LiveKrowd

Inspiration

LiveKrowd was originally created to run virtual concerts for hospitals to boost morale of medical workers and patients while they battle COVID-19. Here's a short video on how we started. After growing our average viewing time to 300% and invited a cultural musician to perform via live streaming, we saw the potential in our platform to empowers cultural institutions with their artists to be booked to perform via private live streaming to anywhere in the world to showcase their cultural heritage.

What it does

LiveKrowd is like Airbnb, but instead of booking rooms, you book global artists to perform via private live streaming. This includes folk or traditional musicians and singers who could live stream from their country to a foreign country to showcase their cultural music heritage. During the live stream performances, the audience can make song requests, song dedications, live chat, and even send virtual applause. Our focus is on interaction and engagement. Our cultural artists are able to talk and interact with the audience while performing thus enhancing their knowledge and experience about one's musical culture. Here's an actual cultural live streaming we did.

How do we preserve cultural institutions

We empower cultural institutions to extend their performances globally via private live streaming (not public live streaming). Clients such as venues, events owners (weddings, festivals, conferences) and business establishments (bars, restaurants, cultural institutions) could book artists performing at an overseas cultural institution to perform via live streaming. Thus, the cultural institutions could provide the live streaming facilities (such as live streaming studio, stage, equipment, etc) that artists need to produce a high-quality (not at-home virtual gig) private live streaming performance.

What is the difference between public and private live streaming

Generally, private live streaming offers immense interaction and engagement between artist and audience while it's virtually impossible to have any interaction in public streaming due to large-crowd size. Thus, most people do not value public live streaming as they can't see the difference between being live and being recorded. However, the value is in private live streaming where clients booked artists to perform only for the client. Please view the side-by-side comparison here.

How we built it

It was built with Javascript, PHP, MySQL, Linux, RTMP/RTSP servers. In our product roadmap is our own streaming software for artists to stream to global venues, events and business establishments.

Challenges we ran into

People do not understand the difference between public and private live streaming and assuming they are both the same. And people usually judge us based on number of views. Average viewing time (aka viewer retention or stickiness) is the best metric that would do justice to a live stream instead of the number of views that only capture a min of 30 seconds of audience retention.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Winning the Univeral Music Group (UMG) competition after barely 1.5 months into our operation. We grew our viewing time by 222% and total views by 86% in our first two live streams. Subsequently, our average viewing time increased to as high as 300%. Here's the [graph of our traction].(https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EpWjWytOFY5AjCXEnr0t_1kv2xWUvO2y/view)