Speaking of Wealth #63 – Live Streaming with Joe Player

Jason Hartman is joined by internet marketing expert, Joe Player to talk about live streaming and broadcasting with the web. Live streaming media, or webcasting, is becoming more and more popular. It has many uses, including marketing or reviewing products, seminars, training, concerts, etc. The Japan tsunami was streamed live as it happened, bringing an eyewitness account of the natural disaster. Listen at www.SpeakingofWealth.com for more details. Joe talks about how well live streaming has worked for training and marketing events. He shares his first experience with live streaming, a small party that he streamed for a friend, which ended up with 123 viewers online to watch the party as it was going on. It’s a great example of how easy it can be to attract followers. Joe explains what is needed to stream an event successfully, including equipment, costs, an adequate length for a streamed event, and content distribution networks.

He explains how encoding software works and gives examples of some of the available software if using multiple cameras. Webcasts can be highly successful when produced well. Joe stresses not to be afraid to pitch a product, while educating and keeping guests entertained. There are many great applications and opportunities for live streaming, and many creative ways to produce a high quality stream with many followers.

Introduction: Speakers, publishers, consultants, coaches and info marketers unite. The Speaking of Wealth show is your road map to success and significance. Learn the latest tools, technologies and tactics to get more bookings, sell more products and attract more clients. If you are looking to increase your direct response sales, create a big time personal brand and become the go-to Guru, the Speaking of Wealth show is for you. Here is your host, Jason Hartman.

Jason Hartman: Welcome to the Speaking of Wealth Show. This is your host Jason Hartman, where we discuss profit strategies for speakers, publishers, authors, consultants, coaches, info marketers and just go over a whole bunch of exciting things that you can use to increase your business, to make your business more successful and more and more passive and more and more automated and more and more scalable. So, we will be back with a great interview. Be sure to visit us at speakingofwealth.com. You can take advantage of our blog, subscribe to the RSS feed and many other resources for free at speakingofwealth.com and we will be back with a great interview for you in less than 60 seconds. [Advertisement]

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Jason Hartman: It’s my pleasure to welcome Joe Player to the show. He has been an Internet marketer since way back in the old days in 1997 and he has been into a new thing recently, somewhat new thing for him and it is live streaming, you know, we’ve talked a lot about podcasting and obviously I love the world of podcasting, but sometimes it’s more fitting to have synchronous or live communication where you can actually stream right from an event, from a nightclub, from a restaurant, from a seminar, whatever it is and that is what we are going to talk about today is the area of live streaming or live broadcasting. Hey Joe, welcome, how are you?

Joe: I am doing great. Thanks for having me on the show. I’m really excited by doing this.

Jason Hartman: My pleasure. Now, where are you located today?

Joe: Right now, I am in beautiful Playa del Carmen Mexico.

Jason Hartman: Fantastic. I know you lived down there in Paradise most of the year, don’t you?

Joe: Yes, exactly. And I’ve been down here for a month already and it’s been great, I love it and I just, you know, it was a one year deal and decided to extend it another year.

Jason Hartman: Fantastic. Well, what is a live broadcast?

Joe: Well, a live broadcast is basically it’s just a form of – a different form of content delivery just like in the audio podcast or a video podcast but, you know, as the word says it’s live. So, there is, you know, whole less of chance for you to make some mistakes there because you are really trying to not make any mistakes because you are streaming live so there is no second take.

Jason Hartman: Right, right. Well, you know, certainly there is more than enough examples out there of people doing live broadcasting whether it’d be television, radio, whatever, people pull it off and you know, live has a certain something about it. There is a certain quality that makes it really, really interesting and real-time communication, so why would someone want to broadcast live though, you know, I can think of some of the reasons but, you know, you tell us some of the listeners, why would they want to broadcast live when they can just podcast instead?

Joe: Well, I think because it’s new, not many people have been joining a live event online these days, it’s billing you and I think it just gives you a better interaction with the viewers and I think those are pretty much, you know, the two reasons I see that people like the live events compared to other forms.

