PENELOPE HOGAN

This story was originally published on ABC Engine Room (back in the days before Periscope or Facebook live!)

The ABC has been trialing the use of video hangouts to give ABC personalities an opportunity to chat directly with their fans. Penelope Hogan from ABC Innovation explains.

Live video interviews with key ABC personalities: Dr Karl, Todd Sampson, Zan Rowe, Stella Young and Jimmy Giggle were broadcast on the internet during Innovation’s trial of ‘hangouts’ over the past six months.

Hangouts on Air is a social video tool which enables anyone with a camera and internet enabled device (desktop or mobile) to stream a live discussion or performance to the world via YouTube. The live stream can have up to ten participants in up to ten different locations, anywhere in the world.

Hangouts have been used by the likes of Barack Obama, the Dalai Lama, the Muppets, the BBC and the Huffington Post. We were interested in experimenting with Hangouts because they offer a light-weight production tool for online broadcast and social media engagement.

The trial was run in conjunction with ABC Guest Host, a cross-platform initiative where ABC personalities guest-curate a section of the ABC Homepage. The objective of each hangout was to give audiences a chance to get to know their favourite personalities in a live video Q&A, with questions submitted on Facebook, Twitter and Google+.

While the visual aesthetic of a hangout is not quite as polished as broadcast TV, the advantages are the low cost and the ability to have up to ten cameras on ten different locations, in a live continuous stream – a virtual town square. After the live broadcast the hangout video is posted onto YouTube and can be shared online and on social media.

Unlike a traditional multi-camera interview, Hangouts look similar to a Skype chat. For the trial, we used two cameras, which meant two ‘windows’ one shared by the interview subject and a moderator and a second window to be occupied by an additional presenter who read out questions from social media.

You can see how this looked in our Redesign My Brain hangout with Todd Sampson and the rest of the Guest Host hangout series, in our playlist.

We ran a series of rigorous tests before broadcasting the first real live hangout from the ABC. We tested everything from the internet connection to the picture, lighting, backdrop, microphone setup and interaction between the two cameras before we were ready to broadcast live.

The first hangout featured Dr Karl for Science week with triplej’s Zan Rowe as moderator with audience questions from Facebook, Twitter and Google+. There were over 50 questions submitted for the live interview and the hangout video continues to attract plays long after the broadcast date.

The hangouts were broadcast from the Innovation offices in Sydney and Melbourne, with the exception of a special Giggle and Hoot hangout with Annabel Crabb and News24’s Kumi Tagutchi. Jimmy Giggle and the owls sang songs and answered live audience questions from the Giggle and Hoot set. Giggle and Hoot fans submitted questions for Jimmy Giggle such as ‘What’s your favourite colour?’ (orange), ‘What’s it like to have owls as friends?’ and more.

After this initial trial, Innovation plans to continue exploring possible uses for hangouts and other social video tools. There are some very exciting possibilities not just for interviews, but for capturing live ‘behind the scenes’ footage. Watch this space.