TalkShopLive partners with NBCUniversal for shoppable video

Video commerce platform TalkShopLive has launched a partnership with NBCUniversal.

As part of the collaboration, which is set to begin on Thursday (August 22), the two companies will create and stream livestreams featuring shopping and entertainers such as Paris Hilton, who will host the debut event this week.

“NBCUniversal is one of the strongest brands in entertainment,” said Bryan Moore, co-founder and CEO of TalkShopLive, in a press release to PYMNTS. “Their tremendous reach coupled with the power and scale of TalkShopLive's multi-embed point-of-sale technology is truly a game-changing partnership for the future of video commerce and connecting the worlds of entertainment and retail – making every moment shoppable.”

According to the press release, the debut event will focus on Hilton's new album and will also include signed bookplates of the multi-talented artist's memoir. The livestream — which is being held in partnership with entertainment news source E! — can be viewed on TalkShop.Live, the E! website, and E! and Hilton's Facebook pages and Instagram feeds.

Earlier this year, PYMNTS spoke to Vincent Yang, co-founder and CEO of video commerce platform Firework, about the difficult challenges of shopping video.

He noted that while commerce-integrated content, such as live streams with shopping capabilities, is gaining traction in China, shoppers in the U.S. still tend to prefer a more traditional online shopping experience.

“15 years ago, Shopify, WordPress and Squarespace were very big in the U.S.,” Yang said. “In China, people didn't even have a laptop. So China suddenly jumped the website era right into the mobile app era. In the U.S., the website era was so big – it permeated every single brand – that it's actually much harder to make the jump to the next generation, which is fully mobile and fully immersive.”

Research from PYMNTS Intelligence shows that American consumers are satisfied with their experiences with retailers and brand websites. The report, “The Online Features That Drive Consumers to Shop with Brands, Retailers or Marketplaces,” found that 76% of shoppers are very satisfied when purchasing products on a retailer's website, and 72% are similarly satisfied with their experiences on brand websites.

Yang also pointed out that brands and retailers in the U.S. are seeing weak adoption of shopping livestreams, but that “shoppable video elements” – the more static kind that can be viewed at any time – are “actually gaining traction.”

“The reusability of live streams is not very good, whereas shoppable videos have no time limit on it,” he explained.