One of the bright spots for Democratic tech in the 2024 presidential election cycle was the emergence of grassroots “mega Zooms” by various affinity groups, initially sparked by the trailblazing “Win With Black Women” call. These virtual events not only reinvigorated Democrats who were less enthusiastic about a Joe Biden run, but also demonstrated how virtual event fundraising can be an effective strategy that can quickly adapt to a rapidly changing political landscape.

For context, our company, Hovercast, powered many of these events, including White Dudes For Harris, Comics for Kamala, Deadheads for Kamala, Heroes for Harris, Cooking for Kamala, the Veep Table Read for WisDems, and even served as the livestream graphics partner for the Harris-Walz campaign. Our platform provides interactive livestream solutions and Democrats rely on us for fundraising graphics (via ActBlue or NGP VAN), donor recognition tools, production support, and virtual event websites.

In this article, we’ll explore what went right, how these events really worked, and where improvements can be made for next cycle.

Why Virtual Event Fundraising Worked In 2024

By 2022, the virtual event bubble had largely burst. So, why did virtual events experience such a resurgence for Harris fundraising in 2024? In my opinion, it’s because livestreams can be set up at a moment’s notice, have potent potential for maximizing reach, securing influential talent, and achieving virality.

These livestreams offered a scalable, grassroots-driven, relational approach to political fundraising. This ultimately translated into international news headlines, viral memes, and significant cash for the Harris campaign.

The moment that Biden dropped out and Harris became the nominee was a catalyst event for enthusiasm on the left. Based on available fundraising data, there was a brief three-week period of peak public appetite for grassroots donations.

The virtual event fundraising format allowed organizers to quickly rise to capture this moment.

The low barrier to entry for celebrity and political talent made participation easy — stars could simply hop on a Zoom call for a few minutes. For example, Jeff Bridges reportedly signed up for the White Dudes For Harris call with just 15 minutes’ notice. This contrasts sharply with the coordination and costs associated with booking celebrity talent for in-person events. Politically passionate celebrities like Patton Oswalt, Kerry Washington, Ken Jeong, and Mark Hamill were able to join several of these events from the comfort of their own homes.

It may sound simplistic, but another reason for the success is that livestreams have a global reach, and audience members can attend from anywhere. The “you had to be there” nature of these events created appointment viewing scenarios, which increased urgency and participation. Direct donation incentives, like seeing their names on screen or unlocking special rewards for hitting collective goals, further encouraged giving.

Overall, this strategy expanded campaign reach beyond in-person events, engaging a global audience with minimal logistical challenges.

The Full Tech Stack of the Zoom Boom

While these events were often labeled “Zoom calls” by the press, most were actually professionally produced livestreams hosted on virtual event sites or social platforms. This was because relying solely on Zoom often created several challenges for organizers — issues like hitting expensive user tier limits, lacking real-time donation graphics, and dealing with generic video conferencing visuals. While Zoom was an easy way to get talent on screen, it wasn’t often the primary destination for viewers. But by leveraging livestreams, these groups engaged communities, raised millions, and provided a blueprint for future political fundraising efforts.

Here’s a look at our typical tech stack for these events:

• ActBlue or NGP VAN: for donations and event registration
• Signal: for production communications
• Google Sheets: for shared run-of-show and pre-production coordination
• Zoom: to capture talent video feeds
• vMix: for livestream encoding and video switching
• Hovercast Pro: for interactive graphics, including fundraising data
• Restream: to broadcast across several platforms
• YouTube: for video streaming, with Twitch, X, Vimeo, IG, FB, etc., sometimes co-streaming as additional feeds
• Hovercast Landing Pages: for the primary virtual event site

Let’s dive a little deeper into some of these components:

Talent Video Feeds: To ensure ease of use, we provided talent-only Zoom links for participants. Zoom’s familiarity helped avoid having to ask talent to learn new software, but it still came with challenges — like this viral moment when Larry David’s poor framing became an internet sensation.

Livestreaming: But our clients often didn’t want it to look like a Zoom, so to enhance production quality, we routed the Zoom feed through vMix, a professional livestreaming software. This allowed us to encode streams for YouTube or Vimeo, add graphics, while enabling video switching, ensuring that the right talent was showcased at the right time. With vMix, we could dynamically highlight key participants, improving the viewer experience compared to a static grid view from Zoom. This was particularly useful for live table reads, where showcasing specific cast members was essential.

Fundraising Graphics: Using Hovercast Pro, we displayed real-time donation updates, lower-thirds for names and titles, goal meters to drive contributions, audience polls, and live user comments during Q&A sessions. Persistent QR codes linked directly to ActBlue donation pages, which proved invaluable — during White Dudes for Harris, for example, the QR code also appeared in earned media coverage, extending the donation funnel to news articles and late-night TV shows.

Virtual Event Venue: While the streams were broadcast on platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, our strategy focused on having a primary virtual event site as the main shareable link. This site provided campaigns with a customizable page featuring a branded theme, chat, donation links, and registration, offering organizers full control over the presentation.

What Could Improve Virtual Event Fundraising for the Next Cycle?

There are several ways the Democrats can enhance their virtual event fundraising for future election cycles.

Leverage Talent More Effectively: While Democrats secured incredible talent for these events — A-listers, NBA players, rockstars, senators, and vice presidential hopefuls — the talent’s audience often wasn’t aware of it. Organizers must improve in providing talent with prewritten social content, shareable assets, and encouraging them to actively promote the event before, during, and after. Taking it a step further, organizers could pick select talent to co-stream the events, broadcasting parallel feeds directly to their audiences across various platforms.

Don’t Forget to Entertain: The best fundraising events provide real entertainment as well as convincing appeals and direct calls to action. Nick Offerman debuted his comedic cover song “Proud to be a Kamala Man” on White Dudes for Harris. During the Veep Tableread for Wisdems, Julia Louise-Dryfus and Tony Hale performed the infamous bathroom scene when Selina Meyer finds out that she’s going to be president — their comedic brilliance was on full display. The other celebrities were losing their minds in the private Zoom chat and the audience absolutely loved it. We once produced a Vote Save America show where Questlove DJed the entire time. The music made the show feel so lively compared to the quiet pace of a normal Zoom. Point being, when you have access to world class talent, let them showcase it live.

Utilize Fundraising Graphics: During the last presidential cycle, we A/B tested Andrew Yang’s identical stump speeches with and without fundraising graphics. The events with graphics raised 4x the amount in online grassroots donations. This highlights the importance of fundraising visuals like live goal meters, donor notifications, and QR codes for easy giving. Many For Harris fundraisers missed this opportunity, and it’s a lesson we can take forward. Live fundraising graphics not only drive more donations, but they also enhance audience engagement — something Twitch streamers have known for nearly a decade.

Develop an Events Strategy: A longer-term investment in democratic event tech would improve the audience experience, fundraising outcomes, and data collection. In a world where text message and email fundraising are deeply flawed (and annoying), virtual event fundraising offers a new way to deliver messaging authentically, gather rich data, and fundraise at scale — but it requires planning. The boom-and-bust nature of political tech risks collectively repeating these past mistakes unless we take proactive steps to build a sustainable framework.

An event strategy can also work for more than just presidential candidates, but most smaller campaigns lack the budget or expertise to hire professional live-stream producers. Developing livestream training programs and creating affordable resources could help them execute high-quality events independently.

Despite not winning the election, these events clearly moved the needle for Harris at the time and capitalized on the renewed enthusiasm of the moment. By addressing these areas above, Democrats can build on some of these small wins and learnings, shape the future of digital political fundraising and deliver even more impactful, engaging virtual events.

