Do you ever wonder how we can watch a football or softball game for hours on ESPN? What keeps us watching isn’t solely the action on the field. It’s the broadcast.
Keeping your audience engaged and entertained during a high school live stream is crucial to the success of your stream. It is something that every school struggles with and has to overcome.
Our goal at Striv is to guide our amazing schools through every step of their live streaming journey. We know how to help schools create an engaging broadcast from the thousands of events we’ve produced.
That is why we have compiled four different ways for you to engage your audience during a high school live stream.
1. Add More Camera Angles
Improving the visual aspect of your school’s live stream is the most important thing you can do to engage your audience.
Upgrading from a one-camera setup to a multi-camera production is not an easy leap. But having multiple cameras allows your stream to be more diverse and capture much more than a single camera.
Having a multi-camera setup means having a dedicated camera for the bird’s eye view. But also have cameras on the sidelines to get those close-up ace serves or touchdown passes and highlight the student section.
Getting more and better equipment leads to a better broadcast, eventually leading to more student AND audience engagement.
2. Integrate Production Elements
There are multiple things on the producing side of your live stream that you can do to help engage your audience even more.
The first is creating and incorporating graphics, such as scoreboards, team logos, rosters, etc., to display during your live stream.
Creating quality graphics gives your audience something interesting and entertaining to view during a timeout or between quarters and halftime.
Running commercials and advertisements during your school’s sporting events is another element you can add to increase engagement.
3. Enhance Your Audio
Awareness of the audio and announcing during your school’s live stream is incredibly important. With every stream you produce, viewers can be more engaged by what they hear than what they see.
Play-by-play and color commentary are your live stream’s most engaging audio elements. That is why the students who do the announcing on your Striv team must be energetic and knowledgeable about whatever sport they are covering.
Here are some other elements that you can add to the audio side of your live stream:
- Share important information or events happening at your school.
- Highlight students, organizations, and clubs at your school.
- Incorporate verbal advertisements.
- Stats (either from MaxPreps for pregame or live game stats).
By incorporating some of the elements listed above into your school’s live stream and focusing on the commentary, you will significantly improve the audio of your live stream.
Download our free Sports Broadcasting Checklist and give your students a roadmap before your next live broadcast.
4. Use Social Media
Social media is a powerful tool that any school can use to maximize viewership and engagement during a live stream.
It is essential to post a game promotion for every live stream that your school does. Promoting your live stream link helps to remind your fans: what time the game is, where they can watch the live stream and what sporting event is happening.
The beauty of Striv is that you can share the same channel page link each time you post!
Quarter updates and final score social media posts are also a great way to drive traffic to your live stream.
Another way to increase engagement through social media is to post video clips of pre and post-game interviews. Incorporating a player of the game spotlight at the end of every game can also increase awareness and engagement with your program.
There are endless ways that schools can use social media to increase viewership and engagement for their live stream. Test different social media posts and see what your fans connect with and engage with best.
Your live stream doesn’t have to look like ESPN for it to captivate an audience. Adding more camera angles, production elements, announcers, and social media can take your live stream to the next level and make it more engaging for your audience.
Striv TV provides all you need in a streaming platform with the training, resources, and support to produce a high-quality broadcast that helps schools connect with their community and fans while empowering students.
Click here to learn more about how to start streaming on Striv TV today.
