Livestorm announces the launch of its Video Engagement Platform with unmatched features for audience engagement

Livestorm launched today the first Video Engagement Platform (VEP), designed to help event organizers optimize audience engagement for their online meetings or virtual events.

With the major shift to online events beginning in 2020, businesses began looking for new, powerful, easy-to-use event platforms. As screen fatigue eventually set in, they struggled to maintain high engagement with attendees during online events, including internal and external meetings, webinars and virtual events.

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Fast-growing Livestorm grew its business by 8x in 2020 due to its focus on event promotion features and audience engagement, and is on pace to at least double its customer base again in 2021.

Today, Livestorm took an important step towards becoming the best video conferencing platform for audience engagement by releasing a new Plugins SDK that enables customers to build their own plugins, such as custom backgrounds, linked shopping carts, emojis, quizzes, chats and social feeds for an event room, similar to a Chrome Extension. In the coming months, Livestorm will open a marketplace of these Plugins, some developed by Livestorm and others by customers or third-party developers.

A Livestorm survey conducted in April 2021 of 1,128 American workers found that video conferencing will continue to be an important part of the workday. Sixty-eight percent of respondents said they expect their use of video conferencing to remain the same (44%) or increase (24%) for the next 12 months — despite the fact that 60% of them say they’ll be back in the office at least part-time by the end of 2021.

“We are very excited about these new features that will help boost engagement, which has become a crucial element in the success of our events,” said Olivier Casassus, Marketing Lead at Front, a longtime Livestorm customer. Front uses Livestorm for its internal and external meetings.

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“Traditional video conferencing platforms have done little to help event organizers with engagement, and companies end up with boring, static events that feel more like lectures than a conversation,” said Gilles Bertaux, co-founder and CEO of Livestorm. “Video has become a commodity. We’re adding features that make Livestorm events dynamic and interactive, to keep audiences engaged and help businesses meet their event goals — whether that’s communicating with employees, customers or prospects.”

“Livestorm, which operates completely in a browser and doesn’t require event attendees to download software to participate, was already the easiest video conferencing platform for event attendees — it now also offers the best engagement features,” added Bertaux.

New Livestorm Plugins are now accessible to a select group of customers, with full access for all customers planned by September 2021 on the Livestorm marketplace. The Plugins will help Livestorm users customize events to their unique needs. The new Plugins can be built on the Livestorm platform by any developer, thanks to the Livestorm Plugins SDK.

Livestorm Hackathon: $15,000 prize pool for the best audience engagement plugins

To expand its Plugin marketplace, Livestorm is hosting a four-week global virtual hackathon in September, during which developers will prototype various Plugins for Livestorm customers. A panel of judges will then select the top 10 teams to participate in a half day Livestorm Demo Day, during which they will present their project to the panel. The most impactful and functional Plugin will be chosen as the winner and will receive a grand prize of $5,000, with prizes of $3,500 and $1,500 for the runners-up.

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