Traction Media launches Live Suite for delivering a live video stream across many sites

Live-streamed video took another step toward becoming a new kind of broadcasting with the release today by Traction Labs of its Live Suite.

The San Francisco-based company offers a platform for connecting influencers and bloggers with video content. As part of that service, it began providing simultaneous distribution of recorded video streams to multiple sites and social networks.

Last June, it offered the first distribution to multiple destinations of a live video stream, for a rally that Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders held in San Francisco.

Today, it has productized that service with its Live Suite for audience engagement and promotion around live streams.

President and COO Scott Young told me that distributed streams are generally used by the video creators as a way to promote an event, drive traffic back to the originating site and gain viewership. He said that Traction is now doing about 10 live-stream events monthly, with roughly 60 percent involving gaming and the rest created by retail and consumer tech brands.

The Suite contains a dashboard so clients can set up a managed service for distributing their live-streams to multiple destinations, a social tool for leveraging the live-streams with social listening and promotion, analytics for measuring engagement and audience sentiment, and a managed service for setting up a website specifically for a live-stream.

The company says that, to its knowledge, this is the first such product offering.

The live-stream can be sent to Twitch and YouTube, and it can be delivered to thousands of websites, usually as video within a native ad. Here’s a screen shot of a gaming session, live-streamed to this and other sites by Traction Labs:

It can also be delivered to Facebook, but President and COO Scott Young told me the Facebook distribution differs because that social networking giant has rules against video streams posted on Facebook also being streamed elsewhere. So, he said, any distribution involving Facebook either uses a separate camera feed from the event just for Facebook, or it sends the single live-stream at certain times only to Facebook — and then the same stream to other destinations at other times.

The native ad format is used as the destination on many sites, he said, because they can be readily served across many sites by Traction Labs via a VAST tag. If desired, a site could alternatively choose to show the video with Traction’s player in an in-stream unit, instead of in a native ad.

Young said his company was “the first to take a live feed and push it out to standardized video ads” by quickly turning it in a VAST tag. Traction will eventually also be releasing streams in a VPAID format.

Instead of serving the video to multiple destinations as a VAST tag, he added, Traction can also split the RTMP (Real-Time Messaging Protocol) location of the stream for distribution to multiple sites.

About The Author

Barry Levine

Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.

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