How do you go about increasing viewership of a tournament? It’s not always as simple as posting more on social media or bringing in commercial partners to promote a broadcast. How about putting the broadcast in front of thousands and thousands of eyes that all have a common interest in video games? That sounds much better.
Asteri LiveStream is a games analytics platform that broadcasts streams on websites of a relevant nature, ensuring that the event suits the audience they’re able to access. There are a lot of takes on embedding broadcasts, but how often do people turn to those provide such a service?
Esports Insider spoke with Andy Price, Head of Advertising Sales at Asteri LiveStream, about the platform’s functionality and how it can benefit broadcasters.
Esports Insider: Would you be able to give us a bit of background on Asteri LiveStream and your journey as a company?
Andy Price: Asteri was founded three years ago by Steve Gray games industry veteran who headed up Tencent Games for a decade, with the goal of creating a revolutionary game analytics platform. Essentially Asteri has built a way for game publishers to test games early and often by tapping into game players across our network of gaming websites.
About a year and a half ago, we decided to combine both our underlying technology and our website network to create a way to show live Twitch streams on our group of gaming websites. We saw that there was a demand from game publishers and esports events for broadcasting live streams onto relevant and complementary gaming websites.
ESI: How does embedding an event stream provide value for tournament organisers and broadcasters beyond increasing viewership, albeit temporarily in a lot of cases?
AP: By having your stream broadcasted on major gaming websites it does a couple of additional things beyond increasing viewership; for the events, it creates another way to be discovered almost like advertising your event. Our metrics show that many of the viewers of the embedded streams end up watching and interacting with the event. For the sponsors of the events, it is another channel for reaching your market.
ESI: How would you respond to those who believe that embedding streams in places where people aren’t explicitly looking to watch an event is artificially inflating viewership?
AP: We don’t broadcast streams on non-relevant sites. So, we are pairing the event or the game and its genre with sites that ring true to the event. This is not a buying bots type scenario, these are real people and gamers viewing the stream and interacting with the event. It’s like a football game in a pub. Some viewers are watching intently, some are watching casually, some just know it’s on.
Having an esports tournament on Challonge.com, for example, the tournament bracket technology and site and website partner of ours is very similar to having a football game on-screen in a pub. It fits the venue. It makes sense. It’s another way to interact with the event. We feel like our service does the same.
ESI: How important to your business and clients is it, that you are selecting the right partners and content sites to distribute your streams?
AP: Very important. We have many website partners that want to work with us because it gives their audience more content for engagement and their metrics show this. So, we are able to pick and choose where a streamer or event wants to broadcast their event and in many cases give the event holder a list of sites to choose from.
ESI: What are some highlights of the last few months in terms of partners and tournaments you’ve worked with?
AP: Over the last several months we’ve done a range of events and have worked on 30-plus different live streams. We find that our clients have different needs. For example, many of our clients are just wanting to get more exposure and see the value in their stream on different gaming websites. Others like one of the larger publishers have been using Asteri LiveStream to broadcast their 10-day esports summit on esports journalism sites, which totally makes sense. Then we have larger clients running major tournaments as well who we’ve been very happy to work with.
ESI: What do you see as the future for Asteri?
AP: Looking ahead, we see a lot more truly curated events where we are broadcasting to more targeted audiences on highly compatible websites. So more pairing of live streams with the right websites. We are also adding a ton of product features that will provide our clients and partners with lots of detailed reports on a variety of metrics. You can reach me at [email protected] or please visit our website for a demo and more details asterilivestream.com.
Disclaimer: This piece is sponsored by Asteri LiveStream
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