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Webcasting v. Web Conferencing
You can see the archive of my discussion with the editors of Simply-communicate about the difference between Web Conferencing and Webcasting by going to their site:
http://www.simply-communicate.com/
They also link to the MediaPlatform White Paper that discusses the same topic.
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Simply-Communicate
Join me tomorrow at 8:00 am EDT / 1:00 pm BST when I discuss the difference between Web Conferencing and Webcasting with the editors of simply-communicate.com.
Click here to register: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/176834728
The Simply-communicate.com website says:
We are the community for internal communication professionals. We
started publishing in June 2005 and have since gradually grown to 15,000
registered members. Since September 2009 the service is completely free to
use. We have around 800 articles, toolkits and templates on the site and we
are visited by 16,000 people who downloaded just under half a million articles
last year.
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Adobe Releases Flash Player 10.1
You can download the official release of Adobe Flash Player 10.1 on the Adobe site.
This is the first step in what will be an extremely eventful year for streaming media. Adobe will soon enter the enterprise market in a big way with a version of Flash Media Server that supports both IP and Application Multicasting.
Flash has long dominated the public internet, but its inability to multicast meant corporations had to stick with Windows Media. This new capability will give large enterprises the opportunity to migrate to the Flash format and benefit from its ability to run on any OS and any browser, ease of use, support for higher quality codecs, ability to change bit rates on the fly etc.
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MediaPlatform Debuts WebCaster
MediaPlatform Debuts WebCaster, a Fusion of Performance and UsabilityNew Addition to Webcasting Software Lineup Leverages Cloud Platform for Productivity and Connectivity NEW YORK - STREAMING MEDIA EAST - May 11, 2010 -
MediaPlatform, Inc. (formerly IVT) today unveiled its latest product offering, MediaPlatform WebCaster, cloud-based webcasting software that packs leading edge event management, event customization, and production capabilities into a simple user experience. WebCaster has been built to serve the needs of demanding webcast production professionals as well as non-technical users
"WebCaster is a heavyweight performer with a flyweight price and impact on corporate IT," said Jim McGovern, Chief Executive Officer of MediaPlatform. "Our team has worked hard for over a year to exceed client expectations in virtually every aspect of the webcasting experience."
WebCaster offers a unique mix of best-in-class features, ranging from an intuitive, browser-based user interface and sophisticated reporting to multiple remote presenters and flexible producing teams. WebCaster also offers rich templates with options to customize, total operating system and browser independence, telephony to Flash® Audio input, and iPhone support.
"We went into the development process with a goal of enabling presentations from 'anywhere to anyone,'" said Greg Pulier, Founder and CTO of MediaPlatform, and head of WebCaster's development. "For every feature we considered, our constant question was, 'Will this provide the best possible experience for users at every step of the webcasting process? I am very proud of the work everyone has contributed to this outstanding offering."
With WebCaster, MediaPlatform is further establishing itself as the preferred provider for digital media producers. As the business of producing webcasts for lead generation, training, and conferences continues to expand, MediaPlatform is serving a growing number of top tier digital media production firms. WebCaster is designed to provide producers with a webcasting toolset they can rely upon as they build their production businesses. WebCaster is the newest addition to MediaPlatform's growing portfolio of media production and management offerings.
It complements the company's high-end webcasting product, now known as IVT MediaPlatform, as well as PrimeTime, MediaPlatform's video portal.About MediaPlatform, Inc. MediaPlatform, Inc. (formerly IVT) delivers best-in-class webcasting and media management technology to global enterprises and digital media producers. MediaPlatform's webcasting software enables high-impact presentations for lead generation, corporate communications and training. The company offers organizations the ability to take advantage of scalable cloud-based computing, as well as on-premises deployment, to present and manage rich media. With media management tools built on its platform, the company helps clients derive long term archive value from their investment in media content.
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IVT Takes Webcasting Software Platform to the Cloud
IVT, Inc. has moved its industry-leading MediaPlatform webcasting software platform to the cloud. With MediaPlatform increasingly being used in large-scale webcasts by media producers, as well as Fortune 500 clients, the company is elevating its delivery capacity through a partnership with a tier-1 cloud infrastructure provider.
