NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--One of the nation’s leading production companies Al Roker Entertainment today announced the formation of its new division Roker Labs. The new entity will focus on tracking live streaming talent and creating the first-ever listing of leading Periscope personalities called the Al Roker Entertainment (ARE) Index. Future indexes will include other live streaming platforms.
In partnering with Dextro, the first computer vision company to analyze live streams, Roker Labs has organized key category personalities that have emerged on the new quickly growing Periscope live streaming platform owned by Twitter. It has also established some critical benchmarks for brands and advertisers looking to leverage the platform for their future marketing efforts.
"We couldn’t be more excited to find and collaborate with the top live stream stars and personalities of today and tomorrow,” said Al Roker, CEO of Al Roker Entertainment. “We believe this new form of direct, live streaming communication is game changing in an era of static social media. I’ve been having a blast live streaming cooking dinners with my family and behind-the-scenes at Today Show. The possibilities are endless.”
The key findings of the ARE Index reveal that on average, streams are most active during the evening hours, followed by afternoon and morning. And, a small Twitter following does not always translate into a small viewer count on Periscope.
The leaders that streamed most frequently are in the following five verticals:
- Around the city - users that stream themselves as they’re navigating through a cityscape
- Food
- Music
- Talking heads (selfies)
- Travel - travel streams include monuments, beach scenes, oceans, etc.
There are also Periscope leaders who captivate a large audience with minimal streaming activity. These users tend to be household names, and have a significant Twitter following. A good example of this type of user is Hillary Clinton, who leverages the power of live streaming on the campaign trail.
“Roker Labs will help connect the dots between the talent, brands and significant global audiences being assembled on these new live platforms,” said Ronald C. Pruett, Jr., an advisor to Al Roker Entertainment and Co-Founder of Roker Labs. “Live streaming is the missing link between television and social media. It will dramatically reshape content, commerce and online communities in completely new and unforeseen ways.”
Additional key findings from the research reveal :
- Talking heads (selfie streams) consistently remain the top-streaming category. About 30% of users stream themselves and are more likely to talk about beauty products, day-to-day activities, and food than anything else.
- Streaming activity across all topics increases throughout the day, with the exception of technology. Periscope users are more likely to showcase their tech gadgets in the morning and afternoon.
- Most users stream themselves cooking dinner as opposed to any other meal.
The leader group is comprised of users from around the world. This underscores the global growth of live streaming. Leaders stream from the following locations (locations based on Twitter profile data):
- United States
- Turkey
- Mexico
- Canada
- Italy
- Qatar
"With Periscope, things are happening live and there are simply too many streams for viewers to accurately curate the content,” said David Luan, founder, Dextro. “At Dextro, we have the ability to turn video into a visual transcript using computer vision in real-time, a game changing capability for the field.”
The ARE Index for the first time reveals some of the top contenders from the most streamed categories.
Celebrities:
-
@HillaryClinton
- Twitter following: 3.83M
- Periscope following: 96.5K
-
@KevinHart4real
- Twitter following: 20.1M
- Periscope following: 151.4K
-
@tomgreenlive
- Twitter following: 283K
- Periscope following: 25.9K
Around the City:
-
@AmandaOleander
- Twitter following: 6.04K
- Periscope following: 224.4K
Talking Heads:
-
@brendonurie
- Brendon Urie
- Twitter following: 789K
- Periscope following: 72.8K
-
@MatthewSantoro
- Matthew Santoro
- Twitter following: 284K
- Periscope following: 92.1K
“Through our partnership with Al Roker Entertainment, we have embedded the functionality to automatically analyze and curate every live streaming video into the ARE Index,” said Luan.
About Al Roker Entertainment
Al Roker Entertainment is a leading producer of original, award winning TV programs and digital content for the world's best brands. Led by nine-time Emmy award winning TV personality Al Roker, known for his authenticity and high trust factor, ARE produces all forms of content for distribution across a variety of platforms around the world, including: broadcast, cable, digital, OTT, and streaming technologies.
Launched in 1994, ARE has produced a variety of breakthrough unscripted, scripted and digital programming for top cable networks which include, The Weather Channel, Food Network, Discovery Channel, Lifetime among others. Shows include the Weather Channel hit “Coast Guard Alaska” and its popular spin offs, “Coast Guard Florida” and “Coast Guard Cape Disappointment/Pacific Northwest.” Recently, the company also produced the reality-based “DEA” program for Spike TV, “Kimberly’s Simply Southern” for Great American Country, and "Celebrity Holiday Homes" for HGTV.
Located in New York, Roker Labs is a full post-production video and live streaming studio that fosters innovation and media partnerships with a proven approach toward authentic storytelling, brand building, and direct response marketing.
About Dextro
Dextro is a computer vision company whose application program interfaces (APIs) make it easy and intuitive for developers and companies to understand, search, curate, and gather actionable statistics in individual videos and across video datasets. From classifying ads and detecting explicit content to monitoring video discovery, Dextro strives to be the brains behind every camera and visual dataset in the world. The company was the first to launch prerecorded video analysis in 2014, and can now analyze live streams in real-time.
