1- Hi John, can you introduce yourself?

Passionate creator / webcast producer, YouTuber, techie, and coffee aficionado.

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2- Tell us about Social180Group?

When I started Social180Group it brought in about 8+ years now of multistreaming, or what I call pro-level webcasting experience. I spent many years learning the trade of broadcast level streaming for weekly events, major events, and OTT specialized support.

My vision for Social180Group is to mainly focus on the remote production for either virtual or hybrid webcast events. We look to optimize and support key activities from live to simulated-live, playback services, broadcast level, down to boutique options such as capture with a show concept interviews style.

Given my background in tech for 25+ years and webcast experience. We are always looking at the innovation and development of media with tech. One of the reasons that drew me to easylive.io as in a prior role we had been looking at solutions that were 100% cloud-based, possibly give us more options for remote production.

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3- How did you hear about easylive.io?

I first heard of easylive.io from my Amazon Web Services rep to evaluate tools for playback services and remote production right when the pandemic hit.. I was with a large house of worship organization based out of Southern California, and working on a project for an online campus effort.

Towards the end of 2020 is where I really jumped into working easylive.io. In fact, what ended up happening was I had Michael Daudignon (Director of North America Sales at easylive.io) join me for a chalk talk session for my YouTube channel, we ended up doing another event, the rest shall we say was history.

4- What made you decide to use the easylive.io solution?

The main need was to leverage a strong video production platform to run 100% in the cloud since I had already been researching efforts including a couple tech partners in the process. Given the scope of finding new and better ways to deliver as webcast or multicast event, such as is this case with hybrid events or fully virtually, for me it’s about a platform with a flexibility to support as an operator for a activity, or where you need scale it with a functional remote studio setup with team members to help the client deliver for the unique needs.

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Key items for me are:

• Flexibility of the platform for remote studio processes and production processes.
• Drive as much as we can to leverage cloud services for media production.
• Integration with video content transport tools like SRT, 3rd party partner tools.
• Guest features for interviews and capture.
• Fanwall.

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5- In your opinion, what makes easylive.io unique for a producer compared to other live production solutions/software?

To me, the value of easylive.io is really the breath of the platform. What I mean by this is the studio allows me to create high quality programs or events, be it live or not.

When you look at the features and functionality, you are getting a production level video mixer that allows you to build a studio virtually since easylive.io is 100% cloud-based, and after evaluating other so-said cloud solutions it was clear this solution works. The cost and availability to set up a similar onsite production environment would be in the thousands of dollars on-up. This solution really helps me evaluate where we see hardware needed to leverage for contribution streams into easylive.io or guest sties, or just fully run virtual all together.

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7- What have you already produced with the easylive.io solution? Do you have any examples?

We are working on several items right now. One fun example, it was an actual collaboration between me and the easylive.io team. Our F1 Quiz show highlighted features of easylive.io, and Never.no: https://youtu.be/1QpBwtTbzmA

In this setup I was the host, we had participants from around the world joining (Paris, California), used the fanwall, again, with many coming in from Paris to London, Canada, Southern California. It was fantastic and really demonstrated what you can do with easylive.io to support an effort.

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8- Why did you join easylive.io as a partner and certified producer?

For me in speaking about my experience over the past year working with the easylive.io team, testing and continued advance testing of features, and other activities it was win-win to join up as a partner and see how we can collaborate together.

In the end it’s really helping the clients see the value of delivering a good quality video production for webcasting be it corporate, e-sports, multistreaming events, etc.

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9- What do you offer as a complementary service to the easylive.io studio?

At Social180Group we are working with other key partners who also integrate with easylive.io as part of our services where we work with clients to develop a full broadcast setup for video sources, scene layouts for graphics, and more. Our aim is to really 1st listen to the client, and then go to work on building a solution that will help not only meet their needs but build long term relationships.

We also believe innovation is key for us for incorporating options with other vendors who could easily integrate with easylive.io using key services like SRT, Network connectivity, and more where we can help the clients evaluate the more complex setups.

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10- What do you think makes a live stream successful?

Planning is key, testing and validating, and listening to the needs of the clients. For me, another aspect is understanding your tools well that you plan to use. Then, I like to approach webcast productions with fellow team members as if we were that Formual 1 pit crew team that is expected to all work together as a team to deliver during a 2.7 sec stop. We have to work together well, use the tools we have been taught to use, and do it well for the team and our clients.

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Learn more about Social180Group

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