How Hive Streaming supported adidas in creating excellent live event streaming experiences for employees

How do some teams manage to achieve the impossible? One of the world’s most iconic sports brands famously declared “Impossible is nothing,” and is uniquely positioned to home in on the answer.

The Hive Video Experience Platform was supporting internal video broadcasts at adidas already in 2017, which enabled all employees – including those outside the HQ – to partake in company-wide live events, regardless of their individual network limitations. Hive’s technology has been crucial in boosting the number of large live events held at adidas over the past few years: from only a handful of events hosted mainly by the CEO, the number has now expanded into the hundreds.

Going into 2020, Hive continued to set up the infrastructure needed at adidas to create excellent employee experiences while streaming live events.

The challenge

Some of the challenges Hive helped adidas to overcome included:

• Improving employee reach during company all-hands, extending attendance beyond HQ
• Increasing video adoption in APAC
• Creating consistently excellent video experiences for all users
• Maintaining consistent viewership all the way through live events
• In 2020, meeting a sharp spike in demand for larger video events with more attendees

The solution

While we initially focused on solely removing bandwidth limitations with Hive’s patented peer-to-peer (P2P) technology (part of Hive Optimization), we soon helped adidas to not only deliver video, but also understand its impact across the organization.

With valuable data procured through Hive Video Analytics, we enabled adidas to monitor the steady adoption of Microsoft Teams across the enterprise and receive actionable insights into the performance of their video communication across the world.

According to Jose Herranz (Director Product Ownership – Unified Communications at adidas), Hive solutions have been key to enabling growing numbers of large live streaming events.

How Hive supported adidas in 2020:

1. Increased reach for company town halls
2. Enabling higher number of large video events to be held
3. Significant increase in video adoption in APAC
4. Improved Quality of Experience worldwide
5. More consistent viewership for entire duration of company town halls
6. Stable and consistent high-quality video experience
7. High level of Microsoft Teams adoption across organization