45 THE LIVE LIFE Trickbox
SONG AND DANCE From a fully interactive event with pop group Steps to
encoding ITV’s NHS singalong, Trickbox gets on with the job without a fuss.
The company is agile, with five permanent staff, a handful of part-time staff and freelancers. It also manages Tower Bridge TV Studios, an HD facility on The Thames, with some very monetisable views of Tower Bridge and the London skyline. ECHO EIGHT Earlier this year Trickbox acquired the live arm of streaming and IT services company, Echo Eight. In addition to purchasing Echo Eight’s live-streaming technology and contracts, Trickbox appointed Echo Eight’s director, James O’Farrell as Trickbox TV head of live video. The acquisition included multiple LiveU encoders for remote live streaming. Trickbox hopes the acquisition will strengthen its live-streaming capability. Echo Eight had been a mix of traditional IT and live streaming. The two companies had been working in partnership for some years. “It seemed a logical next step for us to grow the live streaming in our business and to support James in what he wanted to do. The sum of the parts was bigger together.” T. REX ON THE THAMES The opportunities for live-streaming content are as broad as the imagination. Earlier this year Trickbox participated in a stunt in London around the launch of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom . In the early morning, a barge set off down The Thames with a tyrannosaurus rex aboard (not a live one, a fake one). A Trickbox camera crew in a chase boat was feeding live footage via a LiveU unit back to the Trickbox studio. Cameras at Trickbox’s
Thames-side studio also captured the passing procession. The footage was edited and turned around by 7am for streaming over the big screens in London’s train stations as a ‘breaking news’ story. “With that we were able to test a few different parts of our business – our studio, live streaming,” says Laminman. “It was good fun.” This year, Trickbox’s live-streamed production has included providing the 4G link and onward transport for the University of Westminster’s MA Fashion Design Runway Show, full production flyaway and streaming facilities for the Big Questions Live conference in London, and encoding services for the Big NHS Singalong for ITV. THE WORD ON WEBINARS But Trickbox also does more internal corporate work, where the stream is going directly to a client’s website, in addition to streaming to that client’s social media outlets. The company has also developed
its own webinar platform, called Trickbox Live, which allows users to register and receive calendar updates and for the client to operate live Q&A’s. The platform is customisable and skinnable for easy integration into the client’s own website and brand. “It becomes almost a fully interactive event, rather than just watching a video.” The system was used recently in a Q&A hybrid party event around the reunited dance-pop group Steps delivered to Everyman cinemas. Trickbox seems set to ride a wave of increasing demand for streaming services. “We definitely want to develop the live-streaming part of the business and reach more clients in that area, and improve our systems and solutions by investing in more kit and having more R&D time on the IT streaming side,” says Laminman. “Social streaming – Facebook, YouTube, Twitter – has definitely increased. The last couple of years that has gone absolutely crazy.”
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