MEGOGO, the largest video service in Eastern Europe and the CIS, announced the start up of a new business, i.e. large-scale live broadcasts of the most popular sporting and cultural events like music festivals, niche sports and e-sports events. The first headliner of the new project became Z-Games 2016, the largest sports-and-music festival in Eastern Europe.
According to the management of the online cinema, Z-Games are the main youth event of the year in the post-Soviet space. “When we selected the project, we considered dozens of mass participation events and decided in favour of the most entertaining and interesting one. It was very important for us not only the first-class music and sports component, but also the ambience of the event and its popularity among progressive audience”, as commented on by Ivan Shestakov, Marketing Director at MEGOGO.
It is hard not to agree with this feature, since Z-Games will be held in early August on the Black Sea. More than 1500 athletes and artists will gather directly on the beach to be equipped with four music locations and dozens of unique extreme sports facilities, intentionally for that four-day festival. The spectacular action sports, as well as international sports series will involve more than a hundred top riders from all over Europe. And this is despite the fact that any visitor may try any event and even to qualify and to get into the final. Apart form sporting events, every sunset there will be arranged live performances of world stage stars, every night there will be top world DJ sets and entertaining battles of the best hip-hop groups in the world.
MEGOGO’s idea is that live broadcasts will be carried out continuously, every day, during the event, i.e. from 7 am until the last DJ-set’s over. In early August, all devices of the video platform will get a separate area MEGOGO LIVE with exclusive professional online broadcasts of Z-Games. More than 30 people of the creative team of MEGOGO and Z-Games will present this entertaining event to the 40 millionth audience of MEGOGO in Ukraine, the CIS, Baltic States and other Eastern Europe in a unique format. All of the major headliners of music events, sports finals and high-profile events and shows will be filmed using professional equipment and by professional staff like live studio directors, TV presenters and commentators, cameramen and soundmen. Concurrently, the unique ambience of events will be reproduced by independent teams of MEGOGO streamers to be composed directly from preselected participants of the same event, who will film all the goings-on by using smartphones with special software, including by using drones and other nonstandard technologies.
All video streams, both professional and made by streamers, will be consolidated in real time into a single high-quality picture by professional directors. This approach will provide the online event with outstanding dynamics, interactivity and uniqueness, while keeping an interesting and high-quality picture. To do it, the technical part of broadcasts of mobile streamers will be ensured due to the advanced flagship smartphones by Samsung.
Ivan Shestakov, Marketing Director at MEGOGO, is confident about the project success: “Partially, the format and air of the media project will be kept in the spirit of broadcasting the Olympic Games, world championships and festivals. The airtime is also full of diaries, summaries, interviews, discussions and analytics of competitions, highlights of the best performances and curiosities, backstages of concerts and even after-parties with music bands that can not be available to common visitors. However, a very important component is also the vision of the events directly of their participants, and the ubiquitous streamers will be very useful to do provide it. First of all, this event aims at progressive young people who grew up on youtube and social networks. This is a huge audience and everyone has a smartphone with a camera in his pocket. Due to this project, we will give the audience more than can be given by TV, as we have an open-ended airtime, and at the same time, we allow the audience to create content by itself with a team of professionals”.
The new large-scale product MEGOGO LIVE is tightly integrated with actual business activities of MEGOGO, i.e. the video service’s TV and movie products, forming a single environment for consuming professional video content by any audience, on any device and anywhere.
“The similar format is intended to use for showing important and niche events in Ukraine, the CIS, Baltic States and Europe. We have won recognition from the audience over 30 years old, it got used to the TV picture and got to like the VOD, so this is the very audience we will go on developing these two products to, while for the young people we are designing MEGOGO LIVE, which, I am sure, will be even more popular than the traditional TV products”, as optimistically stated by the Marketing Director at MEGOGO.
The broadcasts will be available for free every day during the festival on the website and apps on any device and worldwide within the MEGOGO platform. According to expectations of the online cinema’s team, the international broadcasting will gather more than 150 thousand viewers. “Z-Games is an international event, more than half of its participants and guests represent different countries of the world, so the new product will also be very interesting for international audience”, as MEGOGO anticipates.