Jason Hartman: You know, one of the other things that I saw and it’s a, you know, it’s negative, but in a way it’s positive because it helps people is when the big Tsunami happened in Japan, people were streaming that live and I mean, if for emergency purposes or just to be in touch with what’s going on in the world, of course, but a lot of times the individual, they can do it much faster than the general news media because they were already there, so if you witness something, you can broadcast it and stream it live just immediately. What’s invovled in a live webcast?

Joe: Well, there is a few things are involved. First of all is you need a stream, so you need a connection compared to recording. So, you need a way to bring the feed directly from the camera to the viewers. Then you need equipment obviously cameras. It could be one camera or you could have different sets of cameras as well. And then you need a CDN, which is a content distribution network and the reason you need a CDN is you could stream to let’s say 10 people, but you can only stream to the amount of your bandwidth, your internet bandwidth. So, if you have a bandwidth of 1 Megabit per second and your streaming is uploading at 10 or 100 Kilobytes a second, you could only stream to 10 people. What the content network distribution does is it takes your one feed and their equipment is strong enough or have enough bandwidth to shoot it out to a 1000 people or 2000 people. So, it takes that restraint off of your bandwidth, you know.

Jason Hartman: In other words, all you’ve got to do is get the stream uploaded to their servers and then they syndicate it out to the rest of the world, so you could have millions of people watching even, you know, as long as they have the server capacity for it, right?

Joe: Exactly, very clear. So, you are basically streaming to one – it’s like streaming from one person and then they are taking it and then they are amplifying it to the rest of the world.

Jason Hartman: Right. So, what are some of the CDNs like Ustream?

Joe: Yes. There is few of them are Ustream, there is also one called a Livestream.com and there is a Justin.tv. There is a whole bunch of them, but I mean the most popular one these days if you are somewhat into the live streaming or played around or heard about it, you’ve probably heard of the Ustream.

Jason Hartman: Most definitely. So, any other examples of how someone might use a live broadcast besides what we’ve mentioned?

Joe: Yeah, I mean, there is all others, well, you mentioned quite a few. There is one that you didn’t mention I thought was which is very interesting and we will talk about it a little bit later on is marketing aspects, so how you could use live streaming to launch your product or market a product or just talk in, you know, general or do a product review and stuff like that. So, you know, I am in the Internet marketing, so for me the whole aspect of live streaming is all it has to do with marketing, but like you mentioned it could be done for training, it could be done for seminars, it could be done for streaming concerts, you name it, I mean, anything you think about and that people may watch or having the interest in watching you could do it through a live stream.

Jason Hartman: So, can you give the listeners some examples of some recent marketing events where a live webcast medium was used?

Joe: Yes, I sure can, like I’ve a few of them. The most interesting one that I’d like to mention was Brendon Burchard’s Total Product Blueprint product launch and Brendon did this – it was quite a year ago and obviously he got the idea from Mike Koenigs’ Main Street Marketing product launch. So, he liked the idea and he decided to recreate it and what he did was a four hour, so half a day, four hour live stream about his product. He had some guests over and talked about different things and you know, interviewed different guests and the whole thing lasted four hours. Now, according to Brendon, this was the most lucrative live stream event up to the – in the Internet marketing industry. He claims that he was able to sell for $500,000 during a four-hour period. Now, that’s not the – it’s not the most lucrative one ever that he is claiming that was the most lucrative in the half day because there is other people in the industry in the Internet marketing industry said have done this before, but a much longer and made more money, but put on more energy into it. So, coming back to Mike Koenigs, this was the first one that I recall in the Internet marketing world and this was a eight hour, that was a full day.

Jason Hartman: Wow.

