StreamYard CEO Geige Vandentop (StreamYard Connect Ep14)

StreamYard Connect Ep14

▶️ Go Live with STREAMYARD: https://LivestreamUniverse.com/StreamYard

• Interview with StreamYard CEO Geige Vandentop on StreamYard’s growth in 2019 and live streaming in 2020
• StreamYard giveaway: One year of the basic plan
• 2020 Predictions from Chris Curran, Chetachi A. Egwu, Coach Jennie, Chris Krimitsos

About StreamYard Connect

StreamYard Connect highlights the different ways talented professionals use live streaming to communicate with customers, connect to new career opportunities and attract candidates to fill job openings. Plus we cover news and technology updates…and the production techniques that power successful live broadcasts. Hosted by Ross Brand and sponsored by StreamYard, a browser-based app that makes it easy to produce professional-looking livestreams. Join us twice a month on  Wednesdays at 2pm ET for StreamYard Connect. For season two, we are now multistreaming on Facebook Live, Twitch, Periscope/Twitter and two LinkedIn destinations (Ross’ LinkedIn profile & StreamYard’s LinkedIn page).

Connect with Ross and StreamYard on LinkedIn for live shows and updates:

▶️ ROSS BRAND on LINKEDIN: https://LinkedIn.com/in/rossbrand
▶️ STREAMYARD on LINKEDIN: https://LinkedIn.com/company/StreamYard

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Transcribed by otter.ai with edits by Ross Brand. The times in the transcript match most closely to the audio version of StreamYard Connect, which can be found below in the Spreaker podcast player.

Ross Brand 0:00
Hey gang, welcome to StreamYard Connect. I’m Ross Brand. And we’re glad to have you with us for our holiday special. We’re going to do things a little bit differently today. Instead of the usual format, we’re going to talk a little bit about StreamYard and how things have gone in 2019, what’s to come in the future, and we’re so glad you could join us for this holiday edition. You’ll notice a little bit different branding throughout the show cards in honor of the festivities.

Ross Brand 0:31
On the agenda today, in just a few minutes, we’ll talk to Geige Vandentop. He’s the CEO of StreamYard. I’m sure he’s very familiar to most most people who watch this show. We will talk to him about how things have gone throughout 2019, what’s coming up in 2020, and what are some of the different ways that you can benefit from using StreamYard as you go forward in building your brand and your business, and having a good time creating content online. Geige is good enough to bring a special giveaway for one viewer. So we’ll have a question to determine who that who that will be. And that will only be during the live show. So if you’re joining us live, stay tuned, because after the interview, we will have that question and do the giveaway and we’ll also do some predictions and some other things as well. But we’re so glad you can join us. Happy Holidays and thanks for being a part of the last show of 2019 for StreamYard Connect.

Ross Brand 1:39
As we mentioned, our guest is Geige Vandentop. He cohosts the StreamYard Town Hall every Sunday night at 9pm Eastern, co-founded StreamYard with Dan Briggs, and also participated in the 2020 predictions blog post that I did. So we’ll get Geige’s thoughts on what’s to come here, as we approach the New Year.

Ross Brand 2:07
Just a reminder, you can go to a multitude of destinations with StreamYard, including Facebook Live, LinkedIn Live, YouTube, Periscope, which puts you on Twitter, and our newest destination is Twitch. In fact, the show is live right now on Twitch in addition to Facebook, LinkedIn, and Periscope / Twitter. And while I’m not going to run down all the destinations again because it gets a little confusing, just so you know, there’s a graphic here and I will share this again on social media. You can pick your favorite platform, your favorite channel within that platform, and enjoy watching the shows. We take advantage of StreamYard’s native multi-streaming capability. It’s really amazing to have a platform and an app that not only can you create the content and produce the content, but you can stream to multiple destinations.

Ross Brand 3:10
Once again, it is the Holiday Edition. And with that, let’s get to our guest. Geige Vandentop is the CEO of StreamYard, well-known I’m sure to most of our audience. Geige, it’s been a phenomenal year for for stream yard without any doubt. Can you talk about how you pictured 2019 when the year was starting, compared to where things have gone as we’re sitting here with just a couple of weeks ago in the year?

