Here's a question for you.  If you couldn't see Susan Boyle, and the audience's skepticism ...if all you heard was her voice, would this woman's performance have become the global sensation that it's become?

I doubt it...because what makes this recording so powerful is seeing her, judging her, and being shocked that this particular woman would have "the voice of an angel." Shamefully, for most of us, the power of the video is the epiphany we experience as we watch it.

For those of you who haven't seen the clip, you can view it here.

If anyone continues to doubt the power of video in our ever more visual society, this pop culture phonon inspires a few observations:

• 1) Video is the world's most powerful communications method. Only communicating in-person rivals the impact that video has on every one of our senses.
• 2) Video can be uploaded to YouTube and virally sweep the globe in a matter of hours. Boyle's video reached over 12 million viewers in less than four days. There is no other form of mass communication that's ever approached these astonishing numbers.
• 3) Video is the truth: You watch it with your own eyes, you interpret it without editorial nuance or second-hand interpretation. People instinctively believe it more.
• 4) If your organization isn't using online video to tell your story - whether to the outside world, or employees or partners - your communications are not as powerful, viral or believable as they could be.
• 5) The younger your audience is, the more this applies: Millenials and younger workers have grown up creating, manipulating, distributing and leveraging online media everywhere - in their social, educational and even professional transactions.

So let Susan Boyle be your inspiration. Take the plunge: get your executives or professors or doctors in front of a camera - whether you start with a production company, or build your own studio.  The amount of time your speakers will invest in their online presentation will dwarf what they would have had to invest traveling around the campus, or the globe, to be sure that everyone got the message.  And, as this viral video poignantly demonstrates, your audience will experience, and engage, with online video content in ways that simply aren't possible with conference calls or the written word. 

Last week, Accordent hosted a webinar with our friends at TANDBERG on the subject of creating archives of video conferencing sessions and extending their value within an online portal that provides search, tracking and reporting capabilities.

The market interest we generated was significantly greater than either Accordent or TANDBERG had seen for prior webinars; with only modest promotion, we had over 700 people sign up for our event.

The sudden interest in this topic shouldn't be surprising, however, considering the growing demand for conferencing services of all kinds as a way to reduce the high cost of travel while still meeting communications and training objectives.

Granted, we've been beating this drum for a while. But via the work with TANDBERG, it's been interesting for Accordent to see a fresh perspective from video conferencing users.

Like most of our clients, video conferencing users are being asked to justify the cost of their video conferencing and telepresence systems.  And while the technology's link to reduced travel is commonly cited, these clients are now being tasked to take it a step further and prove that the information they're sharing via visual communications is valuable, worthwhile and impactful. And if it is, they're being asked to take it a step further to develop a "long tail" plan so that it can be used again and again.

Hearing this in the field, Accordent and TANDBERG decided to team up to help prove just how useful all forms of visual communications can be for the organization.  We do this by integrating two key technologies: 1) a streamlined, integrated video conferencing archive solution and 2) a simple, automated platform that enables the organization to manage and search those assets so they can be retrieved and - more importantly - so viewer information can be tracked and correlated with results.

Because in the current economic climate, it's not going to be enough to just make something happen; it's going to be mandatory that you can prove that it made an impact - on moral, on market share, on safety, on performance, or on whatever you've established as a goal for your visual communications programs.

This is one of dozens of great points made by TANDBERG's Bruce "Zip" Zieper and Accordent's Mike Newman.  If you didn't get a chance to see the webinar, feel free to access the on-demand version and let us know how your visual communications programs are helping your organization meet key objectives.

 

Serious geek alert: We may lose a lot of you with this article. But if you are a multicast streaming expert, we have a new capability - recognized just last week with a 2009 Editor's Pick from Streaming Media Magazine - that will knock your socks off.

Name: Accordent Multicast In-Stream Technology (AMIT).

What it does:  (AMIT) is an advanced technology that enables any company that has deployed multicast-enabled networks to deliver high-quality streaming video with synchronized slides and graphics as a single, compressed stream. By distributing the slide data through the single multicast stream, AMIT offers significant bandwidth advantages over traditional, rich media webcasting.

How it works:  AMIT uses a portion of the multicast Windows Media stream to distribute the slide content as embedded data. The slide data is essentially "downloaded" simultaneously alongside the video and audio stream and is displayed outside of the video player in an image object within the interface HTML page. Contrast this single stream against the traditional approach of delivering slide content via unicast requests from every concurrent viewer:  a live webcast with 3,000 concurrent viewers requires a web server infrastructure in place and bandwidth capable of serving 3,000 requests for each slide throughout the presentation. In contrast, with AMIT, you only need increase the overall bandwidth by 250-350kb in order to allow for the images while maintaining the video and audio quality.  