Joe: And he had a whole bunch of guests on and again, you know, what you do is you talk about your product, you talk about the benefits, you go over the objections that people may have and then you have, you know, you have a friend over and might be in the Internet marketing world. So, it’s just it’s lot of – you put some entertainment in there and the fact also was having different guests means explodes your viewers because if you hire someone or not hire, but if you invite someone to speak at your live webinar, well they are going to probably mail their listing, they are going to be live at such a time, so you get their people involved, their followers that come and check out your product and so on. So it’s I do recommend that you have guests on and it just makes the whole thing more [unintelligible 9:48], but anyhow…

Jason Hartman: That’s the thing I think about live because there is an urgency to it, you know, when it’s podcasted, I mean, I love that media too but, you know, live has its place because there is an urgency. It’s like…

Joe: Exactly.

Jason Hartman: You got to tune in at this specific time. When the Superbowl is on, people watch it at that specific time. Yes, they could DVR it, they could tape it, [laughter] you know like they could watch the replays on the news, but they generally tune in live. There is definitely an urgency about it.

Joe: Yeah, exactly and especially if you want to put some scarcity in there for your product if it’s a product launch and you only have, you know, a small amount of product available or whatever then, you know, they have to be there and they need to listen and be ready to purchase. So, anyway talking about purchasing let’s come back to Mike Koenigs’ product launch. This is supposedly according to Brendon Burchard again, this one was the most lucrative one day webcast so far and then, you know, Andy Jenkins, the creator of Video Boss also did his own thing, but Andy is really into, you know, video and this is a stuff, so he went all out and believe this or not, he did a three full day, six hours per day, so for total of 18 hours of live streaming with multiple guests again for his product Video Boss. So, you know, these guys are doing it, definitely there is people coming and watching these things because I don’t think Andy would have lost three days of life doing live streaming if he wouldn’t have thought that or if he didn’t have the proof that people were coming and watching.

Jason Hartman: Sure, sure. And you know, we’ve talked about this before and many have, you know, with that like you look at the The Salty Droid’s website and so forth and a lot of these Internet marketing things are really highly acclaimed it seems like, but they may or may not be true. That’s the problem. Everybody needs to take them with a greater assault and you know, even if they only do half of that, well it’s still pretty good, [laughter] right.

Joe: Yeah, exactly.

Jason Hartman: You know, so…

Joe: Exactly.

Jason Hartman: So, cut the numbers in half and you are still doing pretty well.

Joe: Yeah, definitely. Afterwards, you know, just to give you an example, the first live stream I have done, I mean, there is proof behind it that people like it, I’ll just give you my first – very first example of live streaming. I was down in the bar one night and then someone invited me to a birthday party and you know, she’s telling me there will be a few people there and you know, I didn’t know what to offer as a gift. I was just starting to play around with live streaming so I said, “Why don’t I, you know, do you mind if I come into your party and live stream it so this way your friends back in Canada will be able to join us and celebrate with you while you are here in Mexico?” And she was like, “Really you are going to do?” I’m like, “Yeah, no problem, I’ve got the equipment and I’ll bring my stuff and I’ll do it.” So, I went over there, went to the party, I did not not mention anything prior to – I said, no Facebook or social media posting whatsoever. I set up at the party. There is only about – it’s about 20 people at the party and then once I was all set up and streaming, I said to people, “Okay, well, and then why don’t we start mentioning this on Facebook?” And this was the only form of social media we used and it was only about 10 of us that posted on our walls that there was a live party going on and believe it or not, we had a 145 people show up during the party online watching what’s going on and out of those 145 there was a 123 unique so it means a few of them, you know, probably, you know, logged off for a few minutes or whatever and then they came back, but still…

Jason Hartman: You know, that’s amazing, you know, what that reminds me of, Joe, is it reminds me of Seth Godin’s book, “Tribes.” Okay, one of his many books and in it, he talks about how everyone nowadays in the Internet marketing world can have a following, a Tribe, they can have fans and with that, he talks about a guy who used Twitter for four years and he was at the Sundance Film Festival in Salt Lake City and Park City, Utah, Park City actually and he was so sick and tired of waiting in line to get into the different bars and restaurants where all the parties were and so he went to an uncrowded bar that was not part of the film festival and he simply went there because – and so he could get a, you know, table and sit and relax and not be, you know, waiting in line forever, you know, especially in that cold weather in January. And he just tweeted, he just pull out his phone and got into his Twitter account and tweeted out that he was there and you know, avoiding the lines et cetera and a whole bunch of people came and it was a big party at this bar. Now, the owners must have loved him, right, [laughter].