Geige Vandentop 3:41
Yeah, absolutely. And I’m glad I’m glad to be here. Thanks for inviting me onto the holiday special. I’m sure it’s gonna be a fun one. But yeah, 2019 was an interesting year for sure. It definitely started with more humble beginnings, some sometimes people are surprised when I when I say it, but this trajectory for 2019 is actually somewhat close to what Dan and I planned, believe it or not. We don’t usually look at things too far ahead. We sort of work week to week and then every week, Dan and I sort of recalibrate and talk to each other about it like, “Okay, how many new broadcasters do we have this week? How many would we like to have this week? How can we make sure we’re hitting our goals? And if we’re not hitting them, what can we do to change that?” And we’ve done that every single week in 2019 and then also the weeks in 2018 when we first we started towards the end of 2018. But every single week, we did that.

Geige Vandentop 4:36
The main thing that surprised me was the community aspect of StreamYard. Like when we first started, what StreamYard looks like today, that part I didn’t expect, so I sort of thought of StreamYard as just a tool. It’s just a tool that people use and that the people using the tool would be disconnected from one another. It’s just they have their own communities, they do their own thing and StreamYard is just a tool that they use for that. So the part that really surprised me was the community aspect of StreamYard, how people sort of see StreamYard almost like a platform itself and a place to build a community around. That part has been really exciting for us. I can’t thank people enough for that, because it just makes it way more fun to work on. I feel like our community is our team behind us almost. And it makes it makes working on things really worthwhile.

Ross Brand 5:26
Well, when you talk about the community, the community has been almost a partner kind of in gearing, where your development goes when it comes to new features and platforms. Can you talk a little bit about how the community maybe influenced the development of StreamYard from what we saw at the beginning of the year to what we have today?

Geige Vandentop 5:52
Yeah, absolutely. And for anyone that’s been in the community for that long, first of all, let us let us know that if you’ve been here for that long, but if you’ve been, if you’ve been part of the stream yard community for 2019, or all the 2019, or most of 2019, you probably agree that StreamYard is almost the community’s product, like we followed it pretty closely, right? I think we didn’t start our Town Halls until January. But even before that, Dan and I were pretty present in our community and listening to what people wanted. But almost every single feature we added came directly from requests from our users. We always made sure that we filter those requests through our three pillars, which we always talk about, which are ease of use, stability and professional streams. But if the request met that criteria and wasn’t something that was too difficult for new people or something that would cause the stream to look unprofessional, we we would add it and prioritize it accordingly. So I guess it probably started with people wanting dynamic overlays was probably the first request we added and it just continued from there adding periscope as a destination. I’m struggling to remember everything that’s been added. But I think…

Ross Brand 7:04
I think Twitch as a destination, the newest one was a big, big request for a long time, right?

Geige Vandentop 7:09
Yeah, absolutely. Backgrounds. Oh, one big one, one big one was intro clips and outro clips, that one was something people really championed for was we really need a way to quickly play a clip during a stream to introduce the show. So that was something that came from the community. But I think I would have a harder time thinking of a feature we added that wasn’t {laughter} requested from the community than the other way. So almost every feature that StreamYard has came from the user base and community asking for it.

Ross Brand 7:39
Well, one of the things you’ve heard me say, a number of times since we started talking at the beginning of the year is every time you add a new feature, and you do it fairly frequently, they all just seem to work out of the box, and I just discovered a new wrinkle for the scrolling text. I had no idea you could add scrolling text while you also had a banner at the same time.

Geige Vandentop 8:01
Yeah, absolutely.They showed up separate from the banners.

Ross Brand 8:04
Yeah. A lot of times I convert a banner into scrolling text, like I might show it as a banner first, and then add it from time to time as a reminder as scrolling text, but I didn’t actually know you could keep up. So this is terrific. I mean, you’ve got like your own little news channel here now with the banner identifying the guests or the topic and the scroll with a call to action or what’s coming up later.

Geige Vandentop 8:31
Yeah, but great, I’m glad it’s popular. To be honest, we surprised ourselves, like sometimes something that Dan and I have added is old enough that we get surprised once in a while. It’s like, “Oh, I forgot we did it like that. So that’s funny to hear.”

