Grabyo Studio is live streaming, sharing and editing platform, built for social. The main goal of the product is to share out exciting moments from live events and TV broadcasts straight to social networks with ease.
The main issue content owners have is sharing moments from a live stream in real time to social media. On top of that they don't have control over what they share on social media. They still want to earn from what they share on social media. Sharing to multiple accounts or platforms also meant it took too much precious time. At that time we had two main competitors. SnappyTV which got aquired by Twitter and later on shut down and Buffer, which didn't have a video sharing functionality at the time, but had the distribution side of it and it did work quite well.
We knew we had to be better than SnappyTV and easier to use. Another advantage that we had is that we partnered up with Facebook, but on top of that we also had to be able to share all your moments to as many social platforms as possible.
After the MVP we quickly learned that the faster you share out a live moment to social media the higher the engagement score will be... just as the video below shared with Grabyo Studio.
We also knew we had to give content owners the ability to monetise and brand their content easily as well as a good analytics dashboard where they can monitor views and engagement scores. And finally we had to focus on bringing more happy clients onboard like the one below:
The ease with which Grabyo allowed us to create social videos as part of our content offering and distribute them to our global digital audience was very impressive. - Alexandra Willis, Head of Communications, Content and Digital at The All England Lawn Tennis Club
I started by defining the user flow as well as all the pages we'll need. I usually try to understand what v12 will be before I strip everything out for v1. So this is exactly what I started to do. I started talking with colleagues, the sales team and clients to define and start shaping up each page into wireframes. I've started with the home page, the editor and the analytics dashboard. One of the first challenges was to make it extremely simple to select a moment you want to share and select all the social accounts you want it shared to. If you were able to do that in less than 1 minute, that meant we were onto something.
Home page & Studio v9 | Campaigns v7 | Analytics v7 | Prototype v5
One of the most challenging tasks was to be able to trim a video in vertical mode for mobile which we ended up solving by the editing mode we called "mouse tracker". Quite self-explanatory, but slightly more sofisticated than it sounds. Quite a few people we tested it were frustrated with tracking a ball, which believe me is quite tricky when it goes fast. That meant we had to also analyse the movement of the mouse and smooth out the sharp movements.
Another interesting insight was that people wanted to be able to add custom overlays and text on videos, just as on Instagram or Snapchat. What we also learned over time is that people wanted to stich videos together, and although there are many tools out there if we were able to do it in the platform, we could save them even more valuable time. The more time they spent on the platform the better. So naturally these were the next two things I started focusing on.
As with every product, the more people use it, the more use cases you'll have. Different companies used Grabyo in different ways. Some of them had people shooting content with their phone and wanted to be able to upload to the platform, which is how Grabyo Mobile was born. That also meant we had to create teams and open up the platform even more, so people could create their own campaigns. This helped us focus on the important things.
What we also learned though is that we were on the right track. We made the company profitable in less than two years and added quite a few big clients to our list.
We are delighted to be collaborating with both Grabyo and Singular. Live to deliver "Featured Tees". Providing our viewers with a flexible way to view the Championships online is something that is very important to FOX Sports. Using Grabyo and Singular.Live to simplify our production and distribution enables us to create a true, digital-first experience for fans across all screens. - Clark Pierce, FOX Sports
As mentioned, one of the things we started investing in was Grabyo Mobile which would make the platform more collaborative. This introduced couple of user roles too - content creators, publishers and administrators who could see the results on top of everything else. Meanwhile we made the results page responsive until the app was finished.
