Choosing a Webcasting Vendor: It's All in the Details
For video production professionals, the challenges of producing world-class webcasts presents a dilemma: Do you acquire the skills, expertise, and technology to expand your offering, or simply partner with an organization that can produce the high-quality webcast your clients are expecting?
[This Onstream Media-sponsored article appeared first in Streaming Media's Shoot, Switch, Stream Live Production Field Guide.]
Internet broadcasting has provided organizations with unprecedented power to deliver their messages to a wide audience. Enterprises are now using webcasts for a wide variety of communications, including quarterly earnings announcements, press conferences, product launches, meetings, and major entertainment and sporting events.
A world-class webcast involves more than just streaming video. Organizations have come to expect high-quality virtual events with mixed media such as live streaming video, branded presentation slides, and graphics. A complete webcasting solution should also offer registration, participant Q&A, polling, post-event surveys, analytics, and reports. The key is having the flexibility to provide your clients with exactly the services they require.
For video production professionals, this presents a dilemma: Do you acquire the skills, expertise, and technology to expand your offering, or simply partner with an organization that can produce the high-quality webcast your clients are expecting?
Partnering for Success
Acquiring expertise and technology may not be economically feasible, while partnering with a professional webcasting provider can give you cost-effective access to a complete set of services to round out your own offerings. Look for managed solutions, with innovative, reliable technology that will allow you to deliver premier webcasting services.
When considering a webcasting vendor, adaptability is important. Every event is unique, and your vendor partner should be able to tailor its solutions to fit your requirements and the complexity of the event itself. Onstream Media [http://onstreammedia.com], for instance, can adapt its tools and services to your infrastructure and capabilities. We can take your signal from a video conferencing unit, fiber feed, or satellite downlink.
You can request an on-site encoder if necessary; or, if you own your own encoder, we can accept your feed and facilitate the webcast transmission.
Your vendor should work with you and your client to determine optimal streaming parameters – to ensure that the target audience for the webcast has the correct stream to match its available bandwidth.