The Webinar Blog

Protecting Recorded Intellectual Property

Readers, I would like your help addressing a question from one of my clients. Please add comments with your thoughts.

Consider a scenario where you offer training via online recorded content. Your revenue stream is based on people purchasing the right to watch and listen to your recordings. You would like legitimate customers to be able to watch when they please, stop and resume later, and come back to a recording to watch it again.

You don’t want one person to be able to buy access and then send the viewing link to everyone they know. Is there any practical way to allow viewing convenience for customers while protecting your content from wider availability?

I can think of a few ways to implement security, but they all have downsides:

• Only allow immediate viewing at time of purchase. There is no provision for coming back and continuing or reviewing content you have already seen. This is absolutely secure, but violates the basic premise we set up.
• Only allow access from the IP address used on the initial purchase or content view. This would stop people from spreading a viewing link, but it seems impractical in an age when people use multiple devices in multiple locations, often with dynamic addressing. The person should have access… Not the computer.
• Offer each customer an individual access link that has a maximum number of uses, after which it gets shut down. This would limit the number of times it could be successfully forwarded, but also restricts potential fair use by a legitimate purchaser. I don’t know of any web recording technology that has implemented this option, do you?
• Generate an individual password for each customer’s access with an automatic expiration period. This is essentially the same idea as the preceding example. Bad guys could forward the access information, but only for a limited time. It couldn’t expose your content to everyone forever. Has any company implemented this strategy?
• Use voiceprint identification for access. The customer has to call a phone number or use a computer microphone to establish identity every time he or she wants to view the content. It’s technically possible, although I would think that customer support would be busy dealing with people who don’t get recognized because of bad phone connections or other issues. And it isn’t very convenient for the customer. Probably expensive to implement as well.

As recorded webinars become more prevalent for delivering fee-based content, this issue is going to vex more small businesses who can’t afford much in the way of intellectual property theft. When you depend on each viewing for your business income, every shared access is money out of your pocket.

What’s your solution?

Technorati Tags: webinar,recorded content,recorded training,web training,webcast,podcast,intellectual property,password security

When Webinar Disaster Strikes

I always advocate preparing for a public webinar with as many backups and failsafe contingencies as you can manage. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred they will be completely wasted and you will feel faintly silly for going through the hassle (and possibly the expense) of setting up an extra computer, extra phone line, extra headset, printed copies of your presentation material, an emergency audio conference number, and preparation for having someone else advance your slides. But that 100^th time, you will feel like a hero for being able to continue with your webinar even in the face of something going wrong.

But even with the best planning and safeguards in place, you can still hit a catastrophic event that forces abandonment of your webinar or loss of access for a significant portion of your audience. I have had to cancel webinars due to fire alarms in the building and safety evacuations on September 11, 2001. Oprah Winfrey and Arnold Schwarzenegger have both faced webcast breakdowns that prevented large numbers of potential participants from joining their events.

Last week it happened to Brainshark, a company that ironically enough stresses the value of creating recorded presentations in place of, or in addition to, live webinars. They were giving a live educational webinar for users of their technology. They wanted to encourage lots of interaction and teamwork in the audience, so they decided to use “breakout sessions” in their webinar. This is a feature found in a few of the biggest webinar technologies, allowing a host to segment attendees into smaller meeting groups where they can interact before all coming back to the full-attendee presentation. Brainshark was using Microsoft Office Live Meeting, which includes the functionality.

Even though they tested the functionality ahead of time, something went terribly wrong in the live event. Every attendee coming in to the session had presenter-level control of the slides! So people were moving slides forward and backward for the entire audience, making the presenter’s job almost impossible. Then when they tried to start the breakout groups, one of the subgroups found themselves locked out of their meeting room (Possibly because an early entrant with presenter-level control changed a setting… It’s hard to tell).

Many attendees abandoned the meeting as a lost cause. Others stayed, but the Brainshark organizers had to admit that it wasn’t the professional experience they wanted to provide, and they didn’t have a chance to deliver the educational value or the image of their company that they should have.

So they did the right thing. As quickly as they could, they wrote an email and sent it to all registrants for the event. I won’t attempt to reprint the entire communication in this post, but you can click here to read it.

What did Brainshark do right?

• They communicated quickly (within 90 minutes)
• They took responsibility
• They empathized with the audience’s experience
• They gave a brief explanation to satisfy curiosity without lingering on blame
• They emphasized the positive rather than the negative
• They said what they were doing to redeliver the promised value

Taking a fast, proactive position in this way can help alleviate a lot of pent-up frustration and anger. I saw one response email that came back to Brainshark. In part, it said:

“In spite of all the technical difficulties yesterday, I THOROUGHLY enjoyed the webinar and I feel like I got a lot out of it.  Nobody likes feeling like they are wasting time, but I could see the value of the content, and I could see that technical issues were the main issue. 

But hey, you and your team did a great job of keeping your cool and working together to make the most out of it… and I’m sure anyone else who was lucky enough to get into one of those breakaway sessions enjoyed it as much as I did.  I really got a lot out of the scriptwriting session and look forward to looking at the others once they are in Brainshark.”

Your audience can appreciate a cool and calm approach to disaster management and recovery. They appreciate being told what happened. They appreciate being told how they will be able to get the benefits they were promised. And mainly they appreciate being respected and valued enough to be kept in the loop.

My thanks to Brainshark and Irwin Hipsman, Brainshark Director of Customer Community, for letting me use their problematic session as a learning experience for others.

 

Technorati Tags: Brainshark,Microsoft Live Meeting,webinar,web seminar,web event,web meeting,online event,online seminar,online meeting,webcast,webcasting,web conference,web conferencing,customer relations