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Magic: The Gathering Pro Tours: Where Legends Are Born

Magic: The Gathering Live Stream Presented by Varvid

Have you ever wondered where legends are born? Legends are born at Wizards of the Coast’s Magic: The Gathering Pro Tours, the highest form of competitive play for the premier collectible card game.These top-ranked players enjoy the spoils available to those living the life of a professional Magic player, at four annual worldwide stops making up the Tour.

Each event showcases a prize pool of $250,000. In addition, the highest level players are selected to play in the annual World Magic Cup – with an additional $250,000 purse.  In all of the tiers of play, there are thousands of participants from around the world facing off to earn the right to play at the professional level so that they too can play the game and see the world.

For the past ten years Varvid has been providing online match coverage for Hasbro’s worldwide Pro Tours. Pro Tour Born of The Gods, Wizard’s most recent tournament, live streamed from Valencia, Spain and garnered almost a million online viewers who tuned in to see the three-day match coverage. Magic The Gathering hopefuls from around the world were watching every move the seasoned hall of fame players made as they dueled for the final cash prize of $40,000.

CEO of Varvid, Aaron Booker, said “In this era, attention spans are short. Wizards realized early on that their audience expected video coverage of the tournament as rapidly as possible.  We deliver Magic’s Pro Tour tournament video match coverage to the Internet live and rebroadcast it within minutes after live streaming. This is extremely important to the Hasbro Magic: The Gathering brand and its community.”

Interested to know when the next Pro Tour will be available to view? Tune in May 16th-17th for the Journey Into Nyx Pro Tour: click here.

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“Connected Events” use live video streaming to connect local attendees on the web

Live Webcasting and Event Coverage

In today’s fast paced world where everyone is on a device and on the move, live video streaming for business and networking events is becoming strategic to event planners and event companies providing solutions for client events.

In a recent blog post written by Sandra O’Loughlin, Savvy Marketers Are Bringing Their Events to a Screen Near You, she declares that “events can be the stuff of great stories,” and some marketers “are taking the next chapter online.” So, if you are marketing your event you need to be able to stream live video.

[pullquote3 quotes=”true” align=”right” variation=”orange” textColor=”#666666″] Marketers are taking the next chapter online.[/pullquote3]

The ability to provide live video streaming is like having a live satellite broadcast on television, but instead live streamed via the Internet. This concept isn’t new, but when you consider that YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine and videos (live or recorded) are being watched everywhere online, it only makes sense that live streaming is becoming an integral part of marketing for events where not everyone can attend in person.  Just as Netflix has become a fantastic online way to view top shelf Hollywood content – live streaming is a great way to deliver great event content.  Ted Talks are a perfect example of expanding the reach of one’s event.  (We LOVE Ted Talks, whether live or on demand!)

This powerful combination of video and live streaming is what Varvid is calling The Connected Event. In fact, a recent case study highlights how Virgin used video marketing to boost sales by 28.5%. It’s here to stay!

If you’d like to experience this in person or by live streaming video, you can register for an upcoming event called The Video Marketing Explain-A-Thon put on by Wistia at The Hard Rock Cafe in Seattle:

Wednesday, May 22, 2013

5:00 pm – 9:00 pm

Hard Rock Cafe – 116 Pike St  Seattle, WA 98101

Varvid will be working in conjunction with the following participating companies to teach Event Planners, Marketing Professionals, Business Owners and Marketing Directors how to use video to market their businesses:

[fancy_box]We’re very excited to be participating in this great educational event. Register if you want to attend.[/fancy_box]

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Technology’s Future, Webcasting and Varvid – It’s Friday, I’m in Love!

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Webcasting — it’s one of the first services Varvid initially offered and it continues to be a cornerstone to our overall success.  While most of our projects have us traveling to wonderful locations across the globe, we are pleased to be planning, preparing and testing for one right here our own backyard.  On Friday, January 18th, we’ll produce and live stream Technology Alliance Group Northwest’s (TAGNW)  Annual Predictions Luncheon from Syre Hall on the campus of Whatcom Community College.  Living in Bellingham is wonderful and working in Bellingham is even better!  We are honored to be part of what we expect to be a long running tradition.

[pullquote_right] Living in Bellingham is wonderful and working in Bellingham is even better![/pullquote_right]

The event and webcast gets underway around 11:45am with some formal introductions and organizational announcements.  Once the formalities are out of the way, the program moves right into tech-savvy prognosticator Mark Anderson’s predictions and some Q&A until about 1:30 or so.  After a little research, his ability to forecast the IT future is pretty darn good…  he’s been right more than 90% of the time over the last 10 years!

There are a couple things that make this webcast really cool:

  1. You can participate via our live chat feature. So if you have questions, we’ll ask them on your behalf.
  2. This is a great way to save on travel costs and time away from the office.
  3. If you are not in Bellingham but would like to attend, no problem.
  4. We’ll be broadcasting in H.264. So, it’ll work on your mobile device.

If you’d like to be part of the audience, either live or virtually, contact the good folks at TAGNW and they’ll set you up.  We’ll see you there or “there.”

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