Helsinki, 04.02.2021, Icareus has delivered a renewed Helsinki Channel service to the City of Helsinki. The Helsinki Channel is the city’s video communication channel and offers important and current content to the city’s residents. The platform powering the Helsinki channel is the Icareus Video Cloud service.
The popularity of videos in internal and external communication has grown tremendously in recent years both on private businesses as well as on public administrations. Indeed, the efficiency of video communication is up to six times that of text and image communication. On social media, on the other hand, people nowadays watch an average of just six seconds of a single video, viewers quickly switch to new content, and only entertainment content in particular does well. Similarly, studies have shown that the number and duration of views are significantly higher if the videos are on the organisation’s own website. Through the Helsinki channel, the communication of the City of Helsinki is a highly effective way of reaching out and informing local citizens and city’s own employees about current and relevant issues.
The Helsinki Channel offers online broadcasts and publishes recordings of e.g. Helsinki City Council meetings, concerts by the Helsinki City Orchestra and the mayor’s “residents evenings”. The channel also publishes the citizens’ own “Urban Videos” content. Most of the content is viewable by everyone. In addition to public content, the City of Helsinki publishes videos whose visibility is limited to the city’s staff.
In 2019, the videos were watched on the Helsinki Channel a total of more than 400,000 times. There were 75 live broadcasts. The most watched video was “Living in an apartment building”. It was viewed more than 36,000 times. The most watched live broadcast was the Mayor’s Independence Day for Fourth-graders, which was watched a total of more than 24,000 times.
At the beginning of 2020, Icareus delivered a renewed Helsinki Channel video platform and responsive website. With the Covid pandemic, the viewing of videos on the Helsinki channel has increased and individual live broadcasts, such as the Mayor’s Info videos and the concerts of the Helsinki City Orchestra, have received thousands of viewers. The May Day’s concert, organised by the City of Helsinki, reached c. 130,000 live and recorded viewers through the Helsinki Channel.
Icareus won the tender for the delivery of the Helsinki channel, offering the most versatile and comprehensive solution for the city. Requirements included support for live streaming on multiple simultaneous channels to thousands of viewers, automatic recordings of live broadcasts, easy video archive management, support for subtitles, integrations with social media services such as YouTube, series and podcasts, watching videos and listening to podcasts from all major browsers , adaptive video content distribution and its geographical restriction, integration into the Helsinki City Council’s Data Pump system, and easy tools and interfaces for adding and sharing videos to different websites. Naturally, the public user interface had to be customisable to match the visual look of the city of Helsinki.
Icareus implemented the Helsinki channel service using the SAAS-based Icareus Video Cloud, which met these diverse requirements. Icareus Video Cloud is used by dozens of domestic and international companies and organisations in several European countries.
Helsinki is the capital of Finland and the center of an economic area of the Helsinki region with approximately 1.49 million inhabitants and 779,000 jobs. Helsinki is Finland’s cultural, administrative, political and business center, the hometown of many large companies and the country’s largest employer with almost 39,000 employees.
More information: http://www.hel.fi and https://www.helsinkikanava.fi/en/
Founded in 2001, Icareus Ltd is a growing, profitable Finnish company that offers SaaS video cloud services. We serve customers in over 60 countries. Our main product, the customisable Icareus Video Cloud service, enables organisations to launch professional video services. It is suitable for both internal and external use in various contexts, such as content services, virtual and hybrid events, communication, marketing, and training – easily and affordably from the cloud, accessible on all devices.
This post is about a tailored implementation of Icareus Video Cloud.
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