Narcos Uses Facebook Live to Debut Season Three Trailer

Narcos is probably one of the most exciting and intense TV shows right now. Following the dramatic death of main character Pablo Escobar in the series two finale, fans were waiting in high anticipation for the launch of the trailer for season three, to see where it would leave the series in terms of change to the direction of the plot. So when Netflix decided they wanted to reveal it by streaming it through Facebook Live, Team Telescope worked hard to help ‘deliver the goods’.

Working in unusual locations and overcoming any obstacle is one of our areas of expertise, and we believe it adds an additional layer of atmosphere to the overall experience. In the past, we’ve live streamed from beaches and football stadiums, to red carpet events and from the top of a bungee crane. This time, we broadcasted straight from the streets of Manhattan, directly across from Grand Central Station, with our production team powering a truly fan engaging live video.

The stream was hosted by one of Narcos newest cast members, Arturo Castro, and Frazier Tharpe, journalist from Complex News. To make things a little more interesting, Castro, who plays the role of cartel man David Rodriguez, invited viewers to not only watch the trailer, but also to ‘prove their worth’, by participating in a fun fan trivia session using our Hashtag Poll feature. To do this, we employed a quiz mechanic where users had 30 seconds to respond to questions posed by Frazier, using specific hashtags. Our graphics, which appeared on the video, had the question, a selection of potentially correct responses, and a 30 sec timer on it.

For example, the first question asked the viewers to guess which of the names listed on the screen were not a Cali Cartel nickname. We then used our poll template to aggregate results. This was the first time we used this approach, and it was great to see that fans responded very positively to it.

Overall, the 17 minute broadcast generated over 100,000 views, 337 shares and nearly 1,500 comments: “I can’t wait for the Season 3 of Narcos!”, commented one viewer, “That was absolutely Brilliant”, added another fan after seeing the trailer.