By Claire O’Neill
Live video is nothing new to the web, but it’s become a real thing for news orgs lately. That’s no doubt the result of Facebook’s incentivization — but it’s also because tech has generally made it more available to more of us, and in some ways more preferable than ever.
Take the Olympics. While TV viewership for NBC was down this year from 2012, Variety reports: “Ten percent of NBCU’s ad revenue for Rio came from digital” and “viewers streamed more than 2.71 billion minutes of coverage” – and much of that was live.
That’s to say: Facebook is by no means the only platform for live-streaming media. But NPR has had the opportunity to experiment heavily there specifically, so we want to share what we’ve tried and learned – in two main parts: Some of our creative/editorial approaches and some of the most salient analytics. We’ll be sharing a secondary post with some technical basics later.
EDITORIAL APPROACHES
Over the course of about 5 months, we’ve produced upwards of 425 live videos. For us, that’s 0 to 60 in no time. We’ve been able to quickly staff up a team of talented visual journalists, test lots of gear and play with various formats and approaches.
We’re all still figuring out what works, and sometimes intuition is wrong. So our philosophy has been: Let’s get weird. Just do it and then decide if it works. You might intuitively think that video of a radio newscast would be really boring, for example. But people have really seemed to enjoy seeing Korva Coleman in the morning! We’ll soon be piloting an evening newscast from NPR West.
We’ve tried lots of stuff that defies category – like playing with a blue screen, staging a worm race, incorporating practical effects like a 3-D printed NPR logo made by the D.C. Public Library, etc. But the majority of our videos fall into three buckets:
1. Building on newsroom strengths:
At NPR, our strengths lie in the talents and knowledge of our reporters; the success of existing shows and brands; and our news-gathering capacity.
The newscast in video form
TV-style streams, e.g. the conventions with PBS
News conversations and interviews, e.g.. video extensions of existing podcast brands, like a Code Switch-hosted discussion of Colin Kaepernick
2. Filing from the field:
We’ve also tried to encourage our reporters to see this as one more tool for delivering news to both their devoted followers and potentially new ones on the web. This is something we’d like to do more frequently, but we routinely run into connectivity issues remotely in the field.
Standups during breaking news, like Ari Shapiro’s dispatch from Baton Rouge on his personal Facebook page
A daily, hosted morning news show, which we call Cereal
Behind-the-scenes tours, like Sam Sanders at the National Museum of African American History and Culture
3. Making the most of the medium:
We’ll never top the exploding watermelon or Clickhole’s brilliant “Let’s Kiss.“ But we have created shows, series and one-offs that exist solely for this medium:
Performances like “Night Owl,” our late-night music series
Slow tv-esque streams: “Mesmerizing things” like jellyfish at the National Aquarium or an art installation in LA
Interactive games like a spin-off show called “Initialisms” with NPR’s Ask Me Another crew
Science experiments … or “eggsperiments”
Field trips like Skunkbear at the Smithsonian
Conversations that revolve around a sense of community or shared experience, like how we mourned the death of Prince
Thinking ahead…
Because the shelf-life of a live video is short — and also because our edited/produced video generally performs better — we’re experimenting with approaches that allow us to repurpose the content.
Invisibilia podcast premiere with a live performance by shadow puppeteers Manual Cinema, which we repurposed and republished
“Let’s Talk” explainer series, which we want to condense and republish
“Night Owl” performances, which we plan to republish on YouTube
(HT to the village it’s taken, which I’m merely representing in writing this post: Lori Todd, Mito Habe-Evans, Kara Frame, Maia Stern, CJ Riculan, Becky Harlan, Becky Lettenberger, Nick Michael, Colin Marshall, Ben Naddaff-Hafrey, Nickolai Hammar)
ANALYTICS
Audio: The most stunning realization for us as an audio network is that live video on Facebook is effectively a return to silent film. About 17 percent of our live video views have the sound on. Another way of putting it: This is a highly visual medium, which obviously raises the bar for visual interestingness. We don’t have a surefire solution but we know it’s not talking heads.
Targeting: So far, the most successful videos we’ve produced have been tied to breaking news or a current event — like the national conventions. Could be that Facebook favors that content; could be that our viewers do. The ultimate challenge is getting the right content to the right people at the right time. Will the people who are interested in art and museums be online at the moment we go live with a sneak peek tour? Odds are: No. So one thing we’ve been thinking about is how to maximize the shelf-life and repurpose-ability of the videos we produce.
Interaction: Ultimately, what you really want are shares, comments and “reactions” — i.e. the emojis available to viewers as they watch — because those are indicators of stories that resonate specifically in this medium.
Retention: Generally, to gauge the success of a video, you can ignore the prominent “reach” metric, which is just trying to seduce you with its size. Reach is tantamount to the effect of an LA billboard as commuters speed past it: The video appeared in your feed, but it may have never really registered.
With that in mind, it’s somewhat arbitrary, but we’ve decided that the 30-second view is what counts. About 13 percent of all views for us last 30 seconds or longer. In other words: It’s easy for Facebook to push the video out, but it’s hard to get drivers to stop and look at the billboard — and even harder to keep them parked. We’ve found that these videos are more successful among our existing fans, but are not necessarily expanding that group in a significant way.
Dearth of data: Facebook can be opaque about other key analytics. While we do know that 13 percent of all viewers watch at least 30 seconds, we do NOT know how much of any given video was completed by someone who started at minute 1 vs. minute 14. Which leaves you, as a producer, obsessing over the interestingness of just about every second in the video. We also don’t know how we’re faring vis-a-vis other news orgs.
Success? So what makes a “successful” live video? Hard to say. As our metrics analyst Dan Frohlich put it: Could be some combination of “video conversions” – from impressions to views; could be engagement (shares, likes, etc); could be the end result of how many 30-second views a video got; or some combo.
(HT to Dan who did all the real work with these numbers.)
TL;DR
We’re only a few months in, but the education has been real. Organizationally, this experiment has gotten more folks in the newsroom thinking seriously about visual journalism – and understanding the challenges of producing it on the fly. As a team we’ve been able to quickly improvise, try new things and drop other things when they’re not working.
Ultimately, live coverage is one of the many storytelling forms that we want to be comfortable with and prepared to do. In the coming months we plan to take what we’ve learned in this space and apply some of it more broadly to our evolving video strategy, so stay tuned.
Did I forget something? Am I wrong about something? Do you have burning questions about XLR cables and shotgun mics? You know what to do: @oneillclaire
Claire O’Neill is a visuals producer/editor, and co-creative director of NPR’s Facebook Live initiative.