Joe: Yeah.

Jason Hartman: Because he brought all those people into their establishment, but it’s like that can just happen on an instant and you know, you say, “Well, it just took one second to create that.” No, it really took four years. It was him having a tribe having a following, but yeah, I agree, that’s really amazing. It really is, how you can…

Joe: It is, especially…

Jason Hartman: So, he changed the whole dynamic with his stuff nowadays.

Joe: Yeah, I mean it’s crazy because considering that at the, you know, actually physically at the party, there was only about 20 of us and we have like 123 people watching us having a party, which is kind of ridiculous when you think about it, but [laughter] if it works, great. Another example I have, which is the first very very very first experience I had with live streaming was back in 2009 in Negril Jamaica and I went to this bar and they had a live streaming going up and I think I had never heard of live streaming prior to this experience and there is barely anyone at the party, you know, it’s probably 10 of us and I just started talking to the – you know, because I saw there was a camera and the computer and went up to him and said, “Hey, what’s, you know, what are you filming?” And then he explained to me that this was his job and he would go to from bar to bar so every day he had an agreement with different bar and he go there and then announce it and have the live streaming going on. Anyways it ends this wasn’t a good night, but he says, “Tomorrow if you want to come over at the other place we are having a Reggae band and it’s always jam-packed and it’s going to be a lot better than tonight.” So, I was there on my own, I didn’t have anything to do, so I show up the next day, next evening at this party and fair enough, there was like a 100 people there and the band was playing so, you know, I had met this guy that night before so I go back to his little station where he had his computer set up. And I am like, I am curious like, “How many people are watching this righ now.” And it was 600 people from all over the world watching this Reggae band at this little party and it was about 100 of us at the party and then 600 people watching us so…

Jason Hartman: That’s amazing. You know, that reminds me of a story I just heard on the news the other day and it was about a privacy issue, but there is apparently an app or a website that you can use on smartphones. And what it does is bars are setting up webcams in their establishments and they are using facial recognition software not to tell the names of people and identify them directly, but it could do that, you know, that’s the Google goggles debate and all of that kind of stuff, but what it’s doing is it’s showing the age and gender of the make up, it’s estimating the age and gender I guess or it’s maybe cross-referencing through a database after it does ID the person but not publishing the ID of the crowd at that bar and you know, of course privacy advocates are up in arms about this kind of stuff, but it’s a whole new world we are entering into. It’s really a, I mean, it’s good and bad, but that’s [laughter] another – another application of live streaming where it can go a lot further than what we are talking about on the show today.

Joe: Yeah, it’s and what you are talking about is just like, you know, I remember seeing this in movies where they just – sci-fi movies where they scan someone’s face walking down the street and they know exactly who he is and I think, you know, that sound crazy but I think technology is moving so fast and you know, these things are becoming reality [laughter].

Jason Hartman: It really is. It really is. That was in the Tom Cruise movie about Precrime. What was the name of that movie? I can’t think of it right now, but you know they had the Precrime division that would go and get people before they committed the crime, I remember that one.

Joe: Well, just to give you, you know, like I don’t want to get off subject, but just to tell you how these things are becoming daily things of life is that the new Android version – Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich has face recognition as your security feature and now instead of having a code or some…

Jason Hartman: Yeah, it looks at your face when you want to open your phone [laughter].