Behind the Screens: The Tech that Fueled the “For Harris” Virtual Events was originally published in Hovercast on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Nobody is throwing more innovative virtual events than the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, aka the WisDems. They broke the internet in 2020 by reuniting the cast of The Princess Bride, and they’ve been gathering A-list talent for virtual events ever since with the casts of Superbad, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and Happy Days.

Hovercast has been working with them for the past two cycles to produce streams and host events on our platform, and we couldn’t be prouder of our events together. While it’s still fresh, here’s a deep dive on one of our favorites from this year: a crossover reunion with the casts of Veep + The West Wing that raised over $700k.

We’ve talked previously about general advice for political virtual events, but this article will focus on the design elements that made this specific event one of the biggest grassroots moments of the 2022 cycle.

Generating the Content and Concept

First off, the WisDems are one of the most creative and innovative teams around, period. Their work in virtual event programming comes from organic relationships with actors like Bradley Whitford and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and the willingness to empower talent to play to their strengths.

Not wanting to retread familiar ground (both Veep and The West Wing had done their own fundraisers in 2020), Veep showrunner Dave Mandel came up with the crossover concept and scripted a run of show. Ahead of the event, the cast members posted on social media to build attendance with help from the WisDems and JLD’s activism strategist, Earl Dos Santos.

The content of the show was incredible — the WisDems talk about it here.

But this recap isn’t as much about the content as it is the design techniques and technology that allowed the event to raise big money.

1. Venue Matters

Hovercast built a branded event page focused on the calls to action. In addition to the standard elements of the live video and chat, our page let us easily embed CTAs like donate buttons and social share links. (Kudos to Speechifai, which makes a rad social share toolkit that embeds seamlessly on Hovercast pages.) As a result, viewers had a dead-simple way to donate during the show, like this segment where JLD introduced a swag contest:

This may seem obvious but the page also had a registration form to control access and verify you bought a ticket.

2. Shout Out Donors

For the show itself, Hovercast built custom graphics with our proprietary production tools that respond to real-time ActBlue donations. These graphics encourage in-show giving by showing names of donors and fundraising goals.

Tickers often take the shape of a CNN-style crawl along the bottom of the screen, and that can sometimes be totally sufficient. But because of the fandom surrounding the source material, Hovercast incorporated donor names into props from the shows: the “Bartlet for America” cocktail napkin from The West Wing and the “New. Selina. Now.” campaign sign from Veep.

These custom shout-outs mean something — they serve as social proof for the larger audience, and they make the individual donor feel seen.

Carol T 🇺🇦 🌈☕🍫😷 on Twitter: "Watching the West Wing/VEEP broadcast to benefit @WisDems and got my donation on the "for America" napkin pic.twitter.com/94PN9gLwO4 / Twitter"

Watching the West Wing/VEEP broadcast to benefit @WisDems and got my donation on the "for America" napkin pic.twitter.com/94PN9gLwO4

But the displays of donor appreciation went beyond graphics — because Hovercast provides easy access to real time donations, the Veep cast built a scene around Sam Richardson and Timothy Simons reading names of donors in character.

There’s absolutely nothing more powerful in a virtual event than building audience participation into the show.

3. Track Progress with Meters

A more classic example is a fundraising meter. It’s not new, but it’s critical to building a communal goal. It puts everyone on the same team.

Meters also play off of the built-in urgency of being live to motivate your audience. Nobody wants to see a goal fail.

We alternated between two themes based on the shows, which changed based on whether it was more of a The West Wing or Veep-centric segment.

When the event hit its initial goal of $650k, a confetti GIF covered the screen, and the meter automatically added $50,000 for a stretch goal. By the end, the total went from $570k at the start of the show to $704k — almost a 25% lift.

4. Play Games

Speaking of communal goals, we played games together! The audience collectively played trivia before and during the show. Hovercast’s toolset makes it simple to pull chats from the audience into games and on screen displays.

This type of co-creation reenforces a mindset of collective action (in this case, donating.)

The Results

The event raised over $700,000 from 13,000 grassroots donors, generated press in local and national outlets, and provided some much needed fun during a chaotic time of the election cycle.

While our team at Hovercast is proud of our work, we were just a part of a big group of talented people helped get to that big number. The WisDems assembled the cast, drove a big audience to show up, and organized in-stream contests to boost the donation total. The cast and writers of Veep and The West Wing contributed time and energy on camera and off.

Event tech and thoughtful design matter. And when used correctly, they infuse live-stream production with established best practices from digital fundraising.

• Summary: Embed your CTAs into your venue, shout-out your donors, build collective goals, and play games with your audience.
• Most of these tactics (thermometers, social proof, co-creation) exist in digital strategy, and there’s no reason not to incorporate them in virtual fundraising and other live event production for campaigns and nonprofits
• The right tools can make a big difference in how much you can raise during an event. Hovercast helped this event raise 25% more just from the live donations.
• But what if I don’t have access to celebrities? “Celebrity” is a relative term, and what really matters is getting guests who are meaningful to your audience. That being said, look at who follows your social accounts and slide into their DMs (really.) There are also some great consultants who help pair influencers with causes.

Contact us, if you’d like help streaming your events.

Jordan Newman is the head of sales and partnership at Hovercast

Hovercast is the leading toolset for creating virtual events on any platform with real time donation graphics, chat curation, audience engagement tools, and other dynamic graphic overlays.

Show credits: Producer, Eric Sheehan; Technical Director, Richard Angelo McLean; Graphic Design Setup, Ariel Zucker; Executive Producer, Judy Craig

Design Lessons from a $700k Virtual Fundraiser was originally published in Hovercast on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How to improve your live streams by co-creating them with your viewers

What if live TV invited you to meaningfully control what was happening on screen? It’s an intriguing question for viewers, a sexy question for marketers, and a downright scary question for traditional television creatives. The emerging format that dares to ask this question is called interactive live streaming.

Interactive Live Streaming is a type of new media that melds television, social media and video games to create participatory live TV.

Hovercast has been an early explorer of the format by creating an interactive live streaming graphics toolset used by clients such as Bernie Sanders, Donald Glover, Comcast, and the original cast of Hamilton. Public media organization GBH experimented with the format’s potential through pilots like Escape Lab, a live interactive escape game on Twitch. In 2020, we partnered to explore the value in creative audience participation in education and storytelling.

But how exactly does a producer harness user-generated content and use it to tell better stories in real time? We decided to answer this question and others with the hope of sharing what we learned with other creatives who want to make interactive live streams.

Chat Plays GBH

Thus was born Chat Plays GBH: an interactive live streamed variety show featuring five takes on classic GBH shows, from left field ideas like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-style remix of Arthur to a play-along gameshow version of Antiques Roadshow. Our goal was to introduce new viewers to public media programming while demonstrating innovative ways of adapting traditional broadcast content for new platforms.

The result? Five case studies of interactive live streaming highlighting our thesis: Audience participation is a creative superpower that can make storytelling more compelling and engaging for everyone involved.

The Five C’s of Interactive Live Streaming

The first thing we noticed is that the characteristics of live interactivity can be organized into five “Cs”: curation, competition, choice, crowdplay, and co-creation.

• Curation — User-generated content is curated by producers and added to the show.
• Competition — Individual viewers compete against each other for a chance to win.
• Choice — Audience decisions help select their desired outcomes in the show.
• Crowdplay — The audience makes decisions cooperatively to accomplish a shared goal.
• Co-Creation — The audience is a creative collaborator with the show’s producers.

These five C’s articulate the cumulative nature of interactive live streaming. They are the building blocks of this format. For those producing their own interactive live streams, it’s important to determine the level of agency that you’d like to give to the audience, then pick the characteristics that best suit your show. To help make sense of these mechanics, in October 2020, GBH and Hovercast partnered to experiment with bringing the five Cs to life.

