Oppenheimer Trailer

A trail(er)blazing year-long live stream…

Groovy Gecko loves a streaming challenge, so when Universal Pictures approached us to help with a year-long live stream for their upcoming movie, Oppenheimer, we jumped at the chance.

Objectives.

Extended live streams for Christopher Nolan films are nothing new to Groovy Gecko, having produced a 24 hour event back in 2017 for the blockbuster, Dunkirk. This time, the objective was bigger and more challenging… To live stream a dynamic film trailer for Universal’s upcoming Oppenheimer film, continuously, for 1 year.

What we did.

This isn’t just any regular trailer looping a VT for 12 months. Instead, each viewer will have a unique experience when viewing the content owing to the dynamic countdown in the trailer, meaning that whenever you join the stream, you are given an accurate countdown (to the millisecond) for when the film will be released.  Groovy Gecko’s challenge was to create a robust streaming workflow with redundancy that would allow the live stream to sit on multiple social media platforms and deliver the dynamic and unique user experience.

Our first challenge was to understand the social media platform capabilities and whether it was possible to stream a continuous live stream to them. Given our relationships with the social media giants, (many of them clients of ours), we were able to quickly establish that YouTube, Twitter and Twitch (with some specific encoder configuration) would be suitable for this activation. Facebook, which had in the past supported continuous lives, no longer supported the feature and therefore wasn’t an option for this delivery. 

Once we had the destination platforms locked down, we then needed to think about the streaming workflow and redundancy we could put in place to ensure an uninterrupted delivery. Our approach was to create streaming hubs at multiple locations meaning we have redundancy on hardware, power and network connectivity. In addition, our developers built an uptime robot health monitoring tool which is constantly checking the stream health on all platforms and in the event of any issues, will trigger a warning to our engineering team to investigate and resolve. 

The live stream racked up millions of views in the first few days of going live and continues to pull in impressive viewing figures. 

You can check out the dynamic live stream until July 2023… 

watch the LIVE TRAILER.