How to Choose the Right Platform for Your Hybrid Event
What are some of the most important factors when choosing a platform for your hybrid event? Chris Pfaff, CEO, Chris Pfaff Tech Media, Producers Guild of America (PGA), VR AR Association (VRARA), gets into the details of this question with Dan Houze, VP, Encoding & Digital Strategy, BC Live, and Alex Lindsay, Head of Operations, 090 Media, in this chat from Streaming Media Connect 2023.
Pfaff asks Houze, “When is the platform a help or a hindrance, or does it really matter? Because there's so many of them and some of them are even bespoke depending on which company and how much money they have.”
Houze notes that BC Live often has clients who have already chosen a platform they want to use, and his company’s focus is to work within that established model to deliver the best outcome for the event. Otherwise, he says, “I think the challenge that we're in now is trying to keep up with all these platforms, trying to figure out who's going to be sticking around for a while because there's a big investment, there's a big learning curve for your production folks, for the end users, [and] making sure that it's a good product [that can] interpolate easily between mobile devices and desktop and where the people are in the world, that end audience that you're trying to go after. So there are some heavy players that we tend to lean towards.”
Pfaff asks Lindsay what his take is on the question. Lindsay notes that a big issue is how there remains a baked-in approach to putting together events firmly rooted in how traditional in-person events were assembled. “For thousands of years, we didn't have video,” he says. “We made all these rules about physical events because we had to get everybody in one place. And to do that, we might as well talk about a bunch of things all at one time because [the attendees] paid for travel, and they have a hotel room. And so there are all these constraints of the physical world that we're weighing our virtual events down with. When we get out of that and say, well, we can have an event that happens for three months and culminate in a physical event or start in a physical event. Still, it doesn't have to be all there, and when we do that, we can have a lot more people because the real power is interactivity with the audience, when you want to see average view time and sequential attendance and all the important numbers. The useless numbers are reach and concurrent views and total views, and all the silly things. When you want to talk about average view time and sequential attendance, what you're talking about is interaction. Like how do we ask questions? How do we interact directly?”
“I love what Alex is saying,” Houze remarks. “It’s interesting because I'm thinking back to conferences that I've gone to in person, right? And I'm thinking, well, wait a second, they never do any interaction at these conferences, right?”
Lindsay says, “I've spoken at a lot of conferences and my plan is to speak for 10 minutes and then answer questions, and it has worked for 20 years. We tell everyone when we're talking about events, flip that switch because what happens is you want to get people out of passive listening and into active listening as fast as you can. And the best way to do that is to answer their questions.”
“One of the masters at that is Leo LaPorte, right?” Houze says. “It's like, ‘Leo, how are you on air 24 hours a day?’ And it's driven by the audience, right? It's a brilliant way to conduct your meetings and to really get at what people are wanting and needing.”
Learn more about hybrid event platforms at Streaming Media East 2023.
Related Articles
As streaming has moved through the pandemic years into a new normal that isn't exactly what anyone expected, the meaning of hybrid event streaming production and delivery that has emerged over the last few years continues to evolve. So what does it mean in 2023, for producers, organizations, and audiences, both onsite and remote? And what can streamers do to level the playing field for those participating from near and far? In this clip from their recent panel at Streaming Media Connect 2023, LiveX's Anna Cowdery, Ohio State's Derrick Freeman, Boston 25 News's Ben Ratner, Stream4us' Anthony Burokas, and Howard & Associates' Andy Howard discuss best definitions and best practices for hybrid event video in 2023.
20 Sep 2023
Are hybrid meetings the new normal for corporate communications, presentations, and training? EY's Waseem Ahmad and LinkedIn's Dan Swiney discuss the future of hybrid events and the technical challenges involved in getting there in this clip from Streaming Media Connect 2023.
08 May 2023
What are hybrid streaming environments and how do large-scale streamers and broadcasters manage workloads and divide tasks between cloud and on-prem infrastructure? Microsoft's Andy Beach and TV2's Loke Dupont discuss distribution strategies in this clip from Streaming Media Connect 2023.
05 May 2023
The biggest problem with hybrid events is focusing entirely on the on-site audience treating the online/digital audience like an afterthought. 090 Media's Alex Lindsay, who's been producing virtual and hybrid events since well before the pandemic, and Social180Group's John Porterfield provide indispensable tips on how to avoid falling into that trap, and fully integrating digital audiences into the event experience in this clip from Streaming Media Connect 2023.
28 Apr 2023
How can enterprise streamers produce and deliver high-engagement and high-reliability hybrid events that serve their streaming audiences as effectively as their on-site participants? The answer is both art and science, strategy, and tech, as LinkedIn's Dan Swiney and MediaPlatform's Mike Newman discuss in this clip from Streaming Media Connect 2023.
24 Mar 2023
What's wrong with today's hybrid events? Where is the QoE for remote attendees? 090 Media's Alex Lindsay and BC Live's Dan Houze diagnose the problem and prescribe the solution in this clip from Streaming Media Connect 2023.
22 Mar 2023
LinkedIn's Dan Swiney and Lockheed Martin's Eric Hards discuss how their organizations' approach to events and internal meetings has evolved since the pandemic's start in this panel from Streaming Media West 2022.
17 Feb 2023
090 Media's Alex Lindsay discusses the challenges of engaging remote streaming audiences with hybrid events and the advantages of digital-first productions in this clip from Streaming Media West 2022.
16 Jan 2023