Webcasting for the Masses
Rich Media Communications
The rich media communications category includes presentations with PowerPoint slides and other graphics, as well as chat, polling, Q&A, and other similar features. If you’re running a conference or training seminar and want your live video stream to incorporate all the elements actually used by the presenter, you will likely need a rich media communications system.
This is a rich media presentation courtesy of Accordent and Intel.If you’re the technical type, your inner programmer may be telling you that you can build this functionality pretty easily in Flash or Silverlight, and you’d be right. However, Intel’s Wayne Waterman, a streaming media engineer who runs Intel’s webcasts, warns that rolling your own system is seldom the best answer. Here are his comments from an on-demand presentation available on the Accordent website:
When I initially did the multicast webcasting infrastructure at Intel, everything was home grown … and it quickly became totally unscalable. … An automated system that ties video production into your skins, into your home page, and into your metrics tracking, with a single package that can parse and collect all of that data, is the difference between scalability and no scalability.In other words, if you plan on producing webcasts frequently in the future, you should buy rather than make. Fortunately, as shown in
Table 3, there are a host of providers in this market space, with models varying among the participants. Choosing between them involves answering a range of questions and about your unique needs and requirements.The first question involves business model and initial CAPEX investment. Two of the best known participants—Accordent and Sonic Foundry—use the traditional software/hardware model, where you buy and install a dedicated computer from the company, and then start broadcasting from your own website or via an arrangement with a third-party service provider such as a CDN. In addition, Sonic Foundry will host the live and/or on-demand website for you, a service that Accordent doesn’t offer.
Qumu sells an installed hardware/software option, but also a software-as-a-service (SaaS) option that may minimize your initial investment. Multicast Media, an LSSP, is one of the few in that category that offers support for PowerPoint slides so you can also consider their service for rich media communications. Other SaaS providers include Datmedia and TalkPoint. In addition, Livestream recently released Procaster, an SaaS available as a free, advertising-supported offering and also as a white label offering.
For event-staging companies serving other companies and organizations holding live events, it probably makes sense to become familiar with multiple rich media systems so as to recommend and implement the one that’s best for the customer’s budget. For example, Midori Connolly, owner of Pulse Staging and Events, Inc. in Escondido, Calif., has used both Livestream Procaster and Sonic Foundry’s Mediasite for different events that she’s produced.
Connolly has been trained on Mediasite and can rent a system from Sonic Foundry for specific events. While she prefers this approach, some clients don’t have the budget, and she’s produced successful "hybrid" events with Procaster, including a recent webcast hosted in San Diego and joined by viewers in Las Vegas.
Connolly has an interesting perspective on live event streaming, having started as a traditional event AV producer. At one event where she was providing camera and projection services, she noticed someone in the audience with a camcorder, and asked what he was doing. When he responded that he was capturing video for a webcast, Connolly realized that she was one Ethernet cable away from being in the live streaming broadcasting business. She invested in training and learning the systems and started providing this service to her clients. She is now a recognized subject matter expert on "event casting" and hybrid or virtual meetings.
The key takeaway from my conversation with Connolly was this: If you or a client of yours is hosting an event—whether a four-person training session in a conference room or a glittery conference in an exhibition hall—if you already have a camera on-site, you’re only one or two simple and inexpensive steps from broadcasting that event live.
Choosing a System
OK, back to choosing a rich media communications system. As a frequent speaker at webinars and conferences, I’ve learned that one key issue is how much the presenters have to change their style to accommodate the system. For example, uploading PowerPoint slides 1 or 2 days before the event seems reasonable, but speaking for myself, it’s rare when I don’t polish my PowerPoint the morning of the presentation.
This screen from Livestream (formerly Mogulus) Procaster shows the PowerPoint on the right, with the talking head on the left.Also, what happens if I Alt-Tab from PowerPoint to a webpage, animation, or other application? Systems that capture only the PowerPoint slide deck won’t incorporate the important visual diversions into the on-demand presentation, while those that capture the desktop or VGA output will.
Another consideration is whether the conferencing system maintains the slides, video, and other content as separate objects that can be reused as needed or gloms them together into a single FLV or WMV file. While this can be reused, the individual objects within the file can’t be. Obviously, the former approach is preferred.
You’ll want to check which player formats the system supports. Some, such as Accordent, support Flash, Windows Media, and Silverlight, but neither Mediasite nor Qumu support Flash. You’ll also want to understand the encoding options available with each system. As mentioned, some vendors offer a dedicated hardware or software option, which will likely be more expensive but also offer greater functionality and integration.
Ease of use is also critical, particularly if you won’t have a moderator at each session. Some systems allow you to automatically schedule presentations, so operation is completely transparent to the user. Sonic Foundry has a Recorder Monitor that lets you monitor multiple presentations from a single centralized location, and start, stop, and switch the input device remotely.
Another critical factor to consider, particularly in a conference environment, is the amount of remote interactivity enabled or supported by the system, such as chat, polling, and Q&A. R.T. Hamilton Brown, a program manager who helps run the conferences for The Sloan Consortium, reports that these and other social networking features helped make remote users feel like "they were in the room" at the recently completed International Conference on Online Learning. To promote this community even further, Sloan assigned "conveners" to each presentation to ensure that questions asked by remote participants were answered, particularly because remote viewers can’
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