Educating the Market
Most of the streaming content currently produced at Microsoft falls under the broad categories of e-learning and marketing. As a producer of sophisticated software products, Microsoft is faced not only with teaching its customer base how to use its products, but also to appreciate those products in the first place. Consequently, much of the streaming content produced by Microsoft's various product groups is intended to educate the market.
Michael Aldridge, lead product manager for Microsoft's Digital Media Division, notes, "There's a huge part of Microsoft devoted to educational outreach, for our channel partners, our external customers and individual end-users. We're integrating digital media, whether it be audio or video, streaming or download-and-play, throughout all of that."
Microsoft targets streams toward a number of different constituencies, including the developer and IT communities, business decision-makers, individual consumers, and Microsoft employees. Over 14,000 devotees of the Microsoft Developers Network tune in to The MSDN Show ( www.msdn. microsoft.com/theshow ), a monthly hour-long webcast geared toward developers who work with Microsoft products. Each episode focuses on a different technology, covering high-level issues and ground-level coding. Presentations typically consist of audio and video synchronized with PowerPoint slides, and are available in various bit rates from 56Kbps to T1 levels.
Microsoft maintains a more extensive archive of technical seminars intended for IT professionals on its Tech Net Inter-net site ( www.microsoft.com/technet/events/archive.asp ). These streaming seminars cover a wide range of topics, and are often created from materials first presented at physical events. Another Internet site, hosted by Microsoft's Product Support Services (support.microsoft.com), offers frequent support webcasts, often with opportunities for interactive Q&As. PSS has produced 138 of these 30-minute to one-hour webcasts to date, and offers 10 new, live webcasts each month.
"Almost all training is moving online. You can put these (presentations) together quickly, deliver your message in a timely fasion and address things in the marketplace that are salient now. Keeping up is becoming a full-time job."
Training material designed for business decision-makers and individual end-users is streamed through Microsoft's Seminar Online site ((www.microsoft.com/seminar/1033). More than 300 streaming presentations, covering a wide range of topics, are available. Aimed at less technically sophisticated users, most Seminar Online presentations consist of streaming audio and PowerPoint slides, and are streamed at 28.8Kbps. Microsoft uses Seminar Online in conjunction with other initiatives, and in some cases, in lieu of them.
"Seminar Online is designed to be supplementary to a lot of the outreach that we do on a fairly regular basis through a series of seminars that we deliver all over the country, and in many cases, all over the world," Aldridge explains. "What we used to do was go out and do road shows. We'd get IT professionals and business decision-makers and show them what Office and PowerPoint and Excel could do to empower them in their businesses. Now, a lot of that can be done online through multimedia presentations."
Microsoft also ties streaming into major marketing/ training events like its annual Tech Ed conference, an event designed for IT professionals. And, according to WMT's Matthias, streaming is playing an increasingly important role in that conference, and may even become a monetizing force. "The last couple of years they've started to capture and stream the keynotes and various other sessions live," he says. "They then repurpose them, and post them on-demand. What they're moving toward is a subscription model, where someone who actually went to the physical event might get access to the on-demand sessions for free, but if you didn't go to the live sessions, you pay a few hundred bucks to get access to all 20 hours. Potentially, in the future, they won't do a physical session."
Just as customers must be trained to use Microsoft products, so must the Microsoft sales force be trained to sell those products. The EKM Countdown site on the Microsoft intranet (EKM stands for Enterprise Knowledge Management) is a repository for product-related streaming media that Microsoft employees can access during the "countdown" to a new product's release. "The whole purpose behind the site is technical readiness for upcoming products. It's designed for our field sales force," Mattias explains.
Steve Carlisle, director of media services at Microsoft Studios, adds, "Keeping the field sales force in sync with the products is a big deal." EKM and other presentations accessed through the Microsoft intranet are typically streamed at 100Kbps.
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