What you need: AMIT works with Accordent rich media creation products. These products create jpeg images that are loaded on a web server for retrieval and synchronization. The local location of the jpeg images are sent to the AMIT platform each time the application synchronizes an image. The images are then encoded directly into the Windows Media stream at the audio & video encoder at the point of origination, and time-stamped. The image data rides along the stream through the streaming server and then out into the multicast network as a single, multicast stream. Remote clients tune into the multicast stream and receive the audio & video streams. The image data downloads on the local PC and is available for display when called. The Accordent software manages synchronization of the video stream and slide image. This approach eliminates the need for individual slide requests from a web server. If you have network segments that are not multicast-enabled, then those users can simply use a unicast connection to a web server as they have done in the past.

AMIT White Paper:  Marketing research firm Interactive Media Strategies was similarly impressed with the AMIT development.  We've made a copy of their white paper available for you in our Resource Library.

While the buzz over the last few years has been all around social networking and entertainment technologies, webcasting has been somewhat blandly gaining ground as a trusted and reliable productivity tool for large organizations with geographically dispersed audiences.

All of a sudden, webcasting is hot, and is melting the hearts of notoriously cold customers in the IT and Finance departments.

What's happened? It's simple: the economy has made saving money about the sexiest thing going.  And for many organizations, webcasting saves lots of it - whether it's replacing the cost of people having to fly to meetings and training sessions, or reducing satellite broadcast and other third-party service costs.

In January, an Interactive Media Strategies' report summed it up best: "In the fast-growing global economic environment that epitomized the first seven years of the decade, webcasting's message of frugality ran against the tides of market demand...Now, the tables have turned. As the global economy slips into recession, the potential audience of executives interested in webcasting's message of cost cutting is certain to expand dramatically in 2009.

"Business efficiency is fashionable, and the online video sector stands among the few emerging technology areas that can truly sell an implementation that quickly translates into cost savings and streamlined business practices," writes principal analyst Steve Vonder Haar.

While conferencing services will always have their usefulness - particularly for small, interactive group meetings - webcasting's efficiency for one-to-many communications is hard to beat.

And, for those companies that have the tech acumen and are willing to put in a little sweat equity, the ROI from deploying an on-premise webcasting system versus other communications and training methods is nearly immediate. Consider:

• You buy a webcasting system (one-time expense);
• You use your own network to stay in close touch with your organization - all the time - whether they are in the office, in the field, or at home;
• It costs you the same amount whether you talk to ten - or 10,000 - people, whether you do it once - or ten times - a day, and whether they are in the next building, or next continent.

With a value-proposition like that, webcasting could turn out to be America's new sweetheart technology (or maybe I'd better stop eating all those little candy hearts...).

Like the tree falling in the empty forest...if a doctor or medical professional takes a continuing medical education course - but never redeems the credits - how can the teaching institution know if it made an impact?

This little-known fact - that medical professionals have a low rate of redeeming CME credits, making the programs difficult to validate - will likely only grow in importance with the new administration, which has set healthcare efficiency and modernization as a national priority.

The good news for healthcare is that there are a wide range of technologies available that can prove not only that intended audiences have consumed educational content, but can also provide data that can be used to correlate that consumption to changes in patient care.

Online, streaming-media based versions of medical education materials hold enormous promise for this segment because they enable medical facilities to easily add an online component to training sessions that happen every day. With an online archive of a medical lecture, training module or patient care protocol, busy doctors and medical professionals can review important content, when it's convenient, in much the same way they would a video on CNN or YouTube.

Additionally, by leveraging an online delivery system, medical institutions can track viewer behavior in highly granular ways - not only to prove who has watched which presentation, but also to provide statistical records of which groups - from Anesthesiology to Urology - have participated. Taking the next step, they can even administer pre- and post-tests online alongside the content to measure the viewer's comprehension and use the data with other performance improvement assessments.

Our prediction on this Inauguration Day? Expect to see the healthcare community increasingly tap streaming technologies for cost-effective and measurable training, education, testing and certification.

For most of last year, it felt like the world was collectively measuring itself in hours and days.  Rapid, jagged swings in the health of markets and companies and equities tested even those of us most resolute about long-term perspectives and, like the driver of a hydroplaning car, caused us the discomfort of having to best exploit a few critical seconds while simultaneously acknowledging most variables were beyond our control.

