The Webinar Blog

Audio Quality vs Video Quality

For my final post of 2014, I bring you a short clip I found on YouTube. This is less than two minutes long and quickly illustrates a fundamental error made by many web conferencing vendors:

[If the embedded clip does not display in your reader, you can watch it at this link: http://youtu.be/-PLMiA18tBc]

Ideally we would always have high quality audio and video in all webcasts and recordings. But there are practical limits on things such as file sizes and internet bandwidth. So vendors use standard tricks such as compressing data, lowering resolution, dropping frame rates, and decreasing audio bitrates to make the end result more universally consumable. That is unavoidable.

The question comes into play when deciding whether to favor the audio or video side of the webcast in the inevitable tradeoff battle between the two. As the preceding clip demonstrates, audio should get the nod. A viewer can get more content value from easily understandable audio than from high quality video with lousy (and lossy) audio.

Add the fact that far too many presenters start with poor source quality in their audio (echoing speakerphones, in-line cable microphones that scrape against their shirts, mobile phones with audio dropouts, built-in laptop microphones that pick up keyboard thumping, VoIP phone lines competing for bandwidth with the web conference, etc, etc, etc). When poor source audio is compressed and bitrates are reduced, the result is something that audiences don't want to spend their time with.

Remember, the presenter gives the presentation. Visuals are there to provide supplementary support, clarity, and engagement. They do matter, but they should always be secondary to what the presenter is saying. Otherwise the material is probably better suited to a SlideShare recording, eBook, blog post, or white paper that puts the visual information as the focus.

So if you are forced to compress your webinar recording, compress the video more than the audio in order to improve audience comprehension and retention.

And with that, I wish you a very happy new year and great webinar success in 2015!

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Is Web Conferencing A Taxable Service?

Pity your poor vendor of web conferencing (webinar, webcast, whatever) and audio conferencing services. Do they need to collect state sales taxes from customers and pay them back to each state's department of revenue?

Until this morning, I would have said "Of course not! Don't be ridiculous. Web conferencing customers aren't buying taxable goods."

Then I read a briefing from Sutherland Asbill & Brennan LLP on the Lexology.com website. It turns out that cloud-based collaboration may or may not be taxable depending on each state's local rulings. Tennessee and South Carolina just ruled that cloud collaboration is a taxable communications service. Tennessee further classified the telecommunications components of the service as intrastate telecommunications, which are subject to a higher local tax rate.

Sutherland has been following the rulings on telecommunication and web collaboration from various states. So far Georgia and Illinois say no, while Colorado, Missouri, New Mexico, Ohio, and Utah have said that at least some components of the service are taxable. I find it extremely difficult to understand which specific service components are taxable, and under what tax rate structure. I'm glad I'm not in that business!

Technorati Tags: teleconferencing,telecommunications,web conferencing,webcasting,audio conferencing,web collaboration,Sutherland Asbill & Brennan

Can You Guarantee Webinar Access?

Today's question: Is it even theoretically possible to guarantee access to all potential webinar participants (attendees and presenters alike), no matter what their security settings and local hardware/software configurations are?

I don't think this is achievable, but I have plenty of clients who want to stipulate it as a requirement for their web conferences and broadcasts.

There are several approaches taken by web conferencing vendors (using the term in its most inclusive sense for all types of web collaboration). The most common are:

1. Downloadable client software. Examples: WebEx, GoToWebinar. Each participant must download a program from the internet and install it on their computer before joining the conference. Potential problems: Institutional security policies that prevent installing programs from the internet on office computers. Software that is not compatible with the target device's operating system.
2. Access via web browser using Flash. Examples: Adobe Connect, omNovia. Participants must have Adobe Flash Player installed in their web browser. No client software gets installed - instead, the conferencing software runs as an internet Flash application. Potential problems: Institutional security policies that prohibit use of Flash on office computers. Outdated version of Flash Player on target computer. Incompatible newer version/beta version of Flash Player on target computer. Unavailability of Flash on iOS devices. User confusion over how to operate Flash authorizations for device access.
3. Access via web browser using WebRTC. Examples: AnyMeeting, Venstream (both with qualifiers). Application programming varies, but software relies on WebRTC for the data transport mechanics. Potential problems: Incompatible browsers or browser versions on target computers. Incomplete WebRTC standards for video creating incompatibility or need for additional protocols such as Flash.
4. Access via web browser using other technologies such as Java. Example: Microsoft Live Meeting Web Access (obsolete). Unusual these days, but still possible. Conferencing software runs as a Java applet in the web browser. Potential problems: Incorrect version of Java on the target computer.

Methods 1 and 2 are by far the most common methods at the moment, and they each fail when confronted with users in companies with stringent security measures for employee computers (most commonly Financial Institutions and Government Offices, but extending to some Research Facilities, Healthcare, and Data Consolidators).

Even if the basic methodology is supported on a participant's computer, they may not be able to access all or part of the web conference content because of institutional security settings affecting HTTP and TCP/IP ports. This is far too complicated to explain properly here, but suffice to say that data flows between the internet and user computers through gateways known as ports. Each potential port has a number associated with it and lots of confusing terminology like "HTTP tunneling on port 80 with fallback to alternate port 8088."

Web conference vendors decide which ports their software will communicate through, and this can be thwarted by company-wide security settings that workers have no knowledge of or control over. By they way, this is often the reason for an attendee angrily calling you to complain that your stupid conferencing software doesn't work and they know it isn't their security settings because they were able to join another conference just the other day. The different products may have communicated through different ports.

It gets worse than this… There is the potential for additional layers of data communications jiggery-pokery such as multicast distribution within a corporate network. It's all enough to make a web conferencing engineering team break down and cry.

The upshot is that as a meeting host, you may have to grit your teeth and accept the fact that there will always be some participant out there with just the wrong setup, who will be unable to get into your meeting.

But if I'm wrong, I would like to know about it. Is there any vendor who wants to add a comment here stating that their software has enough alternate failover connection methods that everybody everywhere can access their web meetings?

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