New interface:
We put a lot of emphasis on share and embed functionality in our live streaming product (Connect). It’s the best way to drive viewership and engagement.
This is especially true for sharing video. Reseach has found that video on social media generates 1200% more shares than text and images combined. Remember Mum in a Chewbacca mask? That video was shared over 2.5 million times on Facebook in 48 hours.
Public-i wanted to make our own sharing tool easier for viewers to use. Last week we released an update that simplifies the interface for sharing webcasts. You can now easily share a specific agenda point on social media or via email.
Facebook Share:
We’ve improved the Facebook controls too. When you share a full meeting, it now appears as a video in the Facebook timeline – without loading a new page. Bear in mind that no index points or slides are shown in this video. To get the full Connect experience the user will need to click on the link that will open in a new tab.
If you share a specific index point, it will now show a card with the link to the full webcast. This will also start at the correct time.
Embed player:
Like Youtube and other streaming services, you can embed the Connect video player on your own site. You can do this by copying the share embed code from the player or the admin area and pasting it into the code of your site. Here is an example of what it looks like:
Webcast Available Here : https://edinburgh.public-i.tv/core/portal/webcast_interactive/213130
At the moment it only shows the video. We’ll update this in future to show captions, agenda points and maybe slides. Users can still get the full experience by clicking on the link at the top of the video.
Embedding the player on WordPress:
WordPress is a very popular platform for making websites or simple blogs. In fact, our own site is built with WordPress.
To embed the payer in there, you just need to copy the embed code from the admin area (Action/Share player link) and select the Text edit mode of your post and paste the code in the relevant place.
Now, if your site or blog is hosted for free on wordpress.org or wordpress.com, then unfortunately it is not possible to embed a webcast. This is due to security restrictions on these sites. We have asked WordPress to enable it and whitelist our site but this might not be feasible for some time due to the size of our organisation.