The season of sports live streaming is here. As we stand in the mid-way of the largest Football tournament, the FIFA World Cup 2022, sports live streamers are getting busier day by day, delivering live streams for all the matches of the grand tournament.
But, for sports live streamers, engaging with the viewers is as crucial as the quality of the stream itself. It is a general observation that the engagement of live streamers with their audience persuades viewers to stay a bit longer on the platform while increasing overall viewer satisfaction. Live Chatting and Polling are two important viewer engagement features that you must have on your live streaming platform. In this blog, we will discuss how you can use these features to increase your overall viewership.
Benefits of Live Chats and Polling in Sports Live Streaming
If you are a regular sports live streamer, you must have adopted different techniques to make your live chat as interactive as possible. But if you are missing out on live chat and polls, then you might be in trouble soon!
With the advent of watch parties and stream-along, people have now got habituated to chatting while watching live streaming. Enabling the live chat and poll features provide multiple benefits to live streamers. Let’s take you through some of those benefits:
Boost Engagement
The live chat and poll features keep your audience constantly engaged with your live chat. Since they type the chat responses and answer the poll questions, they do not get bored any time in the entire chat. Also, they can get to know the perspective of other participants, which encourages them to keep plugged in for a long.
Increase Time Spent on Your Platform
When you are adding live chat and polling features to your live stream, you are actually giving them one more reason to visit your platform and stay there for a longer period of time. Studies have shown that people remain equally interested in knowing the opinions of their fellow viewers as compared to viewing the actual live stream. So, it is obvious that they will spend more time on your platform, as they will find two points of interest.
Increase Subscriber Retention
In today’s times, when OTT churn is a big cause of concern, live streamers must do something out of the box, to increase subscriber retention. Features like live chat and polling increase overall viewer satisfaction, and hence it can increase your subscriber retention rate too!
Make Your Special Live Events More Compelling
When a live streamer conducts special live events like monthly live sessions, live sessions on the eve of special sports events, and more, live chat and polls can play a significant role in attracting more viewers. Through live chats and polls, your viewers can participate in the live sessions, send their questions, and let you know their opinions. Hence, your events become much more compelling.
Understand the Interest of Your Viewers
Live chats and polls help you understand the opinions and interests of your viewers. You can use them to attract more viewers. For example, you can ask your viewers about their favorite teams, favorite sports stars, and matches that they are looking forward to, and make sure to hold special live sessions based on the answers.
How To Enable Live Chat For Sports Live Streaming
If you are using Muvi Live for developing your sports live streaming platform, then it is very easy for you to enable live chat for all your live streaming. You just need to follow the steps given below:
- To enable live chat in Muvi Live, login to your Muvi Live CMS and navigate to “Settings”. Then, go to “Live Streaming Settings”.
- Under “Live Stream Settings”, you will get an option to “Enable chat in all live streams”. Select the checkbox to enable the feature.
- Finally, click on “Save”.
Once the settings are updated, the live chat feature will be enabled for all your live streams through Muvi Live.
After enabling the chat feature, whenever you will start live streaming, the chat option will be automatically visible to your end-users in the Muvi Live Player.
And if you are still not on Muvi Live, sign up today!
Using the live chat feature, you can directly interact with your users, read their comments, and reply to them.
And if you want to know their opinion, you must try the polling feature.
How To Enable Polling For Sports Live Streaming
You can use our CTA Poll cards feature to start a poll during your live streams. Just follow the steps below, and add poll cards to your live streams:
- Go to the “Player” menu in the CMS.
- On the Player page, select “Enable Video Cards”.
- Then, click on “Add Card”, which will appear under “Manage Cards”.
- In the “Card Type” option, select “Poll” from the drop-down. The poll form will open up on your screen.
- In the “Question” field, type your poll question.
- Next, type the answer options. You can add multiple answers to the question. For example, in “Option – 1”, type the first option, in “Option – 2”, type another option, and so on. To add more options, click on the “+” icon.
- Once you have filled up all the fiend, click on “Save”.
The poll cards will appear as layout video cards over your live-streaming content. Your viewers can directly interact with the poll cards and submit their responses.
Engaging Your Users Through Casual Game Playing
Through chats and poll cards, you can engage in casual gameplay with your viewers. No idea what is casual gameplay? Well, let me explain!
Suppose you are live streaming a football match played by Brazil, and you are vouching for Neymar to score goals, and want to know if your users are also feeling the same. Then, you can just post a question in the chat section asking them what they think. And as they answer, take their names, and respond to their opinions live.
Also, you can organize on-stream contests for your viewers too! Just ask a trivia question and request them to answer as fast as they can. Trust me, it will be really fun!
Such type of exciting contest will grow genuine user interest in your platform. You can increase the average view time of your platform, user login rate, and obviously the number of live viewers.
Start Your Sports Live Streaming Platform With MUVI
This FIFA World Cup, grow your sports live streaming business to a new level, by engaging directly with your viewers through live chat and polls. And if you are still thinking about how to start your live streaming platform, Muvi Live is right here to help you out!
With powerful features like DVR-Enabled live streaming, live stream recording, and more, ensure to deliver the best live streaming experience to your followers. Sign-up to start your 14-day free trial today!
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