It’s raining in London. As the banks wobble and businesses batten down the hatches, I smile and thank my lucky stars I’m in the webcasting game. “Alright for you!”, you might say – but really the possibiilties offered up by web streaming technology are good news for us all. People have been bigging up webcasting for years on the grounds that it saves time, money and the planet, and it seems these things perhaps have never been so important as they are now as we head with trepidation towards 2009 AD.
Now if your audience can’t afford the tube fare or the ticket to the gig, maybe they will watch in online and you can sell some sponsorship or adverts around it. Fabchannel have done this and Fabchannel is seriously cool. I love it. They have started putting live gigs out through Facebook too. Also glad to see ChannelBee are still going after launching earlier this year. And I’m also very happy that (should an intellectual mood overtake me) I can participate live with events produced by organisations like the RSA or the the Natural History Museum.
Maybe at annual conference time, putting up your sales team in a hotel for a night just isn’t worth the budget this year. Now it’s entirely feasible to stream a speaker into your conference from a remote location so they don’t necessarily have to take time out to fly over in person. Perhaps you’re a publisher and you’re filming interviews and events anyway – now you can make more money by offering these sessions as video packages alongside rich media such as PowerPoint, PDF reports or live interactive web chats. For example, check out this virtual symposia from St George’s hosptial. And Haymarket’s SpeakersChannel.tv is growing all the time. Whatever the conundrum, if you can do it online you can *probably* save yourself some cash. Webcasting works.
If you’d rather not get your hands dirty, you can commission a company like us to handle your webcasting and go for the full on 3 camera shoot with live vision mixing, etc. But if you’re on a budget and have your own camera (and a bit of time to spare) there’s a number of cool tools to run your own live web event. Amazing really, when you think about it. Just a few sites to have a look at are:
AND – you can also stream from your mobile if you have the right phone and enough bandwidth. I kid you not. I’ll be writing more about that soon. Happy webcasting.