Ross Brand 8:43
Yeah. So, talking about surprises, have you been surprised at all by the content that people are creating, whether it’s some type of livestream, whether it’s a way they’re using the platform that you didn’t expect? What are some things that have jumped out at you about the content being created on the platform this year?

Geige Vandentop 9:05
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. That’s a good one. Because when Dan and I first started, we were expecting it to be mostly marketing folks and social media folks that would be interested in the tool, but the type of content we see is so so varied now, which is that makes it fun to is seeing how many different types of people can use the product. And so yeah, some of the ones that are my personal favorites are authors, we have a lot of authors that use the tool. They’ll do live writing sessions together and sort of help people that are aspiring to be an author. Learn more about what the process is for brainstorming your book and working on the book. So there’s a there’s a whole community around that, which I didn’t even know that existed, which is cool. There’s some really random ones like channels on like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster. There’s several of them. We have several Bigfoot channels, which is interesting. And then just all kinds of stuff. So people that played dungeons and dragons and stream it.

Geige Vandentop 10:07
And then, of course, the more typical stuff, which is just about your business and people answering questions about their business and their product and why it’s a good fit for their viewership. But pretty much, pretty much every subject I can imagine we almost have someone, I would guess that we could find someone’s streaming about it. {Not clear}

Ross Brand 10:27
And I guess another thing perhaps you didn’t think of, I don’t know for sure, was that people would actually use the platform or use StreamYard to create content that wasn’t being broadcast live. For instance, an easy way to get a guest on and record an interview for a podcast, or record a guest or another voice that’s going to be heard in a YouTube video, or to create content for internal distribution within a company. Those are some things I probably wouldn’t have thought of when I first saw StreamYard

Geige Vandentop 11:04
Yeah, that’s a good point. That’s true. I didn’t anticipate recording being such a such a popular use case. And it sort of happened through YouTube since YouTube allowed those unlisted broadcasts. So before, we now have a recording feature, but before the recording feature, a lot of people were using StreamYard to simply do an unlisted youtube broadcast, and then use that recording in other places. And yeah, that was not something we anticipated. It was also something that I had started using for making tutorial videos for StreamYard. That’s how I went about making those tutorial videos. And then, as the community spoke up about it, it became apparent that lots and lots of people, not only did they want a live stream, sometimes they wanted to just basically do a live take of something, whether that was an interview or even just them doing a broadcast but something that they wanted to do one long take and then edit it afterward, was a very common use case. And that’s why we ultimately added recording, but yeah, I did not anticipate it.

Ross Brand 12:01
Yeah, it was from your tutorials where I got the idea that I could have a graphic next to me as I’m talking, as I’ve used throughout this show. And you have any of the ability to change those graphics, all using overlays, which is just a fabulous, fabulous feature. Here’s an interesting question that I had, and there have been a lot of browser based live streaming tools that have come along over the years. And while the features may have improved, or the usability, or the stability, none of them have really seemed to hit the level of high quality audio and video that StreamYard has to where people would use it to record a podcast, even if they weren’t live or to record a YouTube interview. What is the difference between how StreamYard works, that it’s able to achieve this amazing level of stability as a platform where you can bring on up to six guests and it doesn’t degrade. Because the only thing I can think of up till this point for everyday consumers is Google Hangouts on Air, which doesn’t exist anymore. That was a fairly stable platform, good quality audio and video, you could bring on a number of guests. But it was sort of clunky and dated. This is sort of the first modern tool I can think of. What makes the difference for StreamYard versus other options?

