Eurovision and Mixmoov Video Contest Keeps the Music Playing
For users who need a little guidance, however, the Super-Hit creators offered a little theme-based inspiration. Users could click the Inspire Me button to create a randomly generated Super-Hit video on love and relationships, party and dancing, friendship, or miscellaneous. Here’s the text of a randomly created party and dancing creation: “I believe / Maybe I’ll take you with me tonight / You don’t wanna let me down / Spread the news / We are dancing / Tonight / I’m looking for an answer / I know it’s possible / Tell me what you’re thinkin’ / I’ll do all you want me to / Yeah.”
After creating a random Super-Hit, users were free to edit any of the lines or just take the creation as-is.
“At the end when you see a preview, the video cut of these lyrics gets pushed together,” Vazhaparampil says. In order to get a finished Super-Hit video and have the chance to win points, users needed to register. The site tied into Facebook’s sign-in system, so only Facebook members were eligible.
The clients at TeliaSonera were pleased with the contest results, especially the fact that they were able to encourage online sharing.
“The Super-Hit campaign and Super-Charged site were our contribution as head sponsor to the Eurovision Song Contest 2013,” notes Piret Mürk-Dubout, head of the TeliaSonera group brand and the person responsible for TeliaSonera’s Eurovision sponsorship. “Our aim was to make the contest more connected and user-centric by making our activities shareable and fun. The Super-Hit campaign was built on a mechanism where the users could mash up songs from the Eurovisions themselves and send them to their friends. This was very appreciated from the users and we are very happy with the results.”
TeliaSonera, however, declined to provide any metrics about how many videos were created or how many were shared. The only numbers available are what it requested from Mixmoov ahead of time. Prior to the site’s launch, TeliaSonera contracted with Mixmoov for 2,000 hours of video content creation. Considering that all the videos were 20-second to 30-second clips, that’s planning for a lot of creation. TeliaSonera had an option in place to adjust that number up or down as needed.
Fresh from its success with Eurovision, Mixmoov is shopping its API around to other potential clients. “We have fairly straight documentation where anyone can take this and build their application in the front end,” Vazhaparampil explains. “What we provide is documentation in terms of how they can access our API, and how to view us, the video structure, and how to render it and get it back. In this particular project there was an extra amount of customisation because they wanted to store these video files on our storage to make it easy to access and cut together. They also wanted us to render these videos and send them to YouTube, then alert them. These two things were special requirements. Otherwise the [beauty] of the API is that we don’t have to intervene at all because the API is cloud-based. Hundreds of thousands of videos can be rendered and it automatically scales.”
Eurovision fans were able to select lines from old Eurovision hits, and then the Mixmoov cloud video editor would stitch together a unique “Super-Hit” that fans could share on social networks.
All that customisation took the Mixmoov team only 10 days. TeliaSonera was working on a tight deadline, and the Mixmoov team was able to make it work.
Mixmoov can’t say what it charged TeliaSonera for this project, but it can say what a similar effort might cost. The company either charges based on usage, meaning the number of hours rendered, or based on users. This second approach is favored by enterprises that install Mixmoov on-premises. A contest like Eurovision’s is cloud-based and charged by the amount of video rendered. For 2,000 hours of video rendering, Vazhaparampil says the price would be in the range of €20,000 to €30,000 (about $26,000 to $39,000). Discounts or other special arrangements might reduce that amount.
That seems a modest price to pay to bring a contest that started in 1956 into the social networking age. By launching an online video contest and partnering with Mixmoov, Eurovision and TeliaSonera were looking to appeal to younger viewers, making the Eurovision experience relevant for them. While he hasn’t seen the final numbers, Vazhaparampil agrees that as far as generating interest and enticing a new generation of viewers, Super-Hit was a super smash.
“In terms of the user participation and the buzz rendered, I guess it fared well,” Vazhaparampil enthuses. “From what I could gather outside of things, it seems it went well, that it indeed ended up a widely or let’s say socially shared Eurovision.”
This article appeared in the autumn 2013 Streaming Media European Edition as "Eurovision and Mixmoov Keep the Music Playing."