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Mobile Live Streaming Equipment: Your Options in 2021

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Mobile Live Streaming: So Many Choices

These days getting into the mobile live streaming market is easier than ever, but the real challenge is getting the right setup for you. Mobile streaming equipment in 2021 can give professional levels of streaming quality at a relatively low entry point. 

Computers and mobile phones are more advanced than ever and all you need in terms of hardware to get started with live streaming. However, before you start checking out laptops, webcams and microphones be warned that output isn’t going to be great. Why? Because laptops and mobiles are designed to show good marketable specifications while encoding and streaming qualities are a second thought. If you are streaming and want professional results then more bespoke solutions are required.

If your setup doesn’t involve a computer or device that allows camera input to be encoded and pushed to an internet, you will need an encoder. The good news is that in 2021 you can get them the size of portable hard drives. The camera is plugged into one side and the other goes to internet. These take the binary outputs of the cameras and encode them in a compressed standardised format that then can be sent to viewers or a broadcast team effectively.    

Camera Inputs

If you need a camera for live streaming that provides professional quality feeds then you will be looking at DSLR and Mirrorless cameras to achieve this. You need one that has USB live view tethering capability but if your camera does not support this like most, then you may be able to get away with using an external I/O device with HDMI, VGA or SDI input cables.

Software

You will need dedicated streaming software if you are aiming for best quality encoding and streaming. Luckily you can get both cloud based streaming software that is already hosted to save you time. Software in 2021 allows you to control multicamera setups either through the interface or a ‘switcher’; a remote used for input control.

Multicamera live streaming equipment

Multicamera setups are possible with another box to help you input the signal along with one or more additional camera inputs. As mentioned prior you can hook up these boxes to a switcher that allows the user to quickly go to different cameras if they cant get to the software interface. Currently on the market you can get switchers that integrate encoders allowing you to stream without access to a computer or encoder.

Turn-key Streaming

Essentially an all-in-one box containing an encoder, an assortment of inputs and software. They allow you to have a mobile streaming solution in a cost effective small footprint package. A switcher can be useful for controlling them and if you are interested in multicamera streaming then you may be better off going for the dedicated devices mentioned above. 

Scalability and your Setup

Planning two steps ahead can be useful when purchasing gear for live streaming. Do you go big or go home, or do you start small and scale up? There is risk with both methods. Whatever you decide to do, this is an interesting field with many diverse projects possible.   

 

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Mobile Solutions

Business to Business (B2B) marketing; a major challenge for startups & SMEs

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B2B SMS marketing; leading the way to success

There are two fundamental types of business, one that is business to client (B2C) and the other is B2B. B2C only occurs at the end of a supply chain and has a large market base allowing for marketing to be hit or miss. B2B however feeds an offering into supply chains from businesses upstream of a B2C business. Most B2B’s have a limited number of businesses that they service making marketing and sales preparation vital to the success of the business.
B2B SMS marketing enables a business to make or extend contact with a project champion within the target organization. The aim is to provide professional and concise actionable content to recipients enabling them to be filtered during the sales funneling process correctly. This process works by allowing the user to not know whether there is a person behind the B2B SMS marketing they are receiving or not. If they think it is a person, then as a professional courtesy they will reply. Conversely if the recipient believes it is an automated system, they may respond to it without consideration or fear of a formal engagement. Both the former and latter are useful for extracting key information and engaging the potential client after a few messages.

B2B SMS marketing technology
B2B SMS services work through the integration of an API into the company’s CRM system. If a startup does not have a CRM system, then this will also be required to help ensure the sales team and support interacts with the client correctly with all interactions recorded in the CRM for reference. This entire process only takes a few lines of code and the generation of a few automated templates with the providers toolkit. This technology is important for scenarios when meetings with the client have been arranged to ensure the engagement can be pre positioned correctly and based upon any support calls that are presently open with the client. Along with CRM B2B SMS services are just as important to set up as soon as possible, providing a powerful way to engage with every targeted business. A B2B company should have created a list of target businesses at the start of the business and work from the low caps to the high caps using each business as a reference to get more of the market share. The SMS service can use the list of businesses and potential project champions in specific campaigns using filtering tools and grouping to accelerate onboarding of each new company.
While conducting onboarding an SMS service can help not only to reach out to potential contacts but also feedback valuable sales information to validate a sale before a sales team member is needed to actively reach out and complete the sales funnel process.

An SMS service is not just important for making contact it is vital for retaining the client. A business-to-business enterprise will likely have competitors and unless there is a substantial moat such as intellectual property governing who clients buy from, it is likely that brand loyalty will need to be continually cultivated.

Summary
B2B SMS services are the key for engagements and continued brand loyalty management. Ideally B2B SMS services should be integrated into the businesses CRM system to allow quick access to a company’s integration to the sales and support teams. Also, this helps to quickly create and organize marketing campaigns allowing sales and PR teams to direct content and calls to action quickly and effectively. This automation is key to reducing workloads on inside sales teams while helping to ensure that an offering can be positioned to clients onsite with knowledge of how to position it and stopping teams walking into an unknown situation.

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Mobile Solutions

Over the Top (OTT) Communication; Its uses and benefits

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OTT communication; Onboarding users
When a user creates an account for practically anything these days, they normally have to enter their mobile number and confirm the creation of the account. These days many are working in non-traditional circumstances and may not have instant access to emails or have data limits that cause them challenges. An omnichannel messaging service enables a user to create an account from a mobile phone using an application. This means that the user no longer needs to enter additional information that the app cannot collect automatically, making it easier than ever to onboard users. There are a few different suppliers of this technology however Message Whiz’s OTT communication is the best for service and offerings and have been delivering solutions for many years.