As I started my final customer and prospect visits of the year, this is the sentiment that I expected to hear.  That there was a lack of visibility, that there was a lack of certainty, that people were taking it one day - or hour - at a time.  Certainly, these sentiments were present, but there was also present a sentiment I hadn't at all expected to hear:  that for this person, or group, or company, they viewed their webcasting initiative as their career legacy.

The first time I heard this sentiment expressed was by the CIO of a state university.  Since it was not exactly what I was expecting hear, I politely asked him to elaborate.  Interestingly, he said that while his university had supplied and utilized computers for nearly twenty years, that with the deployment of their online webcasting program, this would be the first time that those computers would be used for teaching (as opposed to for research and word processing).  He added that, from his perspective, he was part of a program that would be making the first meaningful change in the way that students learned at the university in more than 200 years, and that the university would be building out online learning, distance learning, information exchange programs, and new testing initiatives that were all tethered to this new webcasting capability.

Not two days later, I was speaking with the head of media services at a major pharmaceutical company.  They had just gone through staff reductions and, as we walked down the long corridor to the meeting room, I suspected I'd be hearing news similar to what had been in the papers for nearly six months . . . that these were tough times.  Instead, I heard that his division had just heard that their webcasting initiative had received "Class A" status, meaning that it was considered an essential technology initiative.  He had received the word, and a visit, from the CEO himself who described how he envisioned every executive using webcasting as their primary method of presenting.  With pride, this person advised me that on his watch, they'd grown webcasting from an average of slightly less than one webcast per month to five or six per day.  It was, in his words, his legacy.

As I started thinking about it, most of the people I have the privilege of interacting with are in a very similar position.  They are contributing to the introduction or growth of webcasting within their organization.  They are changing the way business is done.  They are changing the way people communicate.  They are changing the way their organization is perceived.  They are leaving a mark and, by definition, creating a legacy.

I suspect that many of us, in the short term, will catch ourselves making hourly and daily measurements.  At the same time, I do hope that we don't lose sight of the unique position we're in to introduce meaningful, lasting change often times at mature, settled organizations where such opportunities can be rare indeed.

I can't help it, I just don't buy it - "it" being a story in ReadWriteWeb touting "Enterprise Virtual Worlds" as the next great communications solution for linking geographically dispersed professionals.

The idea is: instead of us boring folks looking each other in the eye using traditional "reality" technologies (i.e. videoconferecing, webcasting etc.) you get a bunch of executives to strap on head gear, pick up their joy sticks and pretend they are in a room with a bunch of other professionals (as represented by other 3D cartoons) and everyone pretends that their ‘toon proxies are working on a project together.

In this article, a company called Forterra Systems (which is pitching an enterprise virtual reality system) has issued a report saying that "virtual worlds are both more engaging and less expensive to operate than audio and web conferencing systems."

I can see how they might be "engaging," but I'm not sure who is being engaged - the real person or the character - and are they jointly engaged in business communications or individually engaged in simply trying to get the hang of the gear and navigating a virtual world?

Frankly, I am deeply skeptical of the report's claim - particularly knowing how much our clients have invested in video-based online communications, and knowing that these choices are backed up by decades of copious data on the effectiveness of video in establishing a highly personal connection with viewers,  no matter how far away.

However, there were some highlights too. My favorite part of the article was a comment someone posted that said "In a virtual world conference you could slap somebody if you disagreed with them."

So that opened my eyes and I began to realize that I LIKE the idea of all this imagining in the corporate boardroom - at least in the near term, it beats the heck out of what's really happening out there in the economy!

So let's go with it: I'll play, but only if I get to be Bugs Bunny (or Roger Rabbit). AND I want a big, red hammer (with Stooges sound effects) that I get to use on anyone who talks over me/doesn't agree with my next great idea.  The room has to look like Chuck E Cheese, and the least-bonked participant gets a free, plastic toy.  I'm in!

Happy holidays...and have some REAL fun along the way...

I was recently speaking with an industry friend who thought our respective companies should partner.  On paper, we provide similar (and potentially complementary) solutions insofar as our products enable organizations to create and manage rich media presentations. However, the primary difference is that his company offers its solution as an externally hosted service, and we typically deploy ours on-premise, behind-the-firewall. 

My friend advocated that, while we have a similar value proposition and share many customers, we never run into each other competitively and, as a consequence, would not cannibalize each other's business.  I like this gentleman and I like his organization - which I believe values customer service, provides a high quality product, and has some true industry talent.

