How Vimeo Transformed Our Beloved Staff Picks Tradition into an Online Live Streaming Spectacle

The Best of Staff Picks screening has been a lunchtime tradition for nearly a decade at the Vimeo offices in New York City. As a “thank you” to Vimeo Staff, the curation team holds a monthly in-house screening of our favorite Staff Picks to give shine to the talented creators whose videos call our site home. Designed to emulate the spirit of industry events and film festivals, the screenings deliver a curated film experience, including access to live filmmaker commentary from the local creators featured each month. (Plus, we fill two long tables with New York-style pizza and all the fixings. Drool.) That is, until COVID-19 entered the chat room. With the office empty but the site still going strong, we wanted to continue our long standing tradition of curated monthly screenings. So we got to work, using our own live streaming tools to bring the experience of watching films alongside fellow film lovers to our virtual Vimeo community. We’ve hosted interactive live streams for the months of April and May, featuring tons of stunning short films as well as Q&A sessions and introductions from filmmakers we love. We’ve learned a lot along the way, so we thought we’d share the steps we took to show up and show out for our staff and our community of creators. 1. Set up your software The first step? Get your live stream up and running. We upgraded the curation team’s Vimeo account to an Enterprise subscription, which gave us access to Studio Software and live streaming capabilities. To allow a stream to transition between prerecorded videos and live Q&A, you can upload your preselected media (in our case, our Staff Picked vids) into your Media Bin, then send out a Remote Guest link via the Studio Software to seamlessly integrate live participants into the stream. From there, all the host and guests need to do is open that link via Google Chrome and enable their webcam and microphone, which allows live video and audio to be incorporated into the stream. The result is a low-lift live Q&A that’s safe for everyone involved!

2. Be smart about promotion

When it comes to live streams, it’s important to get creative with your promotion. You’ll want to start promoting early, but as the days to the stream tick down, it’s smart to promote more often, highlighting different aspects of the event during each audience touchpoint. Featuring the filmmakers who will be featured in a Q&A, specific films that will screen, or underlining a unifying theme throughout the spotlight helps us underline the value of the screening while continuing to build awareness.

3. Involve your audience

It’s important that we make the Q&A feel just as special as our IRL screenings do, so we use the live Q&A tool within the Vimeo platform to field questions from viewers and pass the most upvoted ones onto filmmakers in real-time. This trick helps emulate the spirit of the original screenings and incentivizes watching the stream as it’s happening. Heads up: you can also use Vimeo’s live polling tools to hear from your people as they watch.

4. Make it pretty

Before the screenings, we build custom Vimeo Staff Picks graphics and upload them all into a Media Bin to use throughout the event. We also utilize our software’s picture in picture function to allow us to host our Q&A in a way that feels intimate and polished at the same time. It might seem like a small tweak, but investing a little time to make assets that look and feel like your org can pay off big time in brand recognition and overall aesthetics.

5. Save your work

While the live stream is the special sauce that helps us feel most connected with our audience, it’s important to remember that not everyone can make your showtime. Luckily, you can use Vimeo’s Showcase tools to archive your stream for future viewing. Plus, once it’s recorded, you can include email capture and chapters (like we did!) to make the screening feel interactive, even when on-demand.

6. When in doubt, bring in the experts

Even with a little experience, our Curation team members aren’t exactly specialists when it comes to remote live streaming. That’s where our live production team comes in. We bring in a member of the live production services team to get (virtual!) hands-on insights that help us navigate the technological waters and find creative solves for last-minute roadblocks. Enterprise users, take note — you can get VIP access to our production team’s training and support as part of your Vimeo subscription.

How Vimeo Transformed Our Beloved Staff Picks Tradition into an Online Live Streaming Spectacle

2. Be smart about promotion

3. Involve your audience

4. Make it pretty

5. Save your work

6. When in doubt, bring in the experts

Learn more about Vimeo’s live streaming tools