Messaging within the application
The omnichannel messaging service is a great way to also provide a two-form authentication route that is integrated into the software used and because it is used on a mobile phone everything is much more convenient for the user. Additionally, GPS telemetry could be used with the application for verification the user is where they should be. For example, most banks these days require users to notify them of travel dates to different countries to stop their system from blocking a credit card during that period. With GPS telemetry consented the OTT communication process can report this back to help confirm the user credentials.

Secure connections
OTT communication can be used to generate one-time passwords to access systems and OTT communication works worldwide. They are exceptionally useful for remote access to organizational networks and used already in many secure VPN services for corporations that need military level remote connection security. Another use is in eCommerce purchase authentication, with one of the interesting uses being in cryptocurrency purchases and transfers where a dissimilar currency transaction takes place through a broker or third party. As the number of cryptocurrency users has doubled over the past year and currently around 1-2 percent of the financial marketplace it is expected that applications using this technology will accelerate significantly over the next 5 to 10 years as countries continue to acknowledge it as legal tender.
A large part of a company’s IP has become decentralized and hosted on cloud solutions with secure access to cloud services being a key requirement to business success. In the early days of cloud usage there were many breaches that this OTT communication technology helps to reduce.
The gaming sector has changed considerably over the past decade, with many users livestreaming content and it becoming their income source. Digital assets have a financial worth as does the time to gain such assets, and a perfect reason to integrate omnichannel messaging services into applications. By doing so games and associated software will gain better adoption in a saturated marketplace thanks to the peace of mind omnichannel messaging services help provide.

Passwords and sensitive data
These days with hundreds of passwords being created for each site or application it can be very difficult to recall which password is for each site. As such it makes sense to use OTT communication for the recovery process as well as during the onboarding process.
Some data is sensitive such as healthcare data that also can be protected through using an OTT communication system in any solution. In the unlikely event of data being viewed by others the liability is reduced by the company offering a secure system.
The future of your company
No matter what industry you are in, when you have new or existing users accessing your system you need them and their data to be safe. By ensuring good security to the user, you improve the image of the company while making the onboarding and governance of users far easier. This allows you to focus on growing the business.

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Automotive

Smart SMS messaging for business success

Welcome to the world of smart SMS messaging, where businesses are revolutionizing their customer communication strategies and achieving unprecedented success. In this fast-paced digital era, traditional methods of reaching out to customers are becoming obsolete. Today, it’s all about delivering personalized messages directly into the hands of your target audience – effortlessly and instantly. Join us as we delve into the realm of smart SMS messaging and explore how it can elevate your business to new heights. Buckle up for a thrilling ride filled with valuable insights, practical tips, and inspiring success stories that will leave you eager to harness the power of this game-changing tool!

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smart messaging; automating your workflows
Reaching customers is becoming increasingly difficult these days due to everyone utilizing the same technologies to sell a product or offering to the end recipient, as such you need the most direct way possible to cut through the digital noise. One way to achieve this is through a smart messaging platform that can get your message to the customer directly through their phone. This is a device closer to the user than any others and has no automated blocking for SMS. An SMS is around 184% more likely to be actually read than an email that may end up in a spam folder or deleted at a glance; worse yet is the user unsubscribing the email address.

These days many companies use smart messaging to achieve a deeper level of interaction and automation for repetitive workflows. For example if you need to qualify a potential sales lead then you can use smart messaging to achieve this through artificial intelligence (AI) that is integrated into a chatbot. Now this has some benefits due to the means of communication. For example there are people thinking that the message was sent by a real person and others that know otherwise, and in either case this is useful. For example, the user that thinks it is a message from a real person will likely respond to a short and concise message due to the obligation and the small size of an SMS, making the user think that there is nothing further after the first reply. For the user that thinks it is a chatbot, they may still respond to it for the exact opposite in terms of obligation, they may not see it as a starting point for a marketing funnel. Again, in both cases the first call to action (CTA) is achieved.

Once the first message has been answered it is likely that a user will wish to complete consecutive messages from the basic idea that once they have started something they need to finish it, and so long as the smart messaging replies are not too long in number of responses it is likely that all information will be gathered successfully. Here it is important to know how fast smart messaging should operate, if too fast in replying it will feel to the user as an irritation while if left too long the original incentive to complete the task is lost and the process stopped by the user. To optimize the smart messaging platform some form of testing is required on a smaller portion of the call list demographic.

A smart messaging platform can be integrated into existing enterprise solutions such as the client requirement management CRM system through convenient APIs. These can be set up in a few minutes and allows an existing CRM system which contains all customer contacts to be filtered for SMS contact lists for a marketing campaign much more easily than trying to do it manually and enables the smart messaging platform to use the list to quickly make contact with the details provided in the CRM but also to return information back to the CRM later. Interestingly a smart messaging platform can be used to take users through the process and assess if they qualify for a follow-up by a member of the sales team, reducing many hours of wasted staff time chasing contacts through the equivalent of cold calling. If you are not using the system for sales you may be using it to schedule and confirm appointments with SMS using the same type of process making smart messaging platforms a highly effective customer management tool for many sectors from healthcare to logistics.

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