Schwab Trading Services

Way back in the digital day – you know, four or five years ago – Flash was king of live-streaming delivery online. By the time versatile HTML5 had essentially ascended to the crown, you might say we were already well-invested in the coin of the new realm.

Collaborating with Schwab Trading Services, we helped break new ground in live-streaming by moving the brokerage firm’s “Schwab Live” online event from Flash to HTML5 while keeping a billboard banner ad as the interface. The show featured Schwab specialists and several industry “influencers” answering viewer-submitted market and trading strategy questions in real time.

To make the conversion to HTML5, there were development and quality control issues to consider on many fronts – the client’s back-end moderation tool to field incoming questions, configurations for the banner to run within four separate sites, the ad server, the streaming partner, browser intangibles…heck, simply dealing with a real-time video feed.

As we vetted live-stream vendors for the makeover, it should be noted that the live-streaming industry itself was struggling to implement an HTML5 streaming answer across all devices. Our vendors were initially resistant to this new standard, but we persisted – and, together, a reliable streaming solution was found.

Schwab – a forward-thinking partner – was all-in from the start, allowing us to refurbish the moderation tool and trusting us to figure out how to transition the works. Investing many hours of development and testing (and gaining some valuable production lessons), we ironed out the kinks. Huge victories included pushing a beta HTML5 player to its limits for stability and the correcting of load-balancing gremlins. Another upgrade was implementing a robust tracking plan to provide more fruitful post-event analytics.

With a Click Here Labs team on-site for assistance and potential troubleshooting, the November 2016 “Schwab Live” was essentially flawless over its four hours – deemed a resounding success by the client and our team.

The analytics provided further validation:

• 17.7 million impressions covering four high-profile financial news sites
• Video views topped 87,000, including an estimated 28,000+ continuing beyond the 5-minute mark
• More than 300 questions submitted by viewers
• 330 tweets mentioning #SchwabLive drove over 5.5 million impressions

One of the lead developers on the project called it a great example of the client and the agency being in the trenches together through the ups and downs, chasing solutions and being unafraid to “fail forward” for the ideal outcome, not just for “good enough.” In the process, we also helped find new live-streaming capabilities for HTML5.

We proudly consider it all a royal achievement…in more markets than one.