Level 1: Curation

Curation is one of the simplest techniques of interactive live streaming. In our first segment, AMAzing Space with NOVA, we mixed live video with Reddit’s popular “Ask Me Anything” interview format. Hosted by NOVA Senior Digital Editor Sukee Bennett, the stream featured astrochemist Clara Sousa-Silva, who recently discovered phosphine on Venus, and Moiya McTier, an astrophysicist, folklorist, and science communicator. The audience was invited to ask questions to the scientists in a conversation that explored topics such as the intersection of world building and the search for life in space.

Armed with strong questions from the sub-reddit r/space and supported by fellow Twitch space streamers, GBH producers curated the most constructive and relevant comments to integrate into the conversation.

During the first hour, Chat Plays GBH was featured on the Twitch frontpage and instantly there was a huge range of comments, from people saying hello, to asking for help with their homework, to saying science is fake. These chats needed to be moderated, approved, and then displayed on a teleprompter for the host.

The more we rewarded interesting, thoughtful questions and comments, the more viewers contributed that kind of content, creating a positive feedback loop that elevated the conversation.

Level 2: Competition

We tested the next level of interactivity — competition — by turning ANTIQUES ROADSHOW into Antiques Roadshowdown. Challenging viewers across Twitch, YouTube, and Facebook to become appraisers, audience members were invited to guess the value of featured items using polls and answering trivia questions, earning points for correct answers and ultimately competing for the title of Roadie Scholar of the Day. We learned that nothing incentivizes participation quite like competition. It makes viewers part of the experience rather than passive consumers, encourages them to join in, and is a natural way to add interactivity to existing content or to amp up a simple live stream.

The most important element of an interactive competition is recognizing and rewarding participation. In Antiques RoadShowdown we did this with user shoutouts, a leaderboard, and celebrating the winner with a shareable digital reward: the title of Roadie Scholar. This personalized reward system gave individual audience members a stake in the show. Having a live host is also key to making the show feel active and new, and for sustaining engagement by responding and adapting to input from chat. Our host was ANTIQUES ROADSHOW’s Executive Producer Marsha Bemko, who shared behind the scenes info while Chat Plays GBH co-host Sukee Bennett cheered on chat and let them know when and how to interact.

Gamification creates an opportunity to innovate with legacy content, bringing it to life in new and exciting ways. While ROADSHOW lends itself well to gamification, we came away excited about the potential for gamifying all kinds of content through leaderboards, predictions, puzzles, bingo, trivia and more.

In an ocean of content, gamification adds unique value to the viewing experience by letting viewers lean in and play along.

Level 3: Choice

While competition adds incentive for participation, choice introduces agency, allowing viewers to determine the direction of the show by choosing from a set of options.

This is also known as a branching narrative — or for children of the 80s and 90s, choose-your-own-adventure. However, when a branching narrative is live streamed, viewers don’t have the option to go back and explore all of the avenues the way they did in CYOA books or Black Mirror’s Bandersnatch, which makes their choices even more meaningful.

Our branching narrative was called Choose Your Own Arthventure, and we asked viewers to assemble a whole new episode of the PBS Kids show and GBH production Arthur, with fan-favorite clips from the show. During the stream, we used polls to give chat control of the story, and invited Arthur Associate Producer Deb Frank to join Chat Plays GBH co-host Jackie Bruleigh to help bridge transitions between clips, share BTS Arthur details, and keep chat engaged.

Choose Your Own Arthventure was a delightful example of the audience having fun within a carefully constructed interactive environment. We didn’t know what choices they would make, but we did know that the story would be entertaining, engaging, and end in a classic Arthur life lesson.

Level 4: Crowdplay

Crowdplay takes interactivity a step further, adding community and collaboration by asking viewers to play together as a collective. This raises the stakes by creating an automatic bond between players on the same team, and reinforces that bond through parallel creation of a rivalry with the opposing team — an interactive mechanic most notably used in the viral sensation Twitch Plays Pokemon. If curation generates a positive feedback loop, crowdplay ignites it, fueled by viewer investment in their team and the show through constructive contributions in chat.

The Stream Cuisine with Joyce Chen segment was inspired by classic GBH culinary education show Joyce Chen Cooks. Viewers competed in teams based on their platform — YouTube vs. Twitch — and each was assigned an on-camera chef to direct.

The chefs acted as surrogates for the platforms and had to do whatever the audience chose!

After a clip of Joyce Chen Cooks’ sweet and sour pork episode was shown demonstrating the correct way to make the dish, we presented the viewers with polls that had options for the chefs to take. The audience could decide whether to make the dish the right way or completely sabotage the meal!

In addition to experimenting with crowdplay, Stream Cuisine was a great opportunity for us to feature archival content while adding new life through interactivity. Just as Twitch marathons have inspired a new generation to fall in love with public media icons Bob Ross, Mister Rogers, and Julia Child, public media archives are rife with content worthy of rediscovery and celebration.

Unsurprisingly, viewers on Twitch and YouTube made their chefs cook with wacky ingredients — like putting vodka in their sweet and sour pork! The food may not have tasted exactly as Joyce Chen’s recipe was written, but this crowdplay dynamic made for great TV. We also believe that this may have been the first ever instance of platform vs. platform crowdplay. While it’s still in an early experimental phase, Crowdplay is a fascinating style of interactive live streaming that can work to build community and a shared mission.

Level 5: Co-Creation

Chat Plays GBH culminated in Chatsterpiece, an experience fully co-created with the audience. We invited viewers to write, produce, and direct a British drama acted by improv artists. It was interactive improv, and as such, we had no idea where the audience would take things.

We knew that as a starting place, the genre was a murder mystery. From there, the audience chose the key elements of the story, including the setting, the reason for gathering, and names and qualities of each character. Throughout the show, viewers were empowered to continually change what was happening. They decided which characters were friends, enemies, or lovers, how and where the murder happened, and what weapon was used.

As the story evolved, producers looked for opportunities to react to audience choices. For instance, when the narrator started to annoy the actors, we revealed a meter asking if the audience wanted the narrator to be murdered. Then later in the show, when the actors started trying to figure out who murdered the narrator, we exposed the first audience member who suggested it, a YouTube viewer named Daniel DeLoma. This brought an individual audience member directly into the story and added a personal twist viewers loved.

During a dance party scene, the audience suggested characters who should crash it, and we added suggestions like Elmo, Salt Bae, and a fire-breathing dragon to the scene as GIFs. Clearly co-creation can get pretty weird! We embraced the chaos, reacted to the vibe the audience created, and our story improved because of it.

Relying on audience creativity without guardrails introduces risk, but Chatsterpiece showed this level of creative flexibility can be dynamic and satisfying.

Viewers increasingly value experiences and community over one-way consumption, with co-creation as perhaps the ultimate form of live interaction, bringing viewers into the moment through a unique, collective, creative collaboration.

Conclusion

Interactive live streaming is a game-changer for viewer-driven storytelling. But in this seemingly infinite space of possibilities, how can you unlock an audience’s creative potential and harness it for good, instead of inviting chaos?

We created Chat Plays GBH to answer this question through experimentation with the hope of developing a framework for interactive live stream production.

Like everything on the Internet, this format is evolving at warp speed, and we’re excited to see the countless iterations and innovations that will inevitably arise and move this model forward. In the meantime we hope it provides a useful context and structure for thinking about your next interactive live stream production.

Interactive live streaming is about telling a story with your audience instead of at them. It’s about an open-minded production approach that seeks to catch lightning in a bottle by leveraging the spontaneous ingenuity of the audience.

