The Webinar Blog

Mile-High Webinars? Nonsense

TMCnet ran a “Web Conferencing Featured Article” written by David Sims. I put their designator in quotes because this is rather obviously a sponsored piece touting VIA3 web conferencing. Okay, I can accept that.

What I can’t accept is the allegedly factual central theme of the article. It is not about the theoretical possibility of joining web conferences from airplanes, it states it as a normal mode of business currently being employed by a VIA3 employee. To wit:

“Teresa is one of the progressive information workers who takes advantage of airline Wi-Fi and Web Conferencing to deliver presentations and conduct sales meetings” from in flight airplanes.

It goes on to say later:

“The only disadvantage to collaborating a mile high is the background, which startles some people, Lockard says. “They suddenly realize they are seeing the roof of an airline cabin behind me, and it distracts them for a few minutes.”

I will state up front that I just read the article and I have not contacted Mr. Sims, Ms. Lockard, or VIA3. Still, I don’t believe a word of it. Not a single word.

Ms. Lockard supposedly is not just joining web meetings from seat 4A, she is actually conducting them and giving presentations? Sales meetings? And using a webcam to show herself to her audience? Wow.

So she feels perfectly comfortable conducting an entire meeting in a loud enough voice to be heard by her audience while surrounded by complete strangers (including potential competitors or other prospects) in a cramped environment. And she manages to balance her laptop webcam on her tray table or knees, getting herself framed and in focus. And the airline internet connection speed is fast enough and reliable enough to broadcast a streaming video image along with audio.

She also has no problem interrupting her meeting for announcements from the flight deck, drink orders from the flight attendants, crying babies, and angry shushing noises from her fellow passengers. She doesn’t mind broadcasting the funny faces or middle fingers from the exasperated people sitting behind her.

Bullpucky. Didn’t happen. Won’t happen. Better not happen while she’s sitting in front of me, because her web conference is going to turn very “interesting” with my help. That camera image is going to look awfully jerky as she gets kicked by my knees in the back of her chair every two and a half seconds.

And to top it off, the article ends with this astonishing quote:

Hodges addressed some of the issues surrounding mile-high Web conferencing, noting that one inherent danger to using most Web conferencing software with open airplane Wi-Fi is “the huge lack of security. For proprietary information, documentation, and discussions, fliers wanting to conference should use only VIA3, which is 128-bit AES level secure from the ground up."

Riiiiigghht… The biggest security concern about sharing proprietary information, documents, and discussions on an airliner is the data encryption level. EVERYONE AROUND YOU CAN HEAR YOU!  HALF OF THEM CAN SEE YOUR SCREEN!

Look, I like web conferencing. I use web conferencing. It benefits my business to promote web conferencing. But this kind of fiction parading as fact does a disservice to everyone. It’s nonsense, it’s impractical, and it can only give web conferencing a bad name. We don’t need to sell snake oil. Web conferencing works. Let’s promote it for appropriate business uses. And let’s not encourage more incivility and inconsideration in the air. I think we get quite enough of that already.

Technorati Tags: TMCnet,David Sims,VIA3,web conferencing,web conference,web meeting,online meeting,web seminar,webinar,webcasting,webcast

Business Travel Is For Chumps

Last week I had to fly to a client site to give a local training class. This is an unusual occurrence these days. Given the nature of my webinar consulting business, I do almost all my work remotely. I have clients I have worked with for many years on a first name basis whom I have never met.

But this particular client had asked me to modify my webinar presenter training course to train their executives and upper management on how to deliver more impactful and persuasive in-person presentations during board meetings, client visits, and company gatherings. You have to train in the same context your audience will use, which meant getting on a plane and flying from Raleigh to Chicago.

That’s a short flight - between 90 and 120 minutes of flight time. But we wanted to start at the beginning of the work day. That meant flying out the preceding afternoon, grabbing some inferior and overpriced airport food, taking a taxi to a hotel, spending the night, getting to their office the next morning, teaching the course, taking a taxi back to the airport, waiting around for the flight, getting back to Raleigh and driving home. Total elapsed time, well over 24 hours. Add to this the hassles of airport security, the frustrations of flight delays (I had three separate announced delays in the airport and on the tarmac), setup time and effort to make the travel and lodging arrangements, and all the extra costs involved in the trip.

But wait, it gets better. The first time I gave the training course, it went over extremely well. The participants said “We need our other executives to take this.” So they flew me out again. And then a few people couldn’t make the training on that day so we scheduled another visit to cover the additional personnel. Three separate trips with all the associated costs and lost business time.

