise clients who use SharePoint as their main work portal, employees can stay inside the corporate firewall and within the approved work environment, without being redirected to an external site for viewing the webcast content.
For companies using Facebook to reach the public, the rewards may be even greater. Once you actually manage to pull a person onto your fan page, you don’t want to lose them to another web page or popup window, letting them close or ignore the rest of your information. So keeping them on the Facebook page while they watch the webcast improves the “stickiness” of your site (a term that online marketers love to bandy about).
Another feature of the Facebook integration is that MediaPlatform has built ties through Facebook’s APIs to automatically pass a visitor’s identifying information through to the WebCaster registration system. So you don’t have to ask people to register with additional type-in fields. If they are signed in through their Facebook account, they can be automatically registered for your webcast and tracked on their viewing activity. (There’s no use getting hot and bothered about this… If you use any third-party apps on Facebook, you’re already having it happen time and time again.)
The first real demonstration of the new capability came yesterday, when Chrysler’s Mopar entity webcast a 75th anniversary celebration event.The technical services provider, TVS Communication Solutions out of Michigan (where else?), decided to stream the webcast live on its Facebook page. Here you can see the webcast running inside Facebook (click to expand).
Running embedded video on a corporate website is now fairly common for pre-recorded clips. Embedding live video streams on websites is growing in popularity for events such as sports, fashion shows, and occasions ranging from weddings to funerals. But embedding a live video webcast in a public or enterprise social media portal is a new growth opportunity. MediaPlatform seems to have an excellent competitive position with this introduction.
