Webcasting Goes Social with new On24 Platform

With webcasts, the more interactivity the better.  Although they’re mostly one-way affairs, polls and questions from attendees have allowed some measure of audience participation in the past.  But in today’s social media clime, the ability to integrate  social media like twitter feeds into your event can drive up participation and retention – and produce a more satisfying event for all in attendance.

This article from Datamation highlights some new features just announced by webcast pioneer On24.  Their new widget-oriented platform allows integration with applications like twitter, allows webcasters to tailor the look of the screen in ways not before possible and promises to offer levels of interactivity that have only been possible in face to face events in the past.

Webcasting reaches into the afterlife – Funerals on Demand

When my father passed away earlier this year the funeral home worked with our family to create a tribute video with a photo montage of dad over the years.  They burned a video CD which we shared with those who couldn’t be there, and it still brings smiles. 

Now it seems social media and webcasting have also crossed that final chasm into the great beyond.

While doing my daily scan of webcasting news, I came upon this article about an Australian funeral home that now offers webcasts as part of its funeral services offering for those friends and family that can’t attend the ummm… live event.

They are also offering  real-time messaging so those attending remotely can email a friend, post a message of condolence or light a tribute candle on the family’s web page.

Whoda thunk it?

Animating Webcasts: Flash, Video and .PPT Builds

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.

Webcasting to 80,000 attendees? Here’s how.

I’ve participated in a few webcasts with over a thousand attendees.  A few years ago, a webcast I moderated with Sun Micro’s Jonathan Schwartz drew over four thousand attendees to a seamless event, thanks to our friends at On24.  But what if you need to reach an audience twenty times that size?  This ComputerWorld article lays out Adobe Connect Pro’s newest release which includes support for up to 80,000 attendees.

Think of it as a really big virtual flash mob.

Creating Hybrid events – meshing live and virtual worlds

Hybrid events combine a face to face event with virtual attendees around the globe in a seamless community.  This article at Virtual Edge highlights a new venture between digital media and webcasting pioneer Sonic Foundry and event networking firm Zerista, bringing video to these private communities that live in both worlds.

Webcasting with Video – New partnership adds pop to webcast platform

In today’s press releases was this blurb from CGS and Stream57 about their new partnership offering streaming video support for CGS’ webcasting platform.

Used extensively for broadcast-style presentations such as training and executive pitches, video is finding its way into more B2B webcasts for demonstrations or to add a more personal touch by giving an animated ‘face’ to the presenter rather than a static PowerPoint head shot that so many platforms use.

When choosing the platform for your next webcast think about the media you want to use and how it fares across the webcasting platform.

Happy 40th, Internet!

It’s the internet’s 40th birthday, and that got me to thinking about where I was 40 years ago this week. - Brooklyn Tech high school where I was learning my first programming language, FORTRAN IV.  We had an IBM 1130 minicomputer at Tech, one of the very few high schools to have any kind of computer at all in 1969.  The 1130 was a workhorse of the day, and I remember the IBM engineer telling me that one powered the Shea Stadium scoreboard.  Pretty cool stuff to a 15 year old Mets fan, especially since they were embroiled in their first World Series at the time.

Tech was Geek High then.  Six thousand future engineers attended this public school with TV and radio station, architectural, electronic and metallury labs (to name a few), even a bowling alley.  And the global distributed network?  It belonged to Ma Bell and was all voice.

“Computer Math” was the name of the subject, but it was all about programming and operating that IBM mini.  We learned how to code, punched our programs into 80-column cards, and fed them into the hungry card-eating monster, praying that our programs would run without error. 

Now, we are so accustomed to the instant response of our PCs and networks that it’s hard to fathom that major corporations then had less compute power than today’s average cellphone. 

The internet has changed much more in the past 10 years than in the first 30 of its existence.  I can only imagine what the bleeding edge will be another 10 years hence.