Most webcasts entail a slide deck created in PowerPoint and accompanying audio – one ore more presenters sharing their sales, marketing or training presentation with a remote audience.  Until recently many of the major webcast platforms utilized a static version of your slides with all animation and builds removed.  To effect a build you broke the build slide down into a series of slides that each showed the next stage of the build.  It works, but it’s a pain if your deck is already created WITH the builds.

And as webcasters strive to engage audiences further, the demand for videos – whether to entertain, show a demo or have a busy executive make a “guest appearance” during an event – has put pressure on webcast platform companies to deliver a richer media experience across a wider variety of browsers.

I recently had the chance to speak with Mark Szelenyi, Director of Product Marketing for San Francisco-based On24, one of the most popular platforms for large webcasts and the one I’ve used for hundreds of Ziff-Davis Enterprise eSeminars and PCMagCasts over the past several years.  As On24 continues to expand beyond simple webcasts to virtual trade shows and virtual briefing centers they have recently added Flash capability to their arsenal of technologies, resulting in a host of benefits for presenters and audience alike.

Moving to flash offers better compatibility for different web browsers.  Older On24 versions relied on either Windows Media Player or Real Player, but flash is universally available across all popular browsers.

The flash-based platform also allows PowerPoint transitions and animations to be incorporated easily.  As presenters bring up the slide in the present console, they see how many builds each slide has as well as the build they’re currently on.  This way there’s no guessing what happens when they press the advance button.

Flash also improves interactivity in a key way.  Before, On24 interactive polls were delivered as pop-ups, so attendees would have to disable their popup blockers to participate in polling questions.  The flash version eliminates that drawback and can increase the percentage of attendees who actually respond to the polling questions, and more interactivity is always better.

Pricing for the new Flash-based webcasts is slightly higher than their non-flash counterparts, but may be well worth it if you are ‘build-heavy’ or looking to broaden your webcast’s reach.