Joe: Right, you just – yeah, exactly. You look at your phone and then by your face recognition it unlocks your phone so…

Jason Hartman: I am dying to see if you can hold a life sized picture of the person in front of the phone and it would open just on a picture in a piece of paper.

Joe: Yeah.

Jason Hartman: That would be interesting to know. But okay, [laughter] hey, let’s move on, you know, we are getting little off topic.

Joe: [Laughter] Exactly.

Jason Hartman: So, you know, is there any particular suggestion as to the length of a live webcast?

Joe: Well, there is no criterias that are out there, but I recommend personally at least 90 minutes because 90 minutes gives you the time to engage your audience and if you want to have guests on there, I always suggest guests because that’s like I said earlier is the best way.

Jason Hartman: It’s viral, the guests make it viral.

Joe: Exactly, exactly. And 90 minutes you have people that come in late, you know, people that won’t listen to the whole thing, so I think 90 minutes you got the time to pretty much give out the message you wanted to give.

Jason Hartman: What kind of costs are involved in this?

Joe: Well, there is some costs like anything else, like any other technology. You got to realize the cost really went down because before just a few years ago, the whole live streaming or live webcasting was all based off of hardware. So, physical equipment that you had to plug in your camera and that would plug in to your computers and you would have one machine or the one box for video and the image and then you had another box, a mixer for the sound and it end up these things were like 10, 15, 20,000 per piece and it wasn’t affordable for most people for live streaming. Now, the whole thing of – it’s new game out there because of technology and now actually you could replace all those hardware equipments with softwares like, well there is obviously Ustream. Ustream is a CDN, a content distribution network, but it’s also a software. It’s kind of a two-in-one, but there is also softwares that are called the encoding softwares and what Ustream is, Ustream is a mix of both. It’s a CDN but it is also an encoding software. What the encoding software does is it takes your image and then transfers it into codes so it could be sent over the Internet. So, some of these softwares, the one I use and I prefer, it’s called Wirecast 4 and what that does is basically it’s kind of a I guess you could call it a mixing station or a TV, what you would call it? A TV studio. Yeah, that’s what it is. It’s a TV studio so you could do transitions between images, you could have multiple people on the same screen, so if you want to do like a type of conference so you have more than one guest on your show, you could be yourself with the two other guests, you could have two guests at once and have a PDF file showing if you wanted to do some training or if you want to show something, you could have picture showing up on there. So, really it’s a – it’s a studio that you could manage your live stream with. So, obviously if you are going to have this software, you are going to have someone that’s off the camera managing this because…

Jason Hartman: Because he is operating, yeah, you can’t do it on camera, so…

Joe: No, exactly.

Jason Hartman: So, either it’s Ustream.tv and the Ustream Watershed is free or it’s ad free and you pay per hour, right, per view, right?

Joe: Right, well…

Jason Hartman: Okay.

Joe: Okay. So, once you’ve got your encoding software and the only reason you need encoding software is if you wanted to do more than one camera, if you wanted to use nice effects like transitions like I just spoke and if you’ve got a simple one camera set up, then you could just go to Ustream or any other CDN and they already able to accept one camera. Once you get a little fancy and you get add-on stuff, that’s when you got to get the encoding software. So, if we go back to CDN, the cost of CDN is they usually charge you per – it’s viewer – dollars per viewer. So, let’s say that you have 10 viewers that listen for one hour so that’s going to cost you 10 hours of viewing and that’s all of them charged so…

Jason Hartman: That’s pretty much the same way conference calling companies work, yeah.

Joe: Okay. Yeah.

Jason Hartman: Same idea.

Joe: Exactly. So, but most of them are free or have a free version. So, Ustream.tv is completely free. However, they put advertising on the right side of your stream and once every now and then there is a little pop up – advertising pop up that’s going to show up just like YouTube at the bottom of your stream. So, the one way to get around that is to pay and then you could pay Ustream.tv to remove the ads. However, you cannot stream directly on a blank page. You’ll always have to stream through your profile on Ustream.