Successfully navigating this formula involves new tools, new platforms, new methods of audience engagement, and a brave and flexible production team. The risks are real, but the rewards will be bigger: stronger stories, turbocharged engagement, deeper connection with your audience, and a community that’s more invested in your content.

The future of live will be social, gamified, and made by viewers like you.

Written By Eli Stonberg and Joanie Tobin

Hovercast is a virtual events platform powering the next generation of live fundraising and interactive engagement

GBH is a public media powerhouse creating experiences that educate, engage, and entertain — at home in Boston and around the globe.

The GBH and NOVA names and logos and the Antiques Roadshow trunk are trademarks or registered trademarks of the WGBH Educational Foundation. NOVA © WGBH Educational Foundation. Antiques Roadshow is a trademark of the BBC and is produced for PBS by GBH under license from BBC, Worldwide. © WGBH Educational Foundation. Arthur and D.W. are trademarks of and copyright by Marc Brown. © 2021 WGBH Educational Foundation

Thanks to Tory Starr, Robert Tokanel, Jonathan Yuan, Arya Bakhsheshi, Jeff Greco, Lily Caruso, Devon Dolan, and Patrick Frank.

Unlocking the Fan-Powered Potential of Interactive Live Streaming was originally published in Hovercast on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How to engage your crowd, gamify collective action, and raise a ton of money along the way.

Virtual events have become a central way political campaigns raise money, organize volunteers, and even accept nominations. So why do most of them still look and feel like a corporate conference call?

It’s not just Zoom fatigue — it’s that political organizations have not yet tapped into the available tools and technology that can turn virtual events into two-way, participatory experiences.

This article will provide a comprehensive guide for creating truly interactive virtual events — events that surprise, delight, entertain, engage, and authentically steer viewers toward your organization’s goals.

We’ve seen that successful interactive live streams can transform viewers into participants who actively play a role in the event. And when this happens, your audience will feel a stake in the outcome and a desire to become part of the movement.

Our Path into Politics

But who the hell are we? Our company Hovercast has recently helped power virtual events for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, Andrew Yang, and more. But we didn’t start in politics. Far from it. We were born out of an elaborate viral stunt for Old Spice, where an online audience of millions controlled a man in the woods and forced him to fight costumed bears and drink red pepper flakes.

Surprisingly, the lessons from that gamified experience still inform our political work today. We learned it can be incredibly rewarding for audience members to play along with the show, provided their engagement can have a significant impact on the content in real time.

Since then we’ve been obsessed with building tools to help professional broadcasters make their live videos interactive. Hovercast CTO Jeff Greco previously worked as the engineering manager at the Obama Foundation, and suggested that the tools that we originally built for brands could be helpful in political live streaming, particularly by linking on-screen graphics to ActBlue donations, signups, or Tweets.

So last September we got to work, starting with the Tom Steyer campaign, then Andrew Yang and eventually the Bernie Sanders live streams. Throughout these campaigns we’ve learned that the future of political live streaming looks more like Peloton than C-SPAN.

That is to say, to take full advantage of live video, political organizations should merge their own best practices with some proven lessons from video games and emerging media: design shared goals with real deadlines, invite the audience to impact your show, celebrate progress on screen, amplify social conversation, make videos accessible across multiple platforms, operate with high production value, and above all create content that’s fun to watch.

Here’s how we approach it in 4 easy steps:

1. Decide the goal 🥅
2. Make sure it looks good 📹
3. Engage the audience 🤩
4. Choose your venue(s) 🏟

Decide The Goal

Go in with a mission

Campaign digital staffers live and die by calls to action. So why are they conspicuously absent in so many political live streams?

It’s important to set a goal and build it into the broadcast — whether it’s to raise money, boost volunteer shift sign ups, promote text banking or simply inform and entertain. Creatively, it helps to work backwards from your desired result: simply pick the metric you want to accomplish, identify it clearly in the live stream, and then reward the audience in a meaningful way for completing that action.

Let’s say your goal is to raise money during your event. One technique that’s worked for us is to integrate ActBlue data into the show to track progress and validate audience participation, which we do through our interactive graphics toolset. Meters help to convey and track your objective in real time. Another way to establish the goal is through a simple call-to-action graphic saying what to do and where to go.

During our streams with Andrew Yang, his stump speeches with fundraising-focused graphics made 4x the amount that the same speeches made without them.

The talent should also motivate the audience to donate or sign up for a volunteer shift rather than have those goals live only in the overlay. Think of an email that makes no mention of fundraising but includes a donate button at the bottom; it’s more effective when everything pulls in the same direction.

What does this look like? When We All Vote’s Couch Party 2.0 in April set out to train viewers to register their friends to vote via the relational tools in Outvote. A litany of celebrities and public figures from Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson to Michelle Obama hammered home the importance of civic engagement, and the bottom graphics told viewers where to go to take action.

During convention, Team Biden-Harris-DNC-DNCC:-Raised $70mil-Brought in 285,000 new donors-Added 1.1 mil people to our SMS list -Got *128 mil* video views-Sent 700k unique visitors to https://t.co/9dnvFoMCM4 We're just getting started. Join us! https://t.co/NGeBThJ3dU pic.twitter.com/a5NfLC5GkD

More recently, the DNC’s virtual convention used its multitude of speakers to pitch alternating calls to action of donating money and looking up voting information. If you watched the whole thing, the words “Text VOTE to 30330” may be incurably etched into your brain. And that’s a good thing!

Establish Deadlines

In political campaigns, urgency is a currency. Email writers will use anything resembling a deadline, real or imagined, as an excuse to ask for money. And it works. Deadlines move people to action who would otherwise remain bystanders. But while deadlines in email occur in writing and whenever the recipient reads them, deadlines in live video happen as a shared experience in real time.

The key to establishing urgency is to focus on tasks the audience can complete during the broadcast, and set an expectation of instant action. In a live stream, the deadline can be now. As in, right now. You’re broadcasting with a shot clock and nothing beats the immediacy of a live stream.

Celebrate Progress

This is where it gets fun. Once you set a goal and a deadline, the next step is to reward participation. Creating special rewards for goals met also can help; the reward can be as basic as an onscreen animated GIF, a giveaway, or as elaborate as dying your hair when a goal is met.

“Viewers want a cause to rally behind. They want something to donate to. And they LOVE a good progress bar/fundraising goal. Campaigns: give the people what they want!”

Alex Vassiliadis, Campaigns Need to Git Gud

Recognize the audience’s actions in as many ways as possible, whether through graphics, a shout-out from the host, or even changing aspects of the broadcast. Graphically, some ways to reward the audience are through tickers, which list recent participants, or leaderboards, which list top participants.

Get creative with the rewards, and make them conditional on meeting goals. Imagine if Bruce Springsteen played a three-song set for a virtual fundraiser, but he agreed to play two bonus songs if the audience donated an extra $10,000. Meeting a goal could prompt the talent (whether it’s the candidate, a celebrity endorser, or an organization’s executive director) to show her high-school yearbook photo, share a family recipe, dance, or deliver a personalized message. Make your own version of Cameo, in real time, for a massive audience. Get weird and go nuts.

Team Markey hosts inspiring, energizing, nightly GOTV checkout calls and tonight @EdMarkey himself joined our dance party! He is a joy and a treasure and I can't wait to send him back to the Senate. Goodnight Team Markey! pic.twitter.com/mtioDzVt9O

Celebrating progress can be tricky if you’re throwing a high-dollar fundraiser where most of the guests have already donated, and that’s okay. For some events, it’s more important to create a memorable, VIP experience through high production value, audience engagement, and of course, FOMO.