“Our mission has always been to deliver the best quality of service and enable our clients to produce webcasts at literally any audience size without concern for infrastructure,” said Jim McGovern, Chief Executive Officer of IVT. “Now that cloud-based platforms are gaining widespread acceptance across the IT world, we can give our clients the benefit of switching capacity on and off when required.”
This is not the first time IVT has been ahead of the technology curve in the webcasting industry. The company pioneered the concept of offering webcasting software on a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) basis with MediaPlatform. With MediaPlatform in the cloud, IVT enables its clients to benefit from what is rapidly emerging as the new paradigm for corporate computing.
In the cloud, MediaPlatform’s web services architecture can more readily serve diverse client needs by integrating with a range of enterprise systems, both cloud-based and on-premises.
The cloud, an approach to computing that places servers and infrastructure in remote, abstracted datacenters, is ideal for webcasting, which is known for unpredictable spikes in system load. By working with a tier-1 cloud infrastructure provider, IVT gains virtually unlimited capacity and world-class security, reliability, redundancy, failover, and load management.
IVT will continue to support the numerous on-premises installations of its software, including major deployments at global enterprises. IVT prides itself on offering its clients the choice between hosted and on-premises options.
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IVT Raises $5.5 Million for Webcasting Software
As the article appeared in TechCrunch...
IVT, a company that produces enterprise-friendly webcasting software, has raised $5.5 million in Series B funding from Syncom Venture Partners with Barshop Ventures, Monitor Ventures and Tudor Ventures participating in the investment round. IVT raised $3 million in Series A funding in 2006.
IVT’s SaaS offering not only helps power webcasts, but also converts multimedia files, such as slideshows, into viewable videos for the web. IVT also offers a YouTube-like hosting and social media site for companies to disseminate videos and webcasts. And the startup has a number of prominent companies that use its webcasting software including Oracle, Dow Chemical, IBM and NEC.
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Enterprise Communications - Meet IVT
Here is a link to a recent post by Roger Courville on his "The Virtual Presenter" blog. It reads
A VFAQ (VERY frequently asked question) I get is “what’s the difference between web conferencing, webinars, and webcasts?” The short answer, these days, is “not very much and a whole bunch.”
Seriously, the lines have blurred from the days that “webcasting” was akin to broadcasting (using streaming media) with virtually no interactivity, whereas web conferencing was (and remains) live, totally realtime (you don’t want any delay when you’re talking on a phone conference, right? In many use cases, you don’t on the web either). Webinar is simply a portmanteau of web seminar – arguably a use case rather than a technology. That is brief, but it’s as deep as I’m going as I introduce IVT and their enterprise video communications.
I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Mitch, Hugh, Jim, and Ryan, all at the same time. In addition to the knowledge and passion and history (Hugh’s a fellow ex-Microsoftie with some common connections), what I’m most enthused by is their clarity of mission.
Hello software
First, IVT’s a software company. You can host the software, but for reasons I’ll not get into, you want to take advantage of the fact that they host the software for you. What’s interesting here isn’t a “right or wrong,” it’s a commitment to a business model. Many (if not most) companies who have solutions for webcasting also provide professional production/event management services. IVT is committed to their robust partner community who deliver value-added services atop the IVT platform. Again, this isn’t a right or wrong, but you have to appreciate focus.
Hello production tools
It’s hard to tell you how important the backend of a product is. It’s what economists call an “experience good” …you have to have been there to get it and appreciate it. As it just so happens I spent many years running organizations in the production business, let me say the two words that will bring any accountants to their needs and get the producers all excited: labor and labor. Labor is expensive. Technology, especially over time, often gets less expensive. If you’ve ever produced an event, let alone a bunch of them, you know that the project management time can create a big sucking sound in your budget. This is where producers get excited… not only will they find the flexibility on the back end of IVT’s platform a joy when meeting numerous and disparate client/stakeholder needs, but it’ll save them time.
