Enhanced Live Streaming Monetisation – AnalysisPro and InPlayer

In this guest post, Josh Bryan, Sales and Support Manager at AnalysisPro, provides his insights into the current world of live streaming monetisation and their new partnership between InPlayer and AnalysisPro. 

As we look to continually enhance our AP Capture solutions and live streaming options, we are very pleased to announce a new partnership with InPlayer, the market-leading monetisation and subscriber management platform. 

The AP Capture solutions provide a 4K ready IP Camera, enabling high quality video capture with smooth and simultaneous PTZ (pan, tilt, zoom) movement patterns, which are essential for filming sport. These solutions can either be a fixed installation of IP Cameras or our portable Sports Mast, enabling you to elevate the IP Camera up to 6 metres so you can get great quality footage at any venue.

Live Streaming

In 2017, we added a Live Streaming plugin to the AP Capture software, enabling users to easily stream their footage directly to YouTube or Facebook, whilst keeping their focus on the main priority of filming and capturing everything required for performance analysis workflows and video review. Over the years, we have developed the live streaming further by providing our free AP Scoreboard app, which lets users overlay a scoreboard on their stream; easily updating the scores with pre-set templates in the app for sports like Football, Rugby, Cricket, Tennis and others.

More recently, we added a timer ability to the AP Scoreboard app, so AP Capture users can let their viewers see which half/quarter they are watching and the current game time. Our latest addition lets you put up to 4 different logo images into the Sponsor folder on the AP Capture machine, meaning that the live stream can easily show sponsors to viewers and provide a viable revenue source for streamers to capitalise on.

The popularity of live streaming continues to rise at a rapid rate, with viewers tuning in to watch gamers, sports events, conferences, Ted Talks and just about anything you can think of. In fact, it’s reported that Live Streaming is going to be more than a €70 BILLION industry by 2021! With this next link, you can see more must-know live video streaming statistics. Neil Patel has a comprehensive post about the importance of live streaming and some great infographics, showing what people can do off the back of live streams to increase engagement and this look at the reasons why people love watching live streams.

At AnalysisPro, our aim is to always educate and enhance the workflows of our #APfamily. We know that our AP Capture solutions provides the highest quality filming, which is vital for performance analysis, and we know that our live streaming plugin can run seamlessly in the background to let users ‘kill two birds with one stone’. Whilst creating content for post-event review, the footage can be shared around the world to an ever-growing audience, increasing engagement and providing new revenue streams through sponsorship.

Monetisation

When it comes to providing new revenue streams and really benefiting from monetisation, this is where InPlayer steps in to provide a secure and user-friendly platform for placing your live streams or post-event content behind a registration/subscription paywall.

InPlayer, the world’s leading pay-per-view and subscription solution, helps set up and grow recurring revenue for any company that is looking to enable online sales and access management for their video, audio, files and HTML content. With millions of dollars in transactions managed, InPlayer is making thousands of live events profitable for the media industry, rights owners, agencies, artists and corporations around the world.

Why InPlayer?  

Whether a sports team, league or federation; a live events production company; a faith-based organisation; or anything in between, InPlayer delivers flexible solutions to help customers monetise and distribute live events any time and nearly anywhere in the world. InPlayer’s scalable and fully-featured paywall solution includes advanced tools such as a sales dashboard, audience CRM, analytics, geo-restrictions, landing pages, content syndication, extensive languages and currencies options. 

Content owners can monetise their live streams  behind a secure paywall via pay-per-view and subscription, and deliver compelling live experiences without the complexity of building their own monetizing infrastructure, all with end-users support, flexibility and security.

As the InPlayer platform can embed live streams from a variety of sources, it fits perfectly with the AP Capture live streaming plugin. Now, thanks to the new partnership between InPlayer and AnalysisPro, AP Capture users can monetise their streams with one-off events or regular events behind a paid subscription. As the popularity of live streaming continues to grow, we think that our #APfamily will have the chance to tap into a fast-developing market by combining AP Capture with InPlayer.

AP Capture and InPlayer in Action

To live stream, you need a strong and stable internet connection. We always look for at least a 10mb/s upload speed, with faster speeds enabling a higher quality stream for the viewer to watch. In October, we used the portable Sports Mast at Millfield School’s Kingsweston Playing Fields to live stream direct to InPlayer. You read that right, playing fields. Not usually a place where you would expect a strong and stable internet connection.

To answer this internet requirement and suit the portability of the AP Capture Sports Mast, we can rely on the Trogon ‘Yellow Box’ to provide an internet connection in places where you don’t usually have one. By combining sim cards and giving a single ethernet output (WiFi can be used but an Ethernet connection is always better for stability), we were achieving consistent upload speeds of 30mb/s from the Yellow Box whilst out on these fields.

So, with a completely portable and self-powered AP Capture Sports Mast setup, the AP Capture could connect to the Yellow Box and start streaming the live match to InPlayer, complete with a scoreboard and timer that were being updated through the AP Scoreboard app. With the configuration options of InPlayer, the live stream could be kept behind a simple email registration form or a pay-per-view system. The video player gets embedded into a beautiful landing page which can have further links and information around it or could even be embedded into existing pages for a further enhanced viewing and sharing experience.

You can see an example of that live stream here.

You can see the AP Capture live streaming setup that we used here.

The simplicity of the InPlayer system fitted perfectly with the simplicity of the AP Capture Sports Mast and Live Streaming plugin. This all means that one person can really provide a multitude of benefits when using these powerful solutions in combination. They get high quality video footage for live and post event performance analysis workflows, alongside providing live streaming for increased fan engagement, awareness and a growing revenue stream.

For more information about the AP Capture solutions and InPlayer tools, please get in touch.