Make Sure It Looks Good

Production Value Matters

The bare minimum bar to clear for any virtual event is that it should run smoothly with no major technical difficulties. This guide won’t list all of our production tips, but suffice to say that you should aim to elevate your broadcast by paying attention to audio and video quality.

Here are a few quick guidelines for remote guests to get you started:

• Create a run of show document to plan the order of events in the stream.
• If possible, send professional kits to remote guests to help with quality.
• Use cell phones or iPads over laptops, which often have worse cameras
• Find a space with the least amount of activity in the background as possible. No spinning fans, busy doorways, playful pets, or rooms with social activity.
• Test your internet connection, and use an ethernet cable when possible.
• Meet with your remote guests before the show to review what will happen.
• Don’t be afraid to mix pre-taped content into your show. Giving guest speakers the option to pre-tape their segments alleviates many scheduling concerns and mitigates a lot of the risk of going live.
• Plan, practice, test, rehearse. Then do it again.

Interactive Graphics

All live TV has professional graphics. All Twitch streamers do, too. Now it’s your turn. There’s a lot of competition for people’s attention, and broadcasts need a professional look to stand out from a sea of live-streamed Zoom calls.

Fullscreen graphics can display a countdown to introduce the show, an away message to tell your fans that you’ll be right back, or an end screen with info and credits. For the main program, use lower thirds to introduce guests, logo bugs to shout out partners, and tickers to cycle through information — including your calls to action.

Finally, consider accessibility. Add captions to your event either natively through the platform or baked into the graphics and styled to fit your show. A live ASL interpreter also opens your event to more people.

Engage The Audience

“Barack Obama was the first American President to embrace social media as a communication tool — so much so that he’s been called the “first social-media president.” The 2016 election saw the Donald Trump campaign embrace targeting, including its now infamous alignment with Cambridge Analytica. In light of the recent Coronavirus pandemic, it’s clear that human and natural disasters can completely disrupt in-person events, casting digital engagement as more than just secondary strategy.” — Jesse Damiani, Forbes

Add Play To Your Event

Most of our advice comes back to the same basic principle — audience first. Interactive live streaming gives you the ability to loop audience engagement directly into the show. But to take full advantage of this new format, you should invite your audience to participate in the show in an intentional way. Here are a few techniques to consider:

Trivia

Adding interactive trivia to your show can be an awesome way to mix in some fun to your event. Trivia is a great way to keep your audience engaged during the pre-show countdown or it could be a full-fledged segment in your show.

Polls

Polls are fantastic drivers of audience engagement. Add a poll to let the audience weigh in on the topic at hand or allow the audience’s vote to change the show. A poll can hang out in the corner of the screen and simply add to engagement, or it can be front and center as a full segment. Audiences are more likely to participate if their engagement will lead to an on-screen event. What if the audience was polled on what theme music should introduce the next guest? Or what about letting them choose what location the next camera should cut to? Choose some variables that you would be comfortable with the audience manipulating and allow your crowd to co-create the show.

Games

Video game streaming is by far the most popular way to live stream today. If politicians want to make a splash, why not play a game while talking about the issues?

There are 2 things that people really like about @AOC: she has bold, uncompromising political ideas; and she tries to meet people wherever they are (Twitter, Instagram, protests, community meetings, Twitch streams) to talk to people about those ideas.

Like the time AOC dropped in on a Donkey Kong charity stream. Or the time Mayor Pete’s staff played a Mario Kart tournament. Participating in gaming is a way to show fluency with one of the biggest formats of live video. If your org or candidate has the chops, gaming can be a chance to forge authentic connections.

Feature the Chat — Listen, Respond, and Build Community

On a recent Powered by People event, Beto asked everyone to take themselves off mute to sing Happy Birthday to a staff member. When a participant chimed in that it was her birthday, too, Beto amended his request and asked the audience to sing to both of them. It was a nice, charming moment, and the kind of connection that’s only possible when you listen.

Listening can take many forms. One way to involve the audience is through interactive Q&A’s. One of the reasons that Reddit AMA’s are so successful is that the format seamlessly blends deep insights with internet humor. Livestream video AMA’s can do the same. Many political figures like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jon Ossoff hold virtual town halls where they respond to user questions in real time.

In these instances it helps to have a staff member moderate the chat. Chat curation is an important piece of this equation. Live chat moves quickly with a large broadcast, and you’ll need the right tools to sift through them, find the gems, and display them on screen. Featuring positive chat can help set the tone for your community and tell trolls that toxic behavior will be ignored.

Choose Your Venue(s)

Once you know what you want your show to accomplish, how it will look, and how you’d like the audience to engage, it’s time to decide on where to host it. In broad strokes, you’ll need to figure out if you want the event open or closed.

Many fundraising events default to closed to foster a sense of access and exclusivity. Similarly, organizations may want a virtual phone bank to be closed to anyone who hasn’t been vetted. For both examples, the event may take place on a Zoom or a private events platform.

However, with an open event, you lift the ceiling on the number of attendees. These events stream to a platform like Facebook or YouTube, so you can meet your audience where they are and benefit from social engagement.

The Platforms

Here’s a primer on where you could host your virtual event, arranged in order from frictionless to heavy friction:

Zoom — The default. Zoom comes with a degree of ease of use and networking. It’s comfortable. Zoom events can be open or closed, but they have limited capacity. A major down side is that Zoom doesn’t feel special by itself anymore. One pro tip to upgrade your Zoom production value is to pin a host and broadcast a professional stream with graphics within Zoom.

Twitch — Twitch may not seem like a natural fit for political campaigns and organizations, but it has seen enormous growth in its non-gaming video category, remains by far the largest platform for live video streaming, and has an audience trained to expect interactivity. It probably does not make sense for a local campaign right now, but high-profile national organizations should lead in this space.

YouTube — The second most popular live streaming platform with 17% of the market, streaming to YouTube is typically a no brainer.

Facebook — Facebook’s “cross-posting” feature is currently one of the biggest growth hacks in the live video space. Cross posting enables broadcasters to publish their video to multiple Facebook pages. If you have any guests in your virtual event with big followings, asking them to set up a cross-posting relationship can lead to huge viewership. The more cross-posting, the higher the reach, and bigger viral effects. Thank us later.

Twitter (via Periscope) — Twitter is a smart play for campaigns because of the amount of political discourse on the platform and the power of a good hashtag. Live streams appear on the top left of your followers’ screen when they open the app, which offers great visibility and discoverability especially if your Twitter account has lots of followers.

Instagram — While Instagram enables easy live streaming from your device, it has limitations. Instagram does not offer RTMP streaming (i.e. managing the stream from any device other than the user’s phone.) For political staffers with less tech-savvy bosses, beware. We find IG useful for casual streaming but find it hard to recommend for larger virtual events.

DIY Events Platforms — Since Covid a ton of virtual events platforms have emerged. They usually include a private app or landing page and come with networking features like 1:1 video chatting or private messaging. These events typically look like a Zoom + PowerPoint presentation. Virtual events platforms offer the convenience of an all-in-one solution, but they come with a pretty big catch: you still have to do all of the work. The risk of avoiding technical hiccups, awkward transitions, etc. will be all on you.

Your Own Website — Hosting a stream on your own site has big advantages, particularly around your call to action. Websites can let you add event ticketing, custom interactivity, digital expo halls, breakout room links, networking features, as well as own the look and feel so your venue stays true to your brand.

Virtual Reality — Spatial computing is the next frontier in virtual events. VR offers immersive experiences and has incredible potential for new forms of presentation, collaboration, and interaction. Sadly, it’s still not mainstream. Until it is, there will be huge friction in getting attendees to join your event.

