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To help those in our hometown stay connected from a distance, we’re giving three free months of our livestreaming software, Switcher Studio, to metro Louisville area nonprofits, news organizations, and small businesses (fewer than 50 employees). Apply for your free account here.

Since the onset of social distancing, we’ve heard from tons of organizations that are looking for ways to take their work online. There are conference planners trying to salvage sessions, journalists trying to report from home, local government departments trying to reach their people, churches trying to hold remote worship services. We’ve seen livestreaming used in all of these circumstances, and we think it can work for your organization too.

This week we’re gradually rolling out Switcher Studio 4.4, which includes both form and function updates to the Switcher app. It will be available to all Switcher users over the course of the next few days. So be on the lookout for these changes soon, and check out what’s new below.

As of last week, the U.S.-based Switcher team has gone all remote. We’re tackling the same projects and holding the same meetings, but we’re doing it at a distance, hoping to do our part to slow the spread of COVID-19. We know you’re likely in the same situation, which is why we’re amping up your Switcher Studio access to help you do your work at a distance too.

As a marketer, I rely heavily on media kits. They’re the first thing I look for when I want to place an ad or purchase a sponsorship in a specific content channel, whether that’s an email newsletter, a blog, a podcast, a video channel, etc.

That’s why it’s super important for livestreamers to create a media kit — and for news or multimedia organizations to include their livestreams in their media kits. Media kits help you monetize your content by presenting potential business partners and sponsors with all the pertinent information about your brand, your channels, your reach, and the cost to partner with you.

The Radio Television Digital News Association conducts an annual survey of newsrooms across the U.S., and one of the open-ended questions they ask every year is, “What is the most important new thing you started doing with social media in the past year?”

In both the 2017 and 2018 reports, the most popular answer was Facebook Live. (This makes sense considering Facebook Live was rolled out globally in spring 2016, and each year’s report covers the previous year’s activity.) Newsrooms reported using it for breaking news, weather, polls, sports, events, behind-the-scenes content, and more. Interestingly, in the 2019 report, Facebook Live was the second most popular answer (likely suggesting it was no longer a “new thing” for most newsrooms to adopt). 2019’s top answer was strategy — newsrooms reported being more strategic about what and when they posted on social media.

Newsrooms gearing up for 2020 can learn from these reports by looking at their own Facebook Live strategies and applying the insights in the RTDNA reports. Here are a few tips gleaned from the anonymous responses quoted in the 2018 and 2019 reports (2017’s report didn’t include direct quotes):

Promo.com recently released their 2019 Online Video Statistics and Trends report, and the findings are right up our alley. Here are a few of the highlights. 

• 56% of respondents said that Facebook was the social platform they spent the most time on.
• 67% of respondents said YouTube was their go-to place to watch video.
• 49% of people watch more than 5 online videos per day.
• 52% of people prefer to watch videos on mobile.
• 74% of people prefer to learn about products/services through videos rather than text or photos.

We’ve discussed at length why churches should consider livestreaming and how they can get started for free, but we haven’t yet covered where they can livestream — what sites or platforms are the best fit. There are numerous streaming platforms out there, so it’s easy to get overwhelmed with the options. The obvious big names are Facebook and YouTube, and these are both great destinations for your livestreams, giving you the opportunity for incredible reach, engagement, and ease of use. But there are also a number of paid platforms that churches may choose if they want more powerful broadcasting options. Here we’ll break down a few of the most popular streaming platforms for churches, detailing what they offer.

An interesting shift has happened in journalism training just in the past decade or so. When I was in undergrad, journalism students were required to have DSLR cameras and voice recorders. We needed them for our photojournalism, multimedia, and newswriting classes. By the time I was in graduate school, just a couple of years later, journalism students were required to have iPhones (yes, iPhones specifically). And those we needed for, well, everything.

It’s no wonder iPhones are a staple for aspiring and established journalists alike. What blogs and social media did for news gatekeeping, the iPhone did for news technology. Now we’re all gatekeepers, and we all have in our pockets the tech needed to record, photograph, film, write, edit, polish, and publish a multimedia news piece. That brings a whole new meaning to freedom of the press.

We’ve curated a list of must-have apps and resources that will take your already amazing iPhone and deck it out to be the ultimate mobile journalism tool. So check out our list below, and add your own favorite resources in the comments:

Radio stations are facing more online competition than ever before. Streaming services like Spotify and Pandora provide music lovers with infinite options, and podcasts provide an inexhaustible number of talk shows on even the most niche of topics. And that doesn’t even include on-demand video services, news subscription sites, digital books and audiobooks, and all the stuff our friends post on social media. Channels abound, content abounds, and competition for audience attention is steep.

Happy Switcher Studio update day! We’ve been working on the enhancements in today’s 4.3 release for quite some time. We’re thrilled to introduce asset storage, make our multi-user plan more accessible, bring Video Chat to everyone, and turn a number of your requests into a reality. Below you’ll find an overview of the biggest additions and improvements. But before that, we wanted to introduce you to a new plan structure!