Sundance Film Festival Streams Live: A Case Study

For years you've heard about the premiers, stars, and swag at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. While you may not be attending the event, which runs from January 20 to 30, now you can feel like you're there. Sundance is partnering with cloud-based video platform Brightcove to live stream major events and screenings.

Brightcove will also host on-demand content from the festival, including artist interviews, daily video highlights, and roundtable discussions.

Sundance is making the move to live streaming to pull an online audience into the event, to better connect filmmakers with film watchers.

"The mission of Sundance Institute is to discover and foster independent artists and to connect those artists with audiences, and online video continues to play an important role in helping drive awareness and interest in the festival each year," says Joseph Beyer, director of digital initiatives at the Sundance Institute.

The festival has been working with Brightcove since 2008, but this is the first year that it will take advantage of live streaming.

"Working with Brightcove has enabled us to continually introduce innovative new video offerings that fans can access throughout the world. We are looking forward to taking advantage of Brightcove's live streaming capabilities this year as well as expanding the reach of our video content to new platforms and devices," says Beyer.

Brightcove will offer a high-quality live stream of all the festival's major events. Video will be multi bit rate, to ensure the best quality for each user.

Other online offerings will include social networking tools for sharing on Facebook and Twitter. Video will be available across all major screens, platforms, browsers, and devices.

"Sundance Institute continues to be a tremendous collaborator with Brightcove and a great advocate for using video as a key marketing and awareness tool," says David Mendels, Brightcove's president and chief operating officer.

"The organization has continued to evolve its online video offerings to take advantage of new innovations in the Brightcove platform and deliver the highest quality user experience possible." Mendels adds. "The introduction of live streaming video this year will be a treat for film fans around the world."

Troy Dreier's article first appeared on OnlineVideo.net