2016 Asia-Pacific Stevie Awards Gold Winner - BRiN
Company: BRiN, Sydney, Australia
Category: Award for Innovation in Business Information or Application Websites
Entry Title: The World’s First 24-hour Small Business Channel (online TV)
Created by Dale Beaumont in 2009, Business Blueprint® is the world's most forward-thinking business education company and have assisted over 100,000 business owners around Australia, New Zealand and Singapore. We have hosted hundreds of events and produced over a thousand training videos, helping businesses achieve significant and sustained success as a result.
Whilst this is all very impressive, we weren’t satisfied and set ourselves the challenge of assisting 1 million entrepreneurs globally through business education by utilising the latest innovations in technology.
With this in mind, on 1 September 2015 we launched a game-changing business education website - the World’s First 24-hour Small Business Channel (online TV).
The live streaming service is free, simultaneously broadcasts into 177 countries, and makes business education accessible to millions of people around the world, with hours of training sessions from 150 of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs and experts. 6000 people logged in and watched the opening night, making it one of the biggest business events ever to occur in Australia.
15,000 people subscribed to the channel in its first month, and as of March 2016 there are 23,000 subscribers from 177 countries, averaging 300 - 1000 people viewers per day. Asia Pacific is one of our top viewing regions, with the most users heralding from Australia, India and the Philippines.
To offer this service a multitude of innovations in design, content, use of media, and interactivity have had to be strategised and executed.
Our first challenge in the creation of the online platform was to work out how to effectively run a TV channel 24 hours a day on a budget of less than $500,000 a year - 1% of what it would normally cost to run a TV channel.
This involved creating a fully soundproofed TV studio on site at our premises on the Northern Beaches of Sydney, purchasing and installing appropriate lighting, building a stage and interchangeable sets, and even learning how to apply makeup!
The process of developing this innovation also involved looking at all the video streaming platforms out there, and finally settling on uStream.
Because we couldn’t afford to hire all the staff required to capture and edit the content, we innovated and worked out a way to get three or four computers editing, switching, rendering and uploading and moving files through an innovative and technology enabled production line.
We also have one full time and one part time editor in the Philippines who can access the studio remotely even if no one there - something we’re not aware of other business education or even TV channels doing.
We have also developed an app (currently testing) to distribute the 300 (and growing!) hours of content we have amassed so people can choose what they watch, when they want to watch it in a similar manner to platforms such as Netflix.
The app offers a number of innovations in interactivity including providing users the ability to click on things of interest - add them to a playlist so they can view these at anytime they want.
Another innovative feature of the app is that if you are watching a video on your computer, you can seamlessly move to your car and the system will switch to audio only so you can listen instead of view, and it will remember exactly where you’re up to.
We are extremely proud of our innovation in an education/training website, app and platform, and of the fact we are well on our way to fulfilling our dream of assisting 1 million entrepreneurs globally through business education, and to have achieved it on a shoestring budget. See: http://businessblueprint.com . Registration and viewing is free.
Supporting Materials:
http://www.businessblueprint.com
https://businessblueprint.wistia.com/medias/2s9gzg4chv
http://www.businessblueprint.com/stream