TalkShopLive Teams With NBCUniversal for Shoppable Video

Video commerce platform TalkShopLive has launched a partnership with NBCUniversal.

The collaboration, set to kick off Thursday (Aug. 22), involves the two companies creating and streaming shoppable livestreams featuring entertainers such as Paris Hilton, who will host this week’s debut event.

“NBCUniversal is one of the most powerful brands in entertainment,” TalkShopLive Co-founder and CEO Bryan Moore said in a news release provided to PYMNTS. “Their massive reach paired with the power and scale of TalkShopLive’s multi-embed point-of-sale technology is truly a game changing partnership for what the future of video commerce and bridging the worlds of entertainment and retail together looks like–making every moment shoppable.”

According to the release, the debut event will center around Hilton’s new album, and also feature signed bookplates of the multi-hyphenate’s memoir. The livestream — held in conjunction with entertainment news source E! — can be seen on TalkShop.Live, the E! website and both E! and Hilton’s Facebook pages and Instagram feeds.

PYMNTS looked at the uphill road facing shoppable video earlier this year in a conversion with Vincent Yang, co-founder and CEO of video commerce platform Firework.

He noted that while commerce-integrated content such as shoppable livestreams have been catching on in China, shoppers in the United States are still more inclined to enjoy a more traditional online shopping experience.

“15 years ago, in the U.S., Shopify, WordPress and Squarespace were very big,” Yang said. “In China, people didn’t even have a laptop. So, that’s why China suddenly leapfrogged the website age directly to the mobile app age. In the U.S., because the website age was so big — it penetrated to every single brand — it actually makes it a lot harder to leapfrog to the next generation, which is fully mobile, fully immersive.”

Research by PYMNTS Intelligence shows that American consumers are happy with their experiences with retailers and brands’ websites. The report “The Online Features Driving Consumers to Shop With Brands, Retailers or Marketplaces” found that 76% of shoppers are highly satisfied when they buy products from a retailer’s site, and 72% are similarly pleased with their experience from brands’ sites.

Yang also pointed out that brands and retailers have witnessed poor adoption of shopping livestreams in the U.S. but that “shoppable video elements” are “actually starting to gain traction” — the more static kind that can be watched at any time.

“The reusability of livestreams is not very good, whereas with the shoppable videos, there’s no time duration for it,” he explained.