Geige Vandentop 13:37
Yeah, so that’s very high praise. So I appreciate that. I’m sure there’s lots of great apps out there. So I’m sure there’s definitely other contenders particularly in like the webinar space and things like that. But the main reason for it is just it’s something we’ve really prioritized, right? Its stability is very important to us because, there’s nothing more stressful than when you like, so when you’re doing a live stream it’s already stressful, right? You have to do your prep, you have all your materials prepared, and you have to make sure your guest is ready. There’s a lot going on when you do a live stream. So we wanted to make sure that we lower as much stress as possible for the person. You have enough to worry about, you shouldn’t have to worry about, you know, random tech issues and stuff like that. So it’s very important to us. And then on top of that Dan and I are also very familiar with video. So we have a long background in video. And lots of other tools use third party services to run their video infrastructure, and Dan and I run our own video infrastructure and really dive deep into it. So we’re constantly improving it. We’re constantly monitoring how we can improve things for people on poor connections, how how we can optimize things for people that have good connections. And since we run our own infrastructure, we have the ability to do that versus other tools that just might be using a third party service to run that. And we also stay really on top of the browsers and changes with them as well. So we’re constantly seeing what’s happening with Safari and Chrome and even sometimes talking to those developers. So that helps us sort of stay on top of the game and make sure we have a stable as a platform as we possibly can.

Ross Brand 15:16
We’re talking with StreamYard CEO Geige Vandentop. It’s our holiday special. We have a giveaway that Geige is going to offer coming up in a little bit. We also want to get to your questions. So stay with us, throw your questions in the chat. And we’ll bring some of those on for Geige as well. I assume you’re okay with taking a few questions from the StreamYard community.

Geige Vandentop 15:39
Of course.

Ross Brand 15:40
When you look ahead to 2020, are there certain trends with live streaming or with the platforms where we live stream to that you’re keeping an eye on and then maybe savvy users should keep an eye on as they develop their content strategy in their marketing and their distribution, and all that kind of stuff as we move into 2020?

Geige Vandentop 16:04
Yeah, absolutely you you might be more qualified than me to answer that. {Laughter} I always learn things when I watch your show. There’s always surprises that I was like, “I didn’t know about that.” But yeah, so the main thing I’ve taken away is live streaming has now been around for a pretty long time. So I’m going to get some of these years wrong but I think YouTube lives been around almost a decade I think in 2008 they did like their first stream. It wasn’t publicly available or anything but I think U2, it was like U2 the band did a live stream through YouTube in like 2008. And then hangouts was obviously pretty early and then Twitch I think was Justin TV back then was 2011. So I feel like the space is sort of maturing in the same way that before live video, there was a video, the same way that video matured, especially when you’re seeing it’s becoming a part of every platform. So LinkedIn added live streaming. Twitter is sort of adapting periscope to be more closely integrated with Twitter itself. So all these big platforms now have live streaming as a core component. There’s always going to be interesting stuff. So like VR, like virtual reality is an interesting thing. But

Ross Brand 17:18
Yeah.

Geige Vandentop 17:19
I think the important part is your audience and your content, right? So there’s always going to be exciting shiny things, but I think the most important part is live streaming is just a tool like everything else. I think it’s a particularly effective tool for creating your content because it’s quick, it’s very transparent. People trust you because it’s happening right now. You can’t, you know, hide things or cover things up because it’s happening right now. That’s not to say that other forms of content creation aren’t great, like static video’s great, blogs are great. It’s all good stuff. So I think the most important part for you heading into 2020 is, sure, keep an eye on some of the interesting things out there, especially other platforms, but I would only worry about it if it’s relevant to your audience. So sure, like there might be cool stuff like Tick Tock but if your audience isn’t on Tick Tock I wouldn’t be worried about Tick Tock. You know, I think if maybe if your audience is like teenagers, then maybe it’s interesting, but I would listen to the people viewing your content.

Ross Brand 18:19
Right.

Geige Vandentop 18:19
And make decisions based on that and decide whether or not something’s interesting based on what your viewers are telling telling you. So we follow that advice ourselves, so that we decide what to add to StreamYard not based on sort of the coolest tech trends of which there are a lot, we do it based on practical viewing of what people are asking for. So I would I would give that advice to people that are doing broadcast. What do your viewers want? If you’re a business, where is your audience going to be watching you? I pay attention to those things over the live streaming trends, but I’m sure there’s exciting ones.

Ross Brand 18:53
Right.

Geige Vandentop 18:53
I’d be curious, which one are you most interested in?

