How Jikiden Pioneered Live Streaming in Finance
Jikiden Corporation is a digital media company that supports online financial services with video streaming. This includes streaming support for live-streamed seminars, investor relations, and shareholders’ meetings held by banks, securities firms, and more. Brightcove is at the core of this business, helping Jikiden and its clients to thrive.
Jikiden was founded in 2004, around the time that online securities companies were emerging due to deregulation. “Financial institutions that lacked physical locations were looking for ways to communicate with their customers and build a relationship of trust,” recalled Masashi Hirayama, Representative Director of Jikiden. “So we developed a service that would help them connect with customers and respond to their queries face-to-face in real time."
“When we first started out, we were still in the age of ADSL connections,” continued Hirayama. “To stream videos in real time, you had to use ActiveX on Internet Explorer. We’re talking three frames per second, but even that felt ‘real’ at the time. We were the only service that offered live stream Q&As, so most of the online securities and FX trading companies were using our service.”
About half of Jikiden’s staff have worked at securities companies or financial institutions in the past. So they not only handle software and connection issues, they offer marketing consultation for the content of webinars, handouts, and more.
Adopting Brightcove in the Age of Broadband
Although Jikiden’s business model hasn’t changed since its founding, it continues to update the streaming technology it offers to keep pace with internet and market developments.
“Before Brightcove, we offered a general webinar format combining Flash-based video and materials,” said Hirayama. “These days, seminar participants have better audiovisual equipment, and most people take high-quality streaming for granted. If we kept things the way they were, people might start to think the streaming quality of live seminars was poor when compared with the crisp videos available on YouTube. So we turned to Brightcove to smoothly transition to a higher-quality, stable, and reliable streaming environment.”
“They understood our business model very well and agreed to a reseller partnership, which was rare at the time. Their sales representatives explained the benefits of APIs and how we could use them in our industry, among other suggestions that considered our clients. We felt like we’d found a partner we could trust to help us grow the service.”
Developing a Smooth Streaming System through APIs
Brightcove is currently embedded in the Go Stream service developed by Jikiden.
According to Hirayama, “Customers can stream videos on the Brightcove platform by simply logging in to Go Stream. The Brightcove Live API was already well established, so it was easy to integrate into our system. They also developed additional APIs, so we’re able to maintain a quality service to our customers while keeping pace with technological innovations.”
“Live streaming is difficult and adjusting start times on older products like Video Cloud Live was a very involved process. But with Brightcove Live, we can use an API to adjust the timing in a way that’s more accessible for our customers. A lot of our customers are financial institutions, so security is really paramount. We also appreciate how they investigate issues for us in detail, no matter how minor they are.”
Aside from customer streams, Jikiden also live streams from its own internal studios virtually every day, sometimes four or five times during busy periods. The company also edits customer-recorded data, uploads it to Brightcove, and adds tags.
Expanding Live Streaming in the Future
“Right now, we’re only using about 20% of the features available on Brightcove, but we’re planning to use features like Auto Captioning and ad insertion. It’s also possible we might start seeing financial seminars hosted by virtual avatars like VTubers, so that’s something we need to be prepared to incorporate. We want to give our customers a satisfactory streaming experience using the Brightcove platform for that as well,” concluded Hirayama.
Jikiden’s Go Stream is a stable and reliable streaming service for financial institutions. With live streaming becoming more and more widespread, it looks set to play an even more important role moving forward.
Learn more about Brightcove’s partner program for reselling licenses of our solutions.