Last night, I was introduced to a new app that is a “cloud-based, interactive, live video broadcast application” or, basically, an app that will allow you to stream live video right within your Facebook Fan Page.
A sales trainer could hold a live training session from within his (or her) Facebook Fan Page. Conferences could stream live video of sessions on their Fan Page. Dealerships could hold live video conversations with Facebook fans. An Internet Manager could actually work with a prospect this way. A vendor could have a presentation. I haven’t fully-digested creative applications for this new application but possibilities abound.
The company’s name is Vpype (I’m imagining it’s supposed to read V-Pipe) and this app is supposed to be as easy to start using as clicking a button within Facebook.
Here are some highlights of the application (from their Press Release dated January 21,2010):
- create scheduled or unscheduled live shows
- send video notes
- store completed broadcasts with audience participation
- share videos in Facebook
- requires no software download
- easy-to-view chat history
- embeddable web video player
- broadcast Tweet notifications
- built-in viral marketing tools where you can promote your broadcasts through instant notifications to Facebook walls as well as broadcast alerts to Twitter
- content automatically archived
Here’s a picture of the interface:
I know there are plenty of live video chat/broadcast companies out there, but I don’t think any of the other companies have a potential installed customer base starting at 400 million people (and growing by 1/2 million per day).
Most of the other live video broadcast applications require a software installation on the users end. While frequent users of a particular service may not mind this, the consumer that wants to talk about a car, see a sales training session or view a vendor presentation might not attend just because of this hurdle. (Hey, we all can’t be computer geeks, you know!)
Most people have Facebook accounts, however, and if you can connect with them and all they have to do is click a button within their Facebook account, the odds of them participating and listening to whatever you have to say increase exponentially.
People like easy.
