Several interesting press releases crossed the wires today, so it's an appropriate time for one of my occasional webinar news roundup posts!
- We'll start with Monday's announcement of a new release of iMeet from PGi. The big additions seem to be live video streaming and recording options that save as standard video files for use in web replays. PGi called out a focus on the SMB (Small and Medium Business) market in their announcement. Interestingly, AnyMeeting similarly targeted the SMB market in a press release last week. Competition is definitely heating up in the crossover space between collaborative web conferences and small-audience webinars (up to 100 or 125 maximum).
- ReadyTalk announced their integration with HubSpot to allow more comprehensive design, tracking, reporting, and communications for webinar registrations. ReadyTalk has made external integrations a major focus lately, having already made nice with ExactTarget, Kapost, Eloqua, Marketo, Acteva, and Salesforce. They also feature an automated linkage with PR Newswire, which is still the only integration I know of between a webinar product and press release promotion for webinars.
- TalkPoint confused me with a press release promoting their appearance at The Sustainable Events Summit in London. I'm not exactly sure what "sustainable business communication practices" are, but from the context, I'm guessing it's a relabeling of the classic "green meetings" value proposition about getting people to meet online rather than fly to a destination.
- Arkadin continues to expand its horizontal interests with an announced focus on "Unified Communications-as-a-Service (UCaaS)." They put out a press release trumpeting their acquisition of implement.com - a consulting services provider for Microsoft solutions such as Exchange, Lync, and SharePoint. Not explicitly mentioned in the release except in their new "About Arkadin" boilerplate is the fact that NTT's ownership stake in Arkadin (announced last August) has been finalized and now Arkadin is "an NTT Communications Group company."
- ON24 announced significant growth in webinar viewership in events hosted on their technology. Their press release is worth reading for the statistics they included regarding usage patterns. They saw a 30% growth in viewers overall, with 106,000 webinars reaching more than 30 million viewers. In 2013, the use of mobile devices increased by 76%, but still represents only 6% of total usage by people registering for web events. ON24 also said that viewers watch over 46 minutes of a typical 60-minute webinar.
- VBrick also addressed the growth in mobile webcast preferences, but this time from the perspective of the presenter. They announced an iPad app for enterprise video webcasting enabling "any authorized employee to use VBrick Mix to launch a live video webcast to bring urgent information to a video portal." Personally, I remain skeptical about the quality and professionalism possible in shooting live video from an iPad for large-scale webcast distribution. But I am equally certain there is a market for it.
If you enjoy keeping up to date on news about webinars and webcast technology, make sure to bookmark my Webinar Success Industry News page. I keep it filled with links to press releases and articles (bottom of the page) related to our industry. You can also get updates delivered to your favorite RSS feed reader. The easy access web address is www.webinarnews.info -- Tell a friend!
