Brightcove and LTN Global Help FreightWaves Live Stream at Scale

In the massive global freight industry, FreightWaves is the leading provider of global supply chain data and media content to industry leaders and analysts. You could call them the Bloomberg of freight based on how many subscribers they have to their Sonar data platform, their viewing audience for FreightWaves TV, and their recent success in virtual events.

Cody Mathis is a broadcast engineer at FreightWaves who implemented the tech stack powering FreightWaves TV, and he decided to leverage Brightcove and Brightcove partner LTN Global in his workflow. LTN’s Schedule product is how Cody’s team pulls together live streams and other content that they produce for the FreightWaves TV channel. Brightcove Live, Brightcove Video Cloud, and the Brightcove Player are how they stream it to their audiences worldwide, and they’ve seen dramatic viewership growth in the US, Canada, Mexico, the UK, and Germany.

Cody reports that his primary goal in vendor selection for FreightWaves TV was the ability to scale in the cloud and deliver a reliable and high-quality playback experience across the many screens, like freight brokerage houses, that keep FreightWaves TV on constantly. An added benefit was what the integration between LTN Global and Brightcove meant for his team’s efficiency. In comparison, it used to take a week of training and two weeks of practice for a new team member to operate the FreightWaves TV workflow. Cody explains, “The mixture of LTN and Brightcove lets us train a new person on the entire system in a day, and they can now completely build up the schedule and hit play, and it just works flawlessly."

The key to the integration is that the user interface of LTN Schedule offers the option of sending a stream to Brightcove while maintaining all markers and metadata needed for Brightcove to facilitate ad-insertion and analytics.

Cody and team have extended their live streaming expertise into virtual events in 2020. FreightWaves LIVE was supposed to be an in-person event with 2000 attendees, but the pandemic necessitated going virtual. FreightWaves LIVE @ Home, in the early spring, featured over 5MM minutes of content in 3 days and netted 92,000 unique viewers who streamed over 250,000 sessions. This success inspired the addition of more live-streamed virtual events to the schedule, including FreightWaves LIVE: Global Trade Tech in mid-September.

The ease of operation and high technical performance of LTN Global and Brightcove has enabled FreightWaves to go bigger with confidence. Said Cody of the workflow, “Our entire team is trained in it. So if anyone has to step in, they're more than confident to know what to do if someone has to push a show longer or cut a show early or anything like that. Everyone on the team knows what to do in those situations because the integration is so simple. So it's been really great."