InterCall announced a new release of InterCall Webcast Studio, their platform designed for large audience web broadcasts incorporating streaming audio and video. The company says the new release (which I have not seen) includes “improved self-service, micro-site, mobile and multicasting capabilities.”
InterCall Webcast Studio is primarily a Flash application, letting it take advantage of Adobe’s latest peer-to-peer multicasting capabilities for efficient webcasting to large groups of employees inside a company firewall or network. Because Flash does not run on Apple devices, InterCall also offers a special version of the software for use on mobile devices.
I was interested to see that the company’s press release and product data sheet say that the software detects a viewer’s available bandwidth and switches to an audio-only stream if video performance is unacceptable.
I was also mildly amused to read this quote on the product web page: “Developed from the ground up by InterCall’s webcasting software development division…” I’m sure that’s in there to highlight the fact that it’s their own software code and not a white-labeled third-party OEM platform underneath, but it gives kind of short shrift to a lot of previous independent development work by Unisfair and Stream57, each of which was acquired by InterCall and provided most of the framework for the integrated solution. Oh well, I guess it’s factual enough in that those developers are now part of InterCall’s webcasting software development division.
InterCall has an interesting and somewhat confusing product catalog when it comes to web-based collaboration. They will sell you Webcast Studio for big streaming events or their own InterCall Unified Meeting for smaller interactive web meetings. But they also resell WebEx web conferencing products, IBM LotusLive, and Adobe Connect. It would be fun to have one of their sales reps do a comparison of the offerings and tell you why you should pick one over another!
