Inside LabourStart

Our 12 hour live broadcast showcasing videos produced by trade unions around the world on May Day was a huge success.

This event exceeded all our expectations.  We were able to show nearly 200 videos over the course the day, despite two system crashes.  Those videos varied in quality, as we expected, but many were outstanding and LabourStart will be sharing these over the next few days through our website and across social media.  I expect that many others – especially our global union partners – will do the same.

Our audience came from all over the world and the feedback in the comments on Facebook was exceptionally positive.  Many trade unionists saw this as a unique opportunity to make contact with friends they don’t normally get the chance to see, and to greet one another over huge distances.

Vimeo, which livestreamed the event for us, reported that during the first 6.5 hours (before we crashed), we had 46,865 views of the video stream.  The number of viewers may be less than that, in case some people stopped viewing and later came back and started up again.  Still, the numbers are much higher than we expected.

We had an indication that this was the case because of the very large number of ‘likes’ the videos were getting, especially during that first half of the broadcast.

Thank you to everyone who helped — and long live May Day!