2018 was a busy year of shipping for Team Crowdcast. As the world of livestreaming and webinars merge, we've been at the center focusing on giving creators and startups powerful tools to be successful with live video.

We've compiled the top 5 biggest updates in case you missed it.

1) RTMP Studio

With the global rise of livestreaming we made a big splash when we introduced RTMP Studio to allow livestreaming applications and hardware to talk directly to Crowdcast. This allowed a whole new category of live event features like overlays, animations, pre-recorded video, multi-camera setups and more. Previously only twitch gamers or in-person conference producers were able to have access to these tools.

Now anyone can host webinars, paid workshops, online summits, and more with tools like OBS, Wirecast, and Ecamm Live. See the launch here.

2) HD Recordings, Instant Replays & Thumbnails

Earlier in the year we launched our most requested feature: HD Replays. This enabled support for 720p video replays for both native and RTMP Studio sessions.

Of course, higher quality larger recordings meant that viewers on slower connections would have issues watching the replay. So we quickly followed up with an update to make replays available in multiple qualities for low-bandwidth connections. That update brought the ability to make your replays available in just seconds after the broadcast ends and show thumbnail previews of the video. Something unheard of in the webinar world.

Finally, we recently launched support for 1080p streams on all RTMP Studio streams. 🙌🏾

3) Direct ConvertKit Integration

With many of our customers using ConvertKit, it was clear we needed to add a deep integration with this very loved email marketing platform. So we teamed up with our friends at ConvertKit to design their most advanced webinar integration to date. Now you can create triggers and actions right from Crowdcast, no need to connect Zapier ;)

Read about how it works here.

4) Redesigned Event Landing Pages, Dashboards & Channels

With more and more events happening on Crowdcast, it became clear that we needed to polish up pieces of the platform. One of the most important pages is the event landing page. This is the first page your attendees see to decide if they'll register. We spent time designing an experience that was both beautiful as it was functional across web, mobile, laptops & touchscreens.

We combined this with updates to both your channel's page and dashboards to be better organized to show what events are live, upcoming and in the past.

5) New Analytics Page with UTM Tracking

With more attendees joining Crowdcasts than ever before, we needed to give more visibility about how those attendees were engaging your live events. Crowdcast is the only platform that combines the live event and replay under one unified URL. This opens up a whole set of metrics to track for replay viewers.

So we thought long and hard about what key metrics really matter and surfaced them right at the top. Then, we broke out the funnels for live and replay attendees to better showcase the behavior of each segment.

Finally, we added support for UTM parameters so that you can more granularly track what channel every attendee discovered your crowdcast from.

Checkout the new design below:

Honorable Mentions 🏅

GDPR – Europe started to get serious about privacy with their General Data Protection Regulation. Privacy has always been at the core of Crowdcast so we moved to update our systems for all users, not just European customers, so that everyone can get the benefits of privacy, transparency and access to their data. This included updates to allow attendees to give explicit opt-ins for things like newsletters and terms.

Unified logins – We rolled out a big update to our systems so that attendees can link their email account with Facebook, Twitter, and Google so that they can more easily access their account with multiple routes.

People search – In larger events, it was sometimes difficult to find the right attendee to invite on screen. With that in mind, we redesigned the people tab to include the ability to search and very quickly find the right person. We also surfaced information, like whether or not they attended live, right from the event page.

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2018 was a big year for us and we've got even bigger plans for 2019. Stay tuned & see you on-air ;)

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