What a difference a decade makes. For those of us who've been attending the Streaming Media shows since the beginning, it's been a wild ride. From the heady early days of the industry, when startups flush with venture capital, swagger and big visions vied for exhibit slots, to the recent past when it seemed like someone cut off the back of the exhibit hall, the show's fortunes have mirrored the industry's ups and downs.
So if you buy the premise that Streaming Media East is a barometer for the industry, then in this exhibitor's humble opinion, things are looking the best they have for years. In addition to excellent traffic quality and volume and a sizable exhibit hall, the panel session Mike moderated called "Best Practices in Enterprise Streaming for Communications and Learning," also revealed just how far streaming has evolved as a mainstream business communication tool.
Session speakers Joan Dollard-Spooner, Associate Director, Webcasts, Podcasts, Ernst & Young; Rose Kazan, Director of Global Multimedia Services, Lehman Brothers; Scott Szczurek, Online Video Specialist, CME Group; and Sunil Verma, DVP, Macy's Home Store, offered insights on how their organizations use webcasting in myriad ways and applications.
At Ernst & Young, Dollard-Spooner taps outsourced service providers and video production teams to create hundreds of live and on-demand webcasts for corporate communications and training that are charged back to internal clients. Lehman's Kazan manages a centralized service group, including video production, webcasting and event teams, that delivers nearly 200 on-demand and 50 live webcasts per month using corporate network facilities working in close cooperation with corporate IT.
CME Group's Szczurek uses internal webcasting application software and external content delivery networks to deliver dozens of monthly external live- and on-demand webinars designed to educate the public about stock market trading. Macy's Verma leads an internal corporate initiative that leverages Web 2.0 technologies to encourage 3,000 Macy's brand consultants to create and post their own "Facebook"-style pages and streaming videos. Launched to foster a sense of online community among associates who are also in the store's target demographic, Macy's plans to parlay lessons learned into external social network marketing programs.
While you might expect the panelists to represent the ultimate streaming realists, the audience of some 150 or so seemed similarly experienced, with a show of hands indicating that about half were either in mid- or late-stage streaming deployment. In fact, they frequently interrupted the session with downright evolutionary questions, like: "What about governance?" "How do you set policies for content creation, management and distribution?" "How do you manage the initiative?" "How do you charge back for online training?"
Other key tips panelists offered in from their own webcast experiences:
• Make friends with IT: Launch your partnership from the beginning as a marriage with IT. You can go around them using outsourced providers, but leveraging internal resources gives you greater control, is much more cost effective, and helps spread internal adoption;
• Build it and they will come: Never think of your webcasting initiative as static - it will be successful, and everyone will want it, so make sure your RFPs plan for scalability;
• Off-Broadway: Start with projects that are forgiving (not a live earnings webcast from a hotel with a shared T-1);
• Don't react - advise: There's a lot of confusion over the term "webcasting." Help your clients figure out what they need - they may think they need a live video webcast, but sometimes slides and an audio bridge will do the job;
• Test, test, test - Document your procedures and review every aspect prior to events - from pushing slides, to testing multicast and unicast streams;
• Viewer measurement Rules - Webcasting provides the ability to track not just how many viewers/hits your webcast received, but where they come from, what they watched and what they did. This gives you the ability to collect meaningful data and report on the success of your programs;
• Operational efficiency is the new ROI - Most companies that communicate with video now understand the value of having media-rich content online, instead of trying to get it to people in person, via satellite, or by sending out DVDs or tapes. So the ROI focus has now shifted to doing webcasting efficiently. In addition to the web-based viewer tracking and analytics, the more you do in house and the more you automate the process, the less it will cost.
So while it seems like revolutions historically get all the attention, for those of us who've long pushed the practical business advantages of tapping media-rich communications over IP networks to bring people closer together, it's evolution that's music to our ears.
If you'd like to see an on-demand archive of the session, go to http://www.streamingmedia.com/videos/