Our Recommendation — Stream Everywhere!

If your goal is viewership or grassroots donations, then you should stream cross platform. It’s possible to go live with the same video simultaneously on your own website, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Twitch. And if you don’t already have a following on one of those platforms, it’s never too late to start.

We believe that a great solution for most campaigns is to stream on your custom branded website as well as across other platforms. The website can have expanded features (like an ActBlue embed form), while the other platforms can help to build an audience and drive awareness of your goals. It’s also worth considering pairing a small private event with a large public event, like a VIP zoom and a more broad scale cross-platform event.

That’s what we did for the Ohio Democratic Party when we helped convert their annual fundraising dinner into a virtual convention. This multi-channel approach raised nearly $100,000 more than previous in-person events for a fraction of the cost.

Customize Your Ideal Scenario

You don’t have to go with a one-size-fits-all format. Interactive live-streaming is the ultimate mashup of formats, because it fuses video games, social media, and live TV. You have the ability to choose which elements work for your event and make something entirely fresh. Want it private, ticketed, with trivia games and networking? Right on. Want a public event that’s cross platform with donation meters and Q&A? Love it. No two events are the same, so find the perfect solution for you.

“The thing everyone wants is not a technology, it’s engagement.” — Charlie Fink, Remote Collaboration & Virtual Conferences

Benefits of Virtual Events vs. In-Person Events

1. Cost — All of the hard costs of locations and chicken dinners can now go to virtual production companies, tools, and marketing.
2. Expanded Reach — Stream your event to multiple platforms, websites, and reach national audiences that your original location could never have accommodated. Plus, virtual events reduce travel for attendees and cut down on environmental waste.
3. Better Talent — High-profile speakers may have been out of reach before, but the barrier for entry drops when it comes to pre-recording a message or hopping on a video chat.
4. Interactivity & Engagement — Viewers of virtual events can be more than just viewers; they can be co-creators.

The Future of Political Virtual Events

We’re just scratching the surface of what’s possible with interactive live-streaming in the political space. We’re able to design live video around real-life campaign objectives and use the interactive tools at our disposal to focus on collective action. The best part is that so much of this approach requires only a shift in mindset around conceptualizing events.

Once you figure out what your desired goal is, simply prompt that type of engagement in a way that actually rewards your viewers for their participation. This model creates a positive feedback loop between your audience and the show.

Eventually, we will go back to in-person gatherings. But with Covid’s drastic acceleration of online participation, the shift in user behavior is here to stay, and the potential gains from adding virtual event engagement as a companion to live events is too great to ignore. Savvy campaigns will create hybrid live-streamed events from here on out. Will you?

Contact us, if you’d like help creating virtual events.

Written By Eli Stonberg and Jordan Newman of Hovercast

Hovercast is the leading toolset for creating virtual events on any platform with real time chat curation, audience engagement tools, and dynamic graphic overlays.

Thanks to Patrick Frank, Jessie Cohen, Jeff Greco, Judy Leeds, and Devon Dolan.

Virtual Events in Politics are Boring (But They Don’t Have to Be) was originally published in Hovercast on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What is interactive live streaming?

Interactive live streaming is an emerging genre of entertainment that encourages real time audience participation as part of the show. It’s a hybrid of live television, social media, and video games. This format has also been described as crowdplay, live 3.0, social TV, participatory streaming, and collective storytelling. In these streams, the audience is given agency and the show is co-created, meaning the broadcasters and audience make it together, live.

“It is a form that plays with the boundary lines between audience and producer,” says T.L Taylor in Watch Me Play: Twitch and The Rise of Game Live Streaming. “Combined with the transformative properties of play, it is a vibrant space of new media development that builds on the history of television.”

In 2015 my Hovercast co-founder Jeff Greco and I first joined this space by helping Wieden+Kennedy create a live stream called The Old Spice Nature Adventure. The ad agency was inspired by Twitch Plays Pokémon (more on this later) and wanted to see what would happen if the audience was given control of a “live action video game”. The idea was to drop a man in the woods for three days with a camera on his back and let the Twitch chat give him commands to control his every move. The audience dictated the story, trolled the actor frequently, and created several recurring inside jokes. During this experience I observed an incredible feedback loop where the collective audience acted as a second writers room to the film crew who either fulfilled or subverted their requests, each to their delight. This opened my eyes to the massive potential for real time collective storytelling.

“For centuries, every agency, company, studio, and writer has relied on the Hero’s Journey as a standard for storytelling. But nonlinear, trans-platform communication has entirely disrupted that model. To rising generations, the standard tropes of classic storytelling have begun to feel slow, obvious, and dated. We yearn for a new, far more dynamic and participative approach…”

- Jeff Gomez’ Collective Journey

Why now?

The VC firm Betaworks dubs this moment as Live 3.0. Here’s their framework:

“Live 1.0: in which the goal was to broadcast live TV over the Internet. There was no interactivity, and streaming was limited to broadcasters with TV-studio tools.

Live 2.0: democratization arrives in the form of tools to allow anyone to broadcast themselves, and home bandwidth is sufficient to both broadcast, and have an audience watching. Live streaming really takes off when the major social platforms integrated tools to go live.

Live 3.0: We are at the beginning of this era today, and it’s marked by truly interactive experiences. Ones in which the audience can participate beyond likes and comments, and can play an active role in influencing the live experience.”

We’ve heard of the promise of interactive TV before and it hasn’t exactly taken off. After all, interactive TV has been a thing since CBS aired Winky, Dink, and You in 1953. The difference this time has a little to do with advancements in technology (devices in everyone’s pockets, real time API’s, democratized cameras, networked broadcast capabilities, etc) and more to do with the change in audience behavior.

“We’ve had entire generations grow up for whom gaming and its dynamics are now second nature and they expect participatory experiences by default,” says Betaworks’ Peter Rojas.

For the first time in history, there is an audience in Gen Z who has been raised on interactive experiences. They are used to engaging directly with their favorite on-screen personalities via YouTube, Snapchat, Twitch, TikTok, etc. They’ve rejected cable television in favor of live formats and fragmented social platforms. This switch in user behavior suddenly flips the thinking about interactive media from being considered a nice-to-have novelty to something audiences are increasingly demanding.

What interactive live streaming is not

When the word interactive is mentioned in 2019, the follow up question is usually something along the lines of, “Interactive video, so that’s a choose-your-own-adventure video like Black Mirror’s Bandersnatch, right?” So, not exactly…

Bandersnatch is an example of an interactive video. Viewers watch Bandersnatch asynchronously and play its branching narrative with a single player perspective. Interactive live streaming is more as if Bandersnatch was being controlled by thousands of people at once.

interactive video : single player gaming

::

interactive live streaming : co-op gaming

There’s an immediacy and spontaneity to interactive live streaming that you simply cannot get from non-real time formats. With interactive video if you choose door #1 instead of door #2, you know in the back of your mind that a door #2 version has been shot, edited and exists. It’s there, you just didn’t choose to see it. With interactive live streaming, however, if the audience chooses door #1, nobody ever sees behind door #2. They’ve chosen door #2 in real time and that’s the only direction the show goes in. If you wanted to have an impact, you really had to be there.

For this article, I’m not going to cover interactive video, spatial computing (AR/VR/XR), or immersive theater, although there are several thematic overlaps in all of these next gen mediums. As Matthew Ball says, new forms of storytelling can be characterized by being “interactive, personalized, and immersive.” To put it another way, new media is increasingly becoming more about us and less about them.

I’m also not going to extensively cover game live streaming or esports here. For context, game live streaming typically involves someone broadcasting themselves playing video games, with their webcam on, so the audience can see the player and the game at the same time. These streams are the dominant format of broadcasting on Twitch and the source for the majority of views in the online live stream market. Game streamers occasionally interact verbally with the chat, however the audience is usually not given any agency or control.