Nonetheless, I can't help but feel that his strongest arguments for the partnership are the most compelling against it.  In short, we never run into each other.  Stated differently, our customers: are not looking at externally hosted solutions (nor, presumably, are their customers looking at CPE solutions); are not asking us to combine with an externally hosted offering; and quite frankly, don't seem to speak or overlap much with their customers - even within shared accounts!

At Accordent, we get an immense amount of product feedback and suggestions and we try to be as responsive as possible.  And right now, the majority of that feedback is still towards behind-the-firewall extensions, such as requests to integrate into specific learning and content management systems, or to integrate more deeply with videoconferencing solutions, or to provide greater network control.  However, except for integrating with content delivery networks, we almost never get asked to provide, integrate or partner with an externally hosted solution.

At the risk of over-generalizing, I sense that organizations predominantly use our products for internally facing content (training, town hall meetings, HR and compliance) while they use externally hosted products for externally facing content, such as customer and partner marketing.  And, as far as I can tell, there is not a compelling reason for these different groups to satisfy their streaming requirements with one solution (whether it is achieved by one company or via a partnership).

Now, I may be wrong in my assessment and assumptions and I'd love to learn if that is the case.  Is there a need or desire for companies on both sides of the firewall to partner, specifically on the content creation and management aspects of streaming?  Or are the worlds behind and beyond the firewall so distinct that the potential of such partnerships is - as often is the case - a fraction of what it appeared to be when sketched on the back of a napkin? 

The following presentation is the second of our "Insight Series". In this installment, Accordent VP of Marketing, Darian Germain and Accordent Co-Founder and Senior VP of Sales and Marketing, Jereme Pitts, discuss the trends of enterprise webcasting and best practices and lessons learned based on the RFP's Accordent has seen over the past several years in the streaming industry. 

Presentation link:

http://accordent.powerstream.net/008/00000/amms2/insight_j-d/index.htm

If you think this article is about jumping on the economic doom-and-gloom bandwagon, you're wrong.  I have great confidence in the nation's economy to overcome periodic challenges - however daunting they may now appear.

However, since they say people's true colors come out during difficult times, I can't help but observe that the same thing is true about companies in the streaming media space. 

Having cut my teeth in this industry when it was still in its infancy, the image of it being a young, categorically energetic industry has stayed with me.  However, having parsed through a broad range of recent press and watched closely the industry's response to recent economic events, I have to admit that some things have changed. 

On the positive side, both vendors and customers seem to have a more mature and use-oriented understanding of the benefits of streaming.  It is evident in RFPs and case studies and some very innovative product releases. 

On the flip side, I think we are also seeing less graceful aging in several segments of the streaming arena, particularly among vendors that seem more focused on hiding the effects of aging than actually rejuvenating themselves. 

Here are some of the tell-tale signs that we are starting to run into fairly regularly:

1. Core platforms are a decade old - Some companies still use the same core technology, based on outmoded languages and architecture that they launched the company with! Considering how much has changed across the board - digital media devices/codecs/compression, computing platforms and operating systems, programming languages and development methodology, and network platforms and delivery - patching up an old platform just can't be a good thing for clients.

Innovative, growing companies have to continually revise their platform architectures to harness the latest advances in applications, products and services that can pass all those benefits through to their customers.

2. They still aren't making money - In the current credit crunch, this is going to become the "elephant"  in the middle of the living room.  If a company has been around for a decade and is still not profitable, here are some of the outward signs to watch for: They have new management teams focused on achieving a rapid ROI so they bypass investing in technology and R&D in favor of acquiring or merging with other small firms to enable investors to consolidate their portfolios and/or exit.  The surest evidence of this is a product roadmap focused on integrating newly acquired technologies, rather than on improving or adding features to existing technologies.

3. They over-spend on new branding - When all else fails, apply lipstick.  Watch for companies spending a fortune on enhancing their curb appeal.  This usually starts with a name/colors change and extends to re-branding across the board and expensive or excessive marketing programs.  Signs of this include:  buzzword-laden, high-level messaging that seems to be more targeted to impress other investor than towards clients with a distinct problem; and constantly shifting business models (from software or hardware to services and everything in between).

The bottom line: watch for these telltale signs and be wary of the weary streaming partner.  Now, more than ever, make sure your technology partner is demonstrating tangible signs of continued innovation.  This single factor may be the best way you can ensure that your supplier has the energy and operating capital to look forward to the future, instead of reminiscing about the past.