Ross Brand 18:56
Wow, well, one thing I’m interested in, it’s kind of off the beaten path a bit. But I’m interested if Pinterest will become the last of the — I don’t know if you consider Pinterest a major social network, but it’s the closest to that top tier of of any I can think of that hasn’t added live video yet. So I’m curious. It’s not as social in terms of the overall network as some of the other apps, so I’m just curious if that’s something where they’ll also take that leap into live video, because you’re seeing all these different platforms still continue to prioritize it, even as some people have maybe pull back a little bit from time to time and say, “Gee, I wonder, is this worth all the time?” But the platforms, the brands, don’t seem to be backing off from it at all. So creators seem to be going strong in the content. The platforms that deliver that content to people seem to want it.

Geige Vandentop 20:00
Pinterest would be — I forgot about Pinterest. Pinterest would be a great one. And that’s another I didn’t mention when you asked about people using StreamYard, but that’s another one that’s common that I really enjoy is people that sort of do group crafting.

Ross Brand 20:10
Right.

Geige Vandentop 20:11
They’ll be sort of group people knitting together and live streaming it. So stuff like that I’m sure would be good for Pinterest. I guess it’s also good for all kinds of things like cooking as well.

Ross Brand 20:21
Yeah, and all that stuff is awesome for Twitch.

Geige Vandentop 20:24
Yeah.

Ross Brand 20:24
People love to watch people doing different things on Twitch. One thing you can speak to, I don’t know whether you will want to do it or not. But one thing you certainly must have a little insight on are some features that might be coming along in 2020. Are there any that you can share with us?

Geige Vandentop 20:46
Yeah, I’m going to keep the cards relatively close to my chest, but I will say that there’s a good chance that one of the most commonly requested features — so if you if you attend our town halls and you are active in the community — one of the big ones that people constantly ask for will be coming soon, possibly before 2020. Going into 2020, our main focus is just doubling down on what we’re already doing. So features that make things easier. And you might see that in the form of new integrations, like maybe we’ll integrate with some sort of multiple podcast providers to immediately take your audio from your live stream and send it out to a hosting company. I’m not promising that, but that’s something we’re considering. So anything that makes broadcasts easier. Stability is also huge for us. So we want to really improve things for people. So if you’re close to your router, or you’re plugged in directly, you’ll have a great experience with StreamYard, but we want to help people that sometimes you just can’t get close to your router. So we want to improve things for those people. So people that don’t have great internet connections, we want to add additions to our infrastructure that makes it easier for those people to still get a really high quality output feed, despite them not having a good connection. So that’s something that you’ll see in 2020. Hopefully, more platforms. Aspects of that are a bit out of our hands. But we would certainly like to add more platforms. We’re really excited about LinkedIn Live. We hope that they add the ability to schedule and the ability to bring in comments. As soon as they add that we would love to add that into StreamYard because LinkedIn live, I think, has huge potential. And I was really excited when they released their live streaming platform. And I hope they continue to add features to it. And then, of course, professional streams. So you’ll see aspects of that as well. Things that make your streams look even better. So I apologize if those aren’t specific enough for you, but hopefully, I can redeem myself because there is there is a feature that people will be really, really excited about coming extremely soon.

Ross Brand 22:52
Well, it sounds like there’s a lot coming down the line that we can look forward to. Because ultimately, it’s about how the feature benefits you as the user more than perhaps what it’s going to be called or the exact way it’s going to be rolled out.

Ross Brand 23:08
Let’s say a quick hello to people watching on LinkedIn Live, which is the first destination we went to. Kyle Bondo. I see Beth Granger. Thank you all for being here. Raj is here. Nancy, Jeffrey Fitzgerald. Thank you all. Jason, Rodrigue. Great to see you. And on the other platforms, let’s see who we have: Gail Turner, Dave Gatten, Dan Norton, Jim Fuse. Thank you all so much for being here. Barb is here, Sarah, Prophet Winston, Brad Friedman. Wow. Andrew, thank you all for joining us. What questions do you have if you have any for Geige? Vivian asks, “Will you share a roadmap of the new features?”