Instead, let’s keep the focus on live streams where the audience can truly participate with the show. We’ll go deep on interactive live streaming as a new format, and explore the nascent medium’s past, present, and future.

The History of Interactive Live Streaming

Interactive live streaming is a convergence of many mediums and technologies. The story of this format is rooted in the history of live television, video games, events, performance, spectatorship, webcams, user generated content (UGC), internet broadcasting, platforms, and more. So it should come as no surprise that the first viral moment of this 3rd wave of live was a hybrid of old and new media colliding.

Crowdplay

Twitch Plays Pokémon (TPP) became a sensation in 2014 when an anonymous developer set up a stream showing the classic Game Boy game, Pokémon Red. Instead of watching a single gamer play like a typical Twitch stream, the audience could play it together. TPP allowed over a million different users on Twitch to control a single game. Here’s how it worked: concurrent viewers would type in the commands up, down, left, right, A or B in the chat and a bot would move the character on screen. This crowdsourced mechanic was aptly named “anarchy” mode. The audience struggled to make progress as trolls and gamers navigated fluctuating states of cooperation. As you can imagine, this situation had hilarious consequences. For instance, the audience would catch rare Pokémon and then instantly release them back to the wild. One time, they got stuck repeatedly falling off a simple ledge for 8 hours. But after 16 days, they collectively beat the game and the concept of crowdplay was born.

In 2016 Telltale Games released Batman — The Telltale Series, a multiplayer experience, which used crowdplay to allow players to join a single game and contribute votes to determine what happened in the story. This was designed to be played as a local multiplayer experience — in other words, everyone playing was watching the same screen. Theoretically, a packed movie theater could show the game and the whole audience could take part in guiding the narrative. Similarly, CtrlMovie by Kino Industries, is an interactive system for group controlled movies. It’s easy to imagine expanding this style of group play to live streaming in future crowdplay experiences. Another local multiplayer success in this space has been Jackbox Games, creators of games like Drawful, Fibbage, and You Don’t Know Jack. These games often weave user generated content into the gameplay and have play-along features that are perfect for creating entertaining variety streams on Twitch.

By far the most experimental creations in the last five years of interactive live streaming were conducted by the talented team at Super Deluxe lead by Shahruz Shaukat and Cyrus Ghahremani. Super Deluxe’s interactive live streams pushed the limits of how participatory live video could be with out-of-the-box concepts like a choose-your-own-adventure telenovela, a 24 hour freestyle rap prompted by audience suggestions, and “Punch-A-Nazi! LIVE”. Super Deluxe was an incredible celebration of weird internet culture but, sadly, the network was shut down by Turner on October 19th, 2018.

Entirely new kinds of stories are possible when the audience has agency to play along with the show. Some interesting narrative examples of the past few years include Criken’s Ghost Commander, which allowed the audience to control ghosts and haunt live actors; Orbital Redux, a live participatory sci-fi ballet by Steven Calcote; and Artificial by Bernie Su, the first scripted narrative series to debut on Twitch. Artificial gives power to the audience to make decisions about an AI named Sophie. Viewers can participate in Q&A’s with the characters, vote on polls to change Sophie’s preferences, and even submit artwork that appears in the show. With Artificial, Su has pioneered a narrative method where audience members can pay for extra votes in a story choice using Twitch’s currency, Bits.

Interactive Chat

By far, the feature that has added the most to the medium is the Twitch chat. Chat is an essential part of the live stream experience. It’s a game changer because it provides an outlet to relate, builds community in the channel, and allows the audience to be both passive and active participants in a show. Audience members can have conversations with each other as well as the broadcaster. They can give feedback, participate in Q&A’s, add creative ideas, make jokes, send greetings, cheers, and boos. Chat allows the possibility for audience members to be elevated from viewers to participants.

But for now, chat and video are still pretty separate entities in live streaming. So what are some of the interesting ways that chat can become a larger part of the show?

The best place to search for the answer to that question may be in China. “When it comes to live streaming, China is at another level,” says live streaming expert Peter Yang in A Primer on China’s Live Streaming Market. In China, “IRL streams” dominate the market over game live streaming. IRL streams involve an influencer “host” sitting in front of a webcam chatting about life with their viewers. These streams are monetized through donation and virtual goods systems. Buying expensive virtual gifts is seen as a way to get the attention of a streamer and hypothetically offers a momentary cure for loneliness. Another style of social interactivity featured in the Chinese live stream ecosystem is Bullet Chat (seen above). Bullet Chat displays comments as graphics that float across the screen in real time, allowing UGC to become part of the show itself.

Harassment

So far, we’ve seen many of the positive and creative ways that broadcasters are leveraging audience involvement, but it’s essential to also address the harmful impacts that participation can have.

“Harassment is a common problem in game live streaming, and affects both variety and esports streaming in devastating and powerful ways” says T.L. Taylor. “Women, people of color, and LGBTQIA streamers — and at times even audience members — are especially subjected to a stream of cruelty that includes hate speech, incessant commentary on one’s looks or behavior, visual abuse via unwanted imagery, and practices that disrupt the channel.”

Toxic chat is a huge issue facing the broadcasters and viewers of this format. The big social platforms are notorious for allowing discriminatory behavior to exist and thrive in their ecosystems because they profit from engagement, good or bad. Hateful participation is a universal problem across the social web and this issue compounds in real time environments with less time to process language, emotions, and effects.

It’s still early days for the interactive live streaming format and now is the time to be thoughtful about how we will enable the audience to interact and how we can influence positive behavior in the chat. Some modest steps to create healthier environments have been made but we have a long way to go. As seen above, Twitch has broadcast settings that help filter certain words from the chat, which can help, however because it’s the Internet, people will find a way around the policing of interactions and free speech.

Recently, a streamer named PaladinAmber went viral by publicly shutting down her trolls with comedic “Breaking News” segments that set boundaries and called out harassment on her channel. Other broadcasters sometimes opt to turn chat off entirely. It will be critical to find safe systems to both moderate and showcase audience participation. In addition to bots like Automod to remove content, I believe that the other best practice will be to promote valuable chats into the shows more often. Instead of hiding from the problem, let’s fix it. Elevating and rewarding positive contributions will encourage better audience behavior and better content.

“Regenerative listening is the equivalent of looking your audience members in their eyes, conveying your shared values and aspirations within the context of your stories, and acknowledging one another as human beings worthy of being heard.” says Jeff Gomez

Co-Streaming

“Co-Streaming” is another way that interactive live streaming can be more participatory than cable TV, because co-streaming allows multiple broadcasters to stream the same event from their unique POV’s, expanding the reach of the show. For example, with Twitch Rivals, a weekly live streamed esports tournament, the camera’s perspective flips around from gamer to gamer which encourages the audience to click through and watch the personal stream of any gamer they like.

This networked broadcasting concept has incredibly exciting potential for crossover events as well as more personalized commentary where audiences choose which host they’d like to hear during a live event. When multiple streamers team up to broadcast together, the broadcast has the potential for massive crossover appeal. For instance, Drake, Travis Scott, and Ju Ju Smith Schuster joined popular game live streamer Ninja to play Fortnite together, over 600,000 concurrent viewers tuned in at once, marking a truly mainstream moment for video games as well as live streaming.

Interactive Live Streaming Use Cases

HQ Trivia became a breakout hit two years ago with an app that let participants play a live trivia game show and win prizes via mobile. Viewers have always loved playing along with Jeopardy from home and HQ was brilliant for taking this behavior to the next level by including a personal score and a global leaderboard. For a while, HQ was appointment viewing. Despite its lack of cultural staying power, HQ proved that interactive live streaming and game shows are a winning combination.

