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Earlier this year, ESPN killed its WatchESPN App. Now, all of ESPN’s streaming content is bundled into the ESPN app.

You might have been using the WatchESPN App to screen grab content you could then post to your sports team’s social media page. You can’t do that with the main ESPN app—it detects when users are trying to screen grab content. However, there’s a way you can still clip and share your sports team’s memorable moments—with SnapStream.

Clip & Share Moments from Live Video & Broadcast TV  

With SnapStream, you can clip and share any moment from broadcast TV and your own live video feeds. Specifically, you can create screenshots and frame-accurate GIFs and video clips. Then, with just a few clicks, you can email that content to anyone, or instantly post it to Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube. 

Make Clipping & Sharing a Collaborative Process

If you and your colleagues are live tweeting one of your team’s games, you can do so collaboratively—for example, you can divide up the work so that certain people create clips, and others look at those clips and decide which ones to post. SnapStream makes it easy to have that kind of workflow. It enables users to set clip points, and create and save bookmarks of those clips. Then, your colleagues can access those bookmarks and choose which ones to post.

Crop Clips for Instagram & Snapchat

SnapStream makes having Instagram and Snapchat-ready posts easy. There’s no need to use an additional editing tool. You can create screenshots, GIFs, and video clips with square dimensions, 9:16 dimensions, 16:9 dimensions, and 4:3 dimensions right within SnapStream.

SnapStream makes live video and  broadcast TV social. Our technology lets users instantly capture, create, and share video clips, GIFs, and screenshots to Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, as well as create square and vertical clips for Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok. SnapStream's customers include BuzzFeed, Major League Soccer, and the Arizona Coyotes.

In this summer's earning call, Facebook Founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, said, “If you go back ten years, most of how people communicated was through text. We’re entering into a period where that’s increasingly going to be video and we’re seeing huge growth there.”

The numbers show it:

• In November 2015, Facebook reported 8 billion daily video views (and in April 2015, the same stat was 4 billion daily video views).
• In January 2016, Facebook announced that 100 million hours of video are watched in Facebook daily.

So the arc of this is very clear.  We started with text and moved to images and now we're heading to video.

In the same earnings call last month, Facebook pointed out that, “people watch video differently in mobile newsfeed than on TV”.  As video dominates Twitter and Facebook, what are the new rules?

• Make sure you’re videos are uploaded natively: Linking to a YouTube video from Twitter or Facebook? It’s only going to get a fraction of the views and engagement that a native video will.  Post your videos natively to Facebook and Twitter so they autoplay and play with no lag time or extra clicks.

• Start out strong: Try to win the viewer’s attention within the first few seconds. Those first few seconds are your video’s email subject line or newspaper headline. Some examples from NowThisNews: 
  
  
  
  
  
  

• Add text overlays to your video: Since videos automatically play without sound, you can’t rely on sound to draw in the viewer. So... overlay text on top of your video.  The text needs to be short and crisp and choreographed with the video. My favorite example of this are the news videos made by NowThis. Or take a look at the cooking videos by Tip Hero. Here are a few examples:
  
  

  #ObamaAndKids is the most adorable thing in your feed https://t.co/QzxX9OA77Z

  — NowThis (@nowthisnews) February 22, 2016

  
  
  

  Some brilliant girl scouts are selling cookies outside weed dispensaries https://t.co/LswrdGFAGg

  — NowThis (@nowthisnews) February 23, 2016

• Upload closed captioning to your videos (Facebook videos only): An alternative to adding text overlays, Facebook allows you to upload close captioning with your videos. Closed captioning is displayed by default when a video autoplays so your video can be experienced without turning on the sound.  Here’s what this looks like: 
  
  
  
  How do you get the SubRip closed captioning file (.SRT) for your video?  A few choices:

• Use a third party video captioning / transcription service-- there are lots of them out there, a baseline cost estimate is $1 / minute of video.
• Caption your video yourself-- I’ve used a few different third party SRT creation tools. Aegisub is one of them that's free and open source. Aegisub let you type the text in as your video plays back. It takes a little bit of work, but it's not bad. Pay attention to the size of each block of text-- too short or too long and it'll be hard for the viewer to follow along.
• Use SnapStream (if you’re uploading TV clips)-- If the videos you’re uploading are TV clips (like the Daily Show or the Colbert Report), use SnapStream. We automatically pass-through closed captioning when you create a TV clip and post it to Facebook.

Update (February 11, 2016): If you doubted what I wrote below about how captions on native Facebook videos improved performance, see today's news that Facebook is now offering free automatic captioning of "brand" videos.

Did you know you can upload captions with your Facebook native video uploads?

This is a big deal and something you should always do... why? Well, apart from making your Facebook videos more accessible, it'll also increase the video views and engagement on your Facebook native video uploads.

How's that? Well, we live in a world of autoplay video. When someone scrolls through their Facebook news feed videos autoplay-- which is to say, it shows the moving picture but without any sound.  And if you upload a closed captioning file with your native video upload, Facebook autoplays the video with closed captioning display turned on.

This is a major key 🔑!!  With captioning display turned on, your autoplayed native video is more likely to draw in a viewer because the video can be experienced without audio. Here's an example of the Daily Show (a SnapStream customer) doing this on their Facebook native videos:

(separate question, but what was I doing up at 3:38am when I took this screenshot??)

So how can you upload closed captioning with your Facebook videos?

Facebook has this article on how to add captions to your uploaded videos (it involves uploading something called a SubRip file or an SRT file).

But if you're uploading TV clips to Facebook using SnapStream 7.0, you'll be happy to know we automatically passthrough the closed captioning.  So you don't have to do anything else-- it's just there.  Here's a screenshot of this in action:

If you want to learn more about how SnapStream makes it easy for social media managers to upload TV clips to Facebook (and Twitter), check out the SnapStream social TV features page.