Virtual events platform Hopin acquires Streamyard

Virtual events platform Hopin last week acquired live-streaming studio Streamyard for a reported $250 million. The move represents consolidation in the virtual events space.

Two start-ups combine. U.K.-founded and London-based Hopin, a statrt-up not yet two years old, has as its mission giving event organizers “the ability to recreate the in-person event experience as closely as possible, but online and all in one place.”

Streamyard, Oregon-based and one year older than its purchaser, is a browser-based live streaming studio which can stream directly to Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, and other platforms.

A platform for full-scale conferences. Unlike Zoom, for example, Hopin offers functionality suitable for conferences as well as for small group meetings, including ticketing and registration, break-out groups and meetings, and an expo area.

Last month, Hopin acquired mobile event app Topi, originally developed for in-person events.

All-in-one v. best-of-breed. Hopin aims to offer, in effect, a virtual event venue, with all the features required to host a virtual conference for a large audience. This is an alternative to the best-of-breed approach described by Third Door Media’s SVP Marketing and Technology, Marc Sirkin, at the MarTech conference last year.

“When we looked at what was in the market-place and what we had used before, and mapped it to what our requirements were for success,” he said, “it became evident to us that we could do this at lower cost and much more flexibility [by assembling] best-of-breed components and elements — for exmaple, we’re streaming through Streamyard to Vimeo…”

Why we care. We’re witnessing the same debate around the virtual event stack that has played out around the full martech stack for several years: the all-in-one, plug and play package versus highly customized, purpose-built stacks. Whichever side of the debate is favored, more consolidation in the virtual event space seems likely this year.

Sirkin and Vasil Azarov, CEO of the Growth Marketing Conference, discussed this topic in an episode of MarTech Live.

About The Author

Kim Davis

Kim Davis is the Editorial Director of MarTech Today. Born in London, but a New Yorker for over two decades, Kim started covering enterprise software ten years ago. His experience encompasses SaaS for the enterprise, digital- ad data-driven urban planning, and applications of SaaS, digital technology, and data in the marketing space. He first wrote about marketing technology as editor of Haymarket’s The Hub, a dedicated marketing tech website, which subsequently became a channel on the established direct marketing brand DMN. Kim joined DMN proper in 2016, as a senior editor, becoming Executive Editor, then Editor-in-Chief a position he held until January 2020. Prior to working in tech journalism, Kim was Associate Editor at a New York Times hyper-local news site, The Local: East Village, and has previously worked as an editor of an academic publication, and as a music journalist. He has written hundreds of New York restaurant reviews for a personal blog, and has been an occasional guest contributor to Eater.