Last month I wrote a post saying that too few webinar/webcast products allowed presenters to see their PowerPoint speaker notes inside the conferencing console. The folks at omNovia must have been waiting for an engineering challenge, because it's just one month later and they have added the functionality to their product!
Presenters now have the option to see text that was entered in the PowerPoint notes area in the original slide deck. It appears below the slide display area. The speaker can change the amount of space dedicated to the slide vs. the notes. The speaker can also change the color and font size of the text. Very nice.
This change got pushed to production along with a collection of other functionality improvements. I'll give them a quick rundown for sake of completeness:
- Playback controls for recorded sessions work much more smoothly and reliably.
- Changes to room layout (such as choosing which types of content should be selectable within a session) can now be made inside of a running webinar. It used to require closing and restarting the session.
- Moderators can type quick two-line captions on top of live video (such as webcam "talking heads" of the speakers). Great for placing a speaker's name and title on their image without requiring a formal video captioning service.
The updates seem to work well in my testing and do enhance ease of use for the product. Kudos to the omNovia product engineering team.
