evergent-streak-1blog-bg-for-tablets
Blog

Connecting Communities – How a Tech Trio Helped the Chattanooga Film Festival Reach Their Coveted Audience and Protect Revenue

By Krishna Garimella, Balbinder O’Neil July 30, 2020

  • Corporate News
  • OTT
  • Over the Top
  • product technology

The Covid-19 pandemic of this century has fundamentally changed the way people work, shop, interact and communicate with others. If a merchant wasn’t offering its services online, it’s now or never. Even services that have gained popularity and a significant following via their in-person events are now faced with virtualizing or digitizing their services in order to stay relevant and competitive. The new normal is now the norm. The rapid acceleration of digital transformation that typically takes multiple years has now proven to take flight in as little as 90 days.

Events such as live concerts, film festivals, and drive-in movie theatres are now all considering going virtual. From a purely advantageous perspective, the reach for audiences is wider, consumers get to interact and discuss events with strict adherence to social-distancing requirements. Communities get to enjoy collaborating with the feel of an “in-person scenario” while continuing to take advantage of their favorite services. While this new norm is afoot, determining how to take that first step in the path to virtualizing in addition to getting online as efficiently and smoothly as possible, requires agility and focus. ultimately, service providers and content creators need an easy method of virtualizing events enabling consumers to register, subscribe and pay for services – all while providing them with a seamless experience.

One specific example is the Chattanooga Film Festival (CFF). Now in its seventh year, this film festival showcases a number of Independent filmmakers and distributors. It draws over 30,000 attendees, and given the number of hours, film retakes, and production time spent by these media entrepreneurs, simply not hosting the event this year was not an option. As recently showcased in a webinar where MediaKind, Microsoft, Evergent, and the owners of the Chattanooga Film Festival collaborated to bring to light virtualizing this important Tennessee-based film festival - and enabling the event producers to take it online! How is that for delighting and overcoming the expectations of a viewing community? And furthermore, the trio that enabled this virtualization was one of the first of its kind in North America to highlight the benefits and speed of virtualizing its services and demonstrating the extreme benefits of creating a following, protecting content makers and ultimately continuing to monetize its offerings.

The ability to host and monetize live events in a matter of weeks is paramount for media companies like the CFF. With a captive worldwide audience, our joint solution not only provides a pre-integrated platform, agility, and time-to-market but also provides the capability to allow media and entertainment providers to protect their revenue. And now, geography has no barriers, film festivals or live-event organizers could expand to include worldwide audiences and connect communities in enjoying the content they value the most.

Evergent was an instrumental part of this solution offering whereby we enabled monetization of the event by creating several purchase options such as day passes and VIP passes.

The power of agility, a scalable video platform, and a cloud-hosting platform that is pre-integrated and provides a proven solution for digital service providers looking to transform and advance their digital strategies, is what makes this possible for companies like the Chattanooga film festival. Consumers were able to take advantage of watching these films from the comfort of their homes.

This type of success can be realized in as little as a few weeks, enabling fast time to market and a means for providers to digitize their offerings and protect their revenue. Evergent’s configurable and flexible platform enables multiple possibilities for monetizing services through dynamic product definitions, pricing options, promotions, and bundling options. Our innovative and entrepreneurial nature in delivering value with unparalleled flexibility is an important ingredient to transforming the digital landscape.

Evergent’s turnkey and automated buy-flow enablement enable the rapid onboarding of merchants onto the platform so that they can create flexible products such as one-time, subscription-based, multi-tier bundling, promotion-based products - essentially enabling digital service providers to experiment with product offers until they find the right combination that drives revenue and increases engagement.

Why not virtualize your next event?