Jason Hartman: So, free for one camera on Ustream, Producer Pro, which is multiple cameras, a $199 and Producer Studio, $549, now those are the Ustream products. Then you’ve got Wirecast 4 for $449, Wirecast Pro 4 for $995 and there are others of course, but these are just some examples. Now, are those one-time fees or monthly ongoing fees?

Joe: No, those are one-time fees.

Jason Hartman: Alright, fantastic. Cameras sources, we talked about using PDFs, having digital whiteboard is very handy especially if you are doing training or lessons, classes and so forth. How complicated is it to get started with – with live streaming?

Joe: Well, it could be very complicated or it could be very easy. I mean, if you are just a one, you know, if you have computer skills and you want to do just a very basic set up, you know, you just want to get started and play around with one camera, I mean you could probably be up and running within like 25 minutes on Ustream.

Jason Hartman: Fantastic and one camera can just be your iPhone or your Android, right, I mean, I have the Ustream app on my iPhone, I can just stream, right?

Joe: Correct. This is something that was released recently and you can now stream directly through your phone if it’s enabled with a camera on it and also something that’s fairly new, that’s very interesting is you could stream directly on your Facebook page.

Jason Hartman: Wow.

Joe: So, now you could stream, you could be like you could be at a corner of the street and accident happens or some protest start and something and you could be like streaming from push of one bottom on your cellphone and then you…

Jason Hartman: And that’s with the Ustream app?

Joe: Correct and…

Jason Hartman: And it will stream right to your Facebook?

Joe: Facebook or to your webpage if you set it up that way. And another thing that’s fun is once you’ve done your streaming Ustream gives you the option of recording or keeping a copy of what you just streamed. So, it is very, very, very interesting.

Jason Hartman: When you keep that copy is it hosted at Ustream’s website or is it on your actual phone or device?

Joe: No, it’s streamed directly on the server, on the Ustream server.

Jason Hartman: So, they keep the copy for you then?

Joe: Correct.

Jason Hartman: That’s great, yeah.

Joe: Yeah.

Jason Hartman: So, it’s too long, it won’t fill up your phone’s memory.

Joe: Yeah, what happens real fast is if you recorded and then you are not live streaming live on Ustream on your profile, it will actually give people all your recorded videos so they could watch.

Jason Hartman: Fantastic. Any quick tips you want to give just to make webcast more successful?

Joe: Yeah, well I talk about recording. I do, you know, suggest first I do such as you record all your streams because you might want to use that in the future for offer it as bonuses or you know, sometimes you might just want to give this good information that you’ve got on there, then you want to give out or reproduce or whatever, so it’s always good to – the more content you have obviously the better it is, so always record your streams. Number two, when you are doing a live I suggest that you invite multiples guests like I mentioned that as well just for to make it viral. Number three, don’t be afraid if you are selling a product or a service, don’t be afraid to put in a little bit here and there. I mean, it’s like the shopping that work, you know, [laughter] you got the reason you are doing is to sell something so don’t be afraid to pitch and you do want to have some fun stuff on there and give them some good information because you want to educate your listeners and you want to keep them captivated.

Jason Hartman: And good Internet connection of course.

Joe: Oh! Yes, definitely.

Jason Hartman: Got to have that. Got to have that.

Joe: Yeah.

Jason Hartman: Well, this has been very interesting to learn about streaming and its applications and how it can benefit one in their business. Give out your website if you would and tell people where they can learn about what you do?

Joe: Sure, I appreciate that. They could check out live4cast.com, which is a new project of mine that I will be launching on June 1st and this is mainstream product, it’s live and I am trying to raise $5,000, 30 days for Richard Branson’s Virgin Unite Foundation and $5 of every live is going to be going to that foundation.

Jason Hartman: Cool. Well, thanks so much, Joe.

Joe: All right. Thanks for having me. It’s been great, talk to you soon.

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The Speaking of Wealth Team


Transcribed by: Renee’