The immediacy of interactive live streaming can also be a powerful motivator for fitness. Peleton has been successful in selling exercise bikes that combine live streaming with gamified workouts. Participants bike along with a live instructor and compete with the rest of a virtual class on the leaderboard. A personalized screen shows your stats, heart rate monitor, time remaining, and more. Live used to be the next best thing to being there, but with interactivity you can now be a part of the action.

Professional sports are starting to dabble in the world of interactive live streaming as well. During this year’s NBA playoffs, ESPN and Second Spectrum started experimenting with a “Twitch-ified” broadcast called “Full Court Press”. The stream featured on screen commentators on the bottom of the screen as if they were game streamers as well as video game style graphics that tracked the players, revealed shooting percentages and floating emoji’s.

Imagine a near future, where fantasy sports and sports betting blend seamlessly into personalized live broadcasts. Some broadcasters are already taking baby steps towards that idea, such as when FanDuel recently teamed with fuboTV to integrate betting data into sports broadcasts. As fans, we love to cheer for our favorite athletes live and it’s easy to see how new forms of engagement and gameplay will become a larger part of sports spectatorship.

And betting isn’t going to be limited to just sports — for instance, take the Twitch phenomenon Salty Bet. The stream plays 24/7 and hosts fights between different classic characters. But instead of being controlled by gamers, these characters are controlled by two different AI’s using a robot powered fighting engine called MUGEN. On the broadcast we see a mismatch of characters duking it out, such as Ryu, Superman, Shaq, Beavis and of course Butthead. Subscribers can suggest new characters to enter the fighting ring in future fights. Salty Bet viewers wager fake money, to make bets on fake characters, who are controlled by robots. Very 2019.

We’ve barely scratched the surface of the massive potential for this participatory format to influence music. John Mayer hosts his own Instagram Live show, Current Mood with John Mayer, where he answers Q&A’s from his fans. He’s recently begun to broadcast the live stream on the Jumbotron during intermissions of his stadium tour. In the future, fans could help control concert visuals, choose an artist’s next song, or even collaborate with live artist’s in creative ways. We saw hints of this type of vision recently when EDM artist REZZ teamed with WaveXR to create a virtual listening party in VR for her new EP Beyond the Senses. The artist performed wearing body tracking gear, allowing her to become embodied as an avatar in a virtual venue. Audience members with a VR headset could join the concert as a spectator in the crowd, but if you didn’t have a headset you could also interact with the show on Twitch. This is yet another example of how interactive live streaming can be a perfect compliment to other types of activations by expanding the reach and accessibility of an event.

Of course, savvy brands are catching on too. Interactive live streaming has a few things going for it that marketers really love, such as the beefy engagement metrics that come with gamification, rich contextual data, community focused activations, and cross platform compatibility. Add to that the idea this is a new format where viewers don’t have to download a new app or buy expensive new hardware to play from their phone or computer and there’s a lot to be excited about as an advertiser.

Let’s take a look at some examples — to promote The Grand Tour, Amazon Prime Video created an audience controlled game of Battleship, allowing audiences to blow up real cars in the desert. Ad agency Wieden+Kennedy Portland and key contributors such as Matt Sorrell, Ashley Davis-Marshall, Jarrod Higgins, Craig Allen, Evelyn Loomis, Eric Baldwin, and Mike Davidson, have been at the forefront of interactive live streaming on the brand side for a while, with inventive live activations such as Nike Breaking 2, KFC Colonel Sanders Cat Climber, and Old Spice S.Q.U.I.D.

Interactive live streaming presents a great opportunity for brands to connect with young people, by engaging and entertaining them, instead of simply advertising to them. I’ve had the opportunity to see this firsthand as our company has been involved in a handful of branded interactive live streams such as Audi’s Think Faster, a celebrity interview from the passenger seat of a race car, the Old Spice Boardroom, which allowed the audience to troll the brand through interactive improv comedy, and the Old Spice Foam Zone, an obstacle course game show that allowed the audience to manipulate the giant obstacles using real time polls.

“When you start to shift your thinking from cold, empty, data-induced language like “target audience” and shift to replacing it with “community” and “tribe,” then you’ll be closer to engineering a positive feeling into your brand.” says Ogilvy partner, Kai D. Wright

Inviting the audience into the conversation of a show is also a natural fit for talk shows and video podcasts. According to the StreamElements Q2 Report, “The Just Chatting stream category grew by 7.07% on Twitch in Q2 2019 and had 180 million viewership hours. The success of Just Chatting isn’t strange since it’s the only category that has kept growing since we began making our State of the Stream reports.” Live stream chat provides a modern take on the phone-in radio show.

Interactive live streaming will also play an important role in the 2020 election cycle as the format is starting to spread into news and politics. Bernie Sanders now has a Twitch channel that he is using to spread his message, take donations, and engage in Q&A’s with his audience. Last year, Anderson Cooper’s Full Circle introduced an interactive live stream news format to Facebook Watch, where the audience could vote on polls to determine the topics that they wanted to see. Their slogan was “the show was created for you, by you”.

What’s next for interactive live streaming?

By now I hope to have established that interactive live streaming is perhaps the ultimate mashup format of our time. I believe that it deserves a seat at the table with the other promising next gen formats such as AR, VR, mobile-first video, and interactive video. At its best, interactive live streaming combines multiple concepts and blends them together into something only the internet could create.

When creatives successfully leverage the good ideas of the audience, it’s a win-win for both parties. The audience has a stake in the content, they feel empowered knowing they helped shape the story, engagement numbers go way up, and a connection is forged between audience and show. Just imagine the massive potential of two million people playing together and contributing their unique voices to craft a complex story all at the same time.

For producers trying to tap into this exciting, growing market, the concept of participatory real time entertainment raises some questions:

• In a live environment full of toxic behavior, how do we minimize the bad and amplify the good?
• Who gets rewarded for the labor of UGC?
• How do you reach the widest audience, while successfully curating so much participation?
• How can premium entertainment involve the audience in meaningful ways?
• What can be achieved when creators and fans work together on a show?

Real time commentary has the potential to be a powerful interactive tool for storytellers to leverage. For the first time in broadcast history, storytellers can listen to their audience in real time, react, and curate the best content in order to add creativity, comedy, depth, hot takes, spontaneity, and community into their narratives.

In 2019, chat has already become an essential element of live TV. Just look at the spikes in participation on Twitter or Reddit during the NBA trade deadline, Game of Thrones premieres, or a presidential debate. The chat is often more interesting content than the show itself. Over time, the chat experience will move from the second screen and blend into the first.

The chat is often more interesting content than the show itself.

The future of live will undoubtedly involve new types of stories, different input devices, games and formats that haven’t been invented yet, new methods of monetization, real time forms of gambling, virtual goods, shoppable video, cryptocurrencies payments, evolutions of advertising, expanded immersion, increased personalization, and new types of play.

The line between live TV and video games continues to blur. We’re about to witness the transformation of nearly every vertical of live TV.

Are you ready, player 2,000,001?

Eli Stonberg is the CEO of Hovercast, a product that creates interactive live streams on any platform with real time chat curation, audience engagement tools, and dynamic graphic overlays.

Contact me, if you’d like help creating interactive live streams.

Stay tuned for new articles in this series that explore the themes of interactive live streaming, how to make your own interactive live streams, and more.

Thanks to Jeff Greco, Devon Dolan, Zahid Zakaria, and Judy Leeds.

How interactive live streaming is removing the barrier between audience and show was originally published in Hovercast on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.