Inside Thomson Reuters: Creating a Global Webcasting Platform

Streaming Media: How far up and down the production chain do you guys take things in-house, and where do you farm out work to contractors?
Ball: We contract out the satellite news gathering and the camera crews generally. We have our own on-site producers that go and manage our contractors on behalf of the client, and our on-site producers will connect back to our encoding centre. Our backhaul is almost invariably IP-based using local pipes or ISDN.

Streaming Media: I remember 8 or 9 years ago, we used to have people either sitting on a Windows Media encoder at the back of the stage pressing buttons when the presenter changed a slide or, even more primitively, speaking on a mobile phone and saying, "slide 6", to an ops centre colleague! I take it you guys are a little more sophisticated than that?
Ball: We’ve moved on from those days! We have a web interface that allows you to go and synchronise the slides. It’s fairly sophisticated, and you can have multiple presentations [and] you can have multiple people controlling slides, as you’d expect in the modern day. Our clients sometimes push their own slides because that’s what they want to do, and sometimes they want us to push them for them, but it’s a web interface. I suppose where there is some technology that is kind of interesting and, I think, unique to us because we have these five encoding centres—we generally bring the signal back as H.264 to our encoding centre and create the Windows Media/Flash/Real files from there in their various bitrates. Then we have an encoding array where we stream the live stream in its various formats, and we do a master recording, which can then be transcoded at the same time as the live stream is happening, so it gives us the ability to version the webcast while it’s still happening.

Cotter: For customers who want to ensure that the on-demand content is available as close to the time of the live presentation as possible, we’ve built our platform to accommodate that need.

Streaming Media: How involved are you in helping clients create the content for their webcasts?
Cotter: Our experience working with thousands of clients across the enterprise allows us to be consultative. We can say, "Here’s how several of our clients approached this kind of challenge, and here are some solutions we’ve seen work well". That is valued by our clients a great deal. But what we don’t do is consult with them on their individual message. We’ll provide some guidance around the message for them to consider. And while we won’t help them craft the message, we will help them distribute the message to the right audience in the most effective way.

Streaming Media: Are you at all prescriptive, for example, in how they prepare PowerPoint presentations and such? Are there any limitations, or are people free to use features such as transitions, animations, embedded video, and that sort of thing? Do you have to give them a framework within which to operate that’s technology-led, or do you just say, "Send us the PowerPoint and we’ll work out all the problems"?
Ball: I would like to say it’s the latter, but the reality is that we do give them a bit of a framework and some guidance. Heavy on animations obviously can cause issues, and embedded video in the PowerPoint is a no-go, but there are ways of conveying that video message as a play in, so they can incorporate it into the webcast as opposed to incorporate into the PowerPoint presentation, in our case.

Ball: Well, yes, particularly with Windows Media, you’re kind of tied to the encoding and Windows Media server latency that’s inherent, so it is around 20 seconds in terms of disclosure.

Streaming Media: Does latency cause issues with regard to disclosure of market sensitive information?
Cotter: No, it hasn’t. Normally investors are updating their models as soon as information is available to the market, and they’re updating those models from a variety of tools that are feeding off of regulatory filings databases, press releases, [and] a number of disclosure mechanisms. I think the power of the conference call is that disclosure call is often scripted—indeed many of our clients will prerecord the call. The Q&A is the more dynamic portion of the call typically, and again, I think the institutional investors are more often than not on the actual conference call because that’s the interactive component. For the webcast, I haven’t heard that a 20-second delay created some unfair trading advantage or disadvantage, so I don’t think that’s an issue at all.