Ross Brand 23:53
I think you (Geige) gave us about as close as you will for now but thank you for the question, Vivian. Good to see Terry Johnson and Felisha as well. {Laughter}

Geige Vandentop 24:03
I will say part of the reason I won’t share a specific roadmap, but part of that is we don’t know exactly what it’s going to be because we do listen to you guys pretty closely right? So some of those decisions will happen based on our feedback in 2020. So based on what people are telling us on our Town Halls and based on what people are saying and community group, and based on just what’s happening in the space around us, is how a lot of those decisions will be be made. So I honestly don’t know all of them.

Ross Brand 24:29
And if you haven’t started hosting your show yet, it’s a great time to do so. You can just go to StreamYard.com/Ross, StreamYard.com/Ross, and you can get started for free. You can stream unlimited, almost unlimited, 20 hours a month, a lot of streaming on the free plan, and then also you can save when you upgrade to the (paid) plans. And with that, Geige, should we do the giveaway?

Geige Vandentop 24:59
Sure.

Ross Brand 24:59
You came up with an interesting question. And I’ll let you roll it out. Or first, I guess, tell everybody what you are giving away.

Geige Vandentop 25:10
Yeah, that’s probably {Laughter} a good choice. So I’ll be giving away a year of StreamYard, the StreamYard Basic Plan. If you’re already a paid user of StreamYard, you’ll just get it in credit. So yeah, that would be the giveaway, a year of the StreamYard Basic Plan. And then, are you saying the question Ross? Or you want me to say it?

Ross Brand 25:28
No, go ahead.

Geige Vandentop 25:28
So the question will be, what was the month and year of the very first broadcast that was ever done on StreamYard? And I’ll just give it away to the first person that answers it correctly, or as close to as I can. I might not get the timing perfect on platform, so someone that’s close the first will win.

Ross Brand 25:49
I’m going to actually take that off of the scrolling text so it’s easier to see for people who might be watching on mobile. In what month and year did StreamYard go live for the first time? Enter that into the comments. And we will give the award to the first person who gets that question correct. Geige, thank you so much for the time. Thank you so much for this wonderful platform that we’ve enjoyed using. You’re going to come back on and present formally to the winner in just a few minutes. So stick with us. We will stay live for a bit longer as we go into some post show. But thanks so much, Geige. It’s great getting to know you and great using the platform throughout 2019.

Geige Vandentop 26:37
Absolutely. Thanks so much. Thank you all for using it and thank you specifically Ross, you’ve been here since like the very beginning. So it’s been very cool seeing how things have unfolded with with that, and I appreciate everything you do.

Ross Brand 26:49
Well thank you so much Geige. It’s great to have you on and it’s great to talk to you again. If you haven’t entered an answer, throw an answer in the chat: In what month and year did StreamYardgo live for the first time? Can’t wait to see what Geige and Dan, the cofounders of StreamYard, come up with next.

Ross Brand 27:10
And as we go into some Post Show, we will just quickly remind you that we have other shows through the StreamYard platform, produced and delivered from StreamYard including the StreamYard Town Hall where Geige and Dan go live every Sunday night, 9pm Eastern, 6pm Pacific. You can watch that on Facebook Live, YouTube, Periscope and LinkedIn also, and I believe they’re going to add Twitch as well. Not positive, but I think they’re going to go live on Twitch as well. Also Rob Balasabas goes live in the StreamYard community group. If you haven’t joined that group on Facebook, do to join it. It’s a great place to connect with other StreamYard users, learn more about the platform. You can find guests, you can get asked to come on another show, you can find a cohost. Just a great place for networking and connecting with the StreamYard community and staying on top of the latest developments with StreamYard. So Rob goes live once a week. He does interviews with different StreamYard users. That’s in the StreamYard community group. And then come back here in 2020. We will be going live every other week. We will be off for the rest of this year with Christmas next week and then New Year’s the following week. But we’ll be going live every other week with StreamYard Connect, and going live on Facebook, LinkedIn, on Twitch and on Periscope. That’s every other Wednesday, 2pm Eastern, for StreamYard Connect. And that wraps up the last episode — Episode 14 — of 2019 and StreamYard Connect, but stay right there. We’ll be back in one second with some post show.

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