I couldn’t help comparing this to the training I give companies over the web. They pay for my time during the actual delivery of the course. I suffer no lost business opportunities, no travel headaches, and no travel expenses. We usually record my session. If a few people can’t make the live training, they simply watch the recording later. No additional expenses or coordination.

I’m not saying that all face to face business should be replaced by web collaboration. That’s silly. I’m just pointing out that once you get used to the advantages of web-based communications, those times when you have to travel feel even more odious than they used to. Sure, you can still get me on an airplane. But not willingly and not when I have any other option!

Technorati Tags: web training,online training,business travel,web meeting,online meeting,webinar,web seminar,web conference,web conferencing

Recent News In The Webcasting World

I’d like to talk about webcasting vendors and technology in this post. This is a bit of a departure from my usual concentration on webinars, so let’s define the major differences.

Live webinars tend to most commonly (but not always) have the following characteristics:

• Audience sizes of 20-400
• Heavy reliance on PowerPoint materials
• Limited reliance on video, whether live or prerecorded
• Audio that may be delivered over computer, phone, or both
• Audience interaction through polls, typed chat, and/or voice
• Speakers presenting from computer workstations
• Audience members watching individually at their own computers

Live webcasts often demonstrate different trends:

• Audience sizes ranging into many hundreds or thousands.
• Heavy reliance on video – either live or prerecorded
• Audio delivered exclusively over computer speakers
• More limited audience interaction, especially for typed chat and voice
• Speakers presenting in front of a local audience or in a studio setting
• Audience members who may be watching a projected screen together in a room

Before you start writing angry comments, please note that these are very broad generalizations and an individual webinar or webcast can easily cross the line on any of these characteristics. But looking at the generalities shows why most web collaboration vendors concentrate on one or the other of these specializations. There are different priorities and requirements for satisfying webinar and webcast customers.

I have been speaking with and working with a few webcasting vendors lately and I thought it would be interesting to review what they are concentrating on.

IVT announced last week that they have changed their company name to MediaPlatform, which they previously used as a product name. The primary webcasting platform has been relaunched as WebCaster, which comes in a “Pro” version as well. Greg Pulier, the founder and CTO of the company, told me that their recent focus has been on simplifying the process of setting up and running an event. They have added more analytics and graphical reports to help organizers study an event and they have made their archive recordings instantly available upon event completion and editable on the web to remove unwanted sections. WebCaster delivers content in Flash (a common trend now) and Greg says that WebCaster is already enabled for the new Flash 10.1 multicast capability that Adobe has announced.

omNovia has introduced a new option for their webinar technology that optimizes the experience for webcasting. Called StageToWeb, the product allows easier integration and broadcast of full size streaming video along with the usual webinar capabilities. I had the chance to use StageToWeb on a large client project recently. omNovia has given viewers the ability to select from different video stream rates and quality, and lets them view the video in a windowed format or expanded to full screen. This helps different sites optimize their local experience to match available bandwidth and processing power. We also took advantage of omNovia’s Recast capability to schedule and run rebroadcasts of the full interactive content as if they were live events.

Netbriefings has had large group webcasting available for some time with their eConference Enterprise product. Their latest focus is on Proclaim, a self-service way to quickly record an audio/video message and embed it in an email message, web page, or blog. What makes this product interesting is that it is a hybrid of live and recording technologies. You can use it in full stand-alone mode to record a simple video message, but you can also use it to run a live collaboration session. A “Director” function lets an organizer switch camera views between different feeds and choose which feed should show up in the live or recorded content.

Altus has created an interesting niche application. They synchronize the audio and video of a recorded webcast with a transcript of the narration. On playback, you can see the transcript scrolling to match the speaker’s pacing. But the cool part is that you can search on a word or phrase. The player jumps you forward to that point in the webcast, so you don’t have to play “guess and seek” with a time bar or high level table of contents. They can even scan a PowerPoint used with a recorded presentation and take you to the point in the presentation where your search term showed up on a slide.

I invite you to use the search box on The Webinar Blog website to look up recent mentions of other webcasting companies such as ConnectSolutions, Stream57, TalkPoint, and Vivu. There are quite a few companies concentrating on creating powerful and innovative webcasting solutions and it’s worth your time to examine the differentiators.

Technorati Tags: webcasting,webcast,Altus,Netbriefings,omNovia,IVT,MediaPlatform,Proclaim,StageToWeb,web collaboration,web conferencing,web conference,webinar,web seminar,web event,virtual event