Thursday 15 March 2012

How do I run an online event?

We've built and run many webcasts used by physicians and healthcare professionals to attend online live/ pre-recorded  live symposiums and lectures. We do pre-recorded live webcast due to multiple review and regulatory processes that we are well versed with

For live speaker sessions

We usually use Adobe connect and use the web services provided to perform the registration and SSO login to these rooms from our/clients branded website. Adobe connect and the website the user uses to login from can be totally separate. If you have a small meeting say 5-20 people then VOIP and Video for all users works well. 

If you go larger, then phone call + VOIP and video for presenter only is best option.  We integrate premier global's conference with the online meeting room to give both VOIP and phone users the ability to talk to each other.  The Adobe connect room is great with a lot of the usual features you expect from Webex, but Adobe Connect is much better for hosts/Admin to manage the room - from live questions to file storage  and screen sharing etc. Adobe Connect, uses Adobe presenter to convert uploaded slide kit, so you do not loose slide animations and it does a good job, however we always recommend checking your  slides as  you may find you need to fiddle with layout on the slide kit

This entire system is price sensitive depending on geographic location. For instance if you were running this for predominantly US users - I'd do it via adobe US and pay in dollars.

For pre-recorded speaker, live audience sessions

We use iSpring (very similar to Articulate presenter and Adobe presenter)to convert PPTs to flash and sync audio. This is just a simple add-in into powerpoint.

We have custom built  this into our own bespoke web-app - we can stream iSpring ppt-flash conversion with live chat, registration, login, email reminders, and housekeeping data. This is hosted on the cloud and we have no problem with large scale streaming.

The problem with camtasia:  it's a screen capture tool,, so it essentially converts to bitmap- When streaming live bitmap video you need to have quite a lot of bandwidth, a lot of resources are wasted, iSpring converts most of its to flash vectors and mp3 for audio  = smaller file size =  better stream quality  = much larger audience.

Hope this helps with your research!