We are a mobile country. When a young couple gets married, more and more friends and family are being asked to travel to attend the ceremony. Imagine a couple who meet at college, each one from a different state. I’ve talked to brides trying to coordinate bridesmaid’s dresses and groomsman’s tuxedos for friends from around the country who would not meet until the wedding day.

And for every person who attends the wedding, there is someone else that would like to have attended, but couldn’t afford to fly in for the wedding.

With online video now so commonplace, would the couple be interested in a live streaming video of the ceremony? Could you offer this service? It is a lot easier to do than you think.

For example, Google+ recently announced a service called Hangouts On Air. This is a free and easy solution to reach people via videos. Here’s what you need to know to get started.

This kind of service has some unique advantages over typical videography:

• It’s new, exciting and cool.

• If you have a laptop and video camera (or an iPad!) with a high-speed Internet connection, you’ve already got all the hardware.

• Because it is a live video stream, you don’t have to worry about capturing and editing HD quality video and audio like a videographer does.

• You can collect email addresses from the bride before the ceremony to announce to them how to watch the live video, then later send them a gentle reminder to contact you if they would like the same service for their wedding – or any event.

• You could offer this paid service (you’ll need an extra assistant) as an add-on to a full wedding package. You could even go further and offer to live stream the reception, or for an additional fee to upload the video to YouTube for the bride to share later with family and friends.

Eventually brides will start asking for this service. Why not be the first to offer it?

What do you think? Could this be an added income stream for your studio? Share your thoughts below.

Tags: marketing, video

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This entry was posted on Thursday, May 31st, 2012 at 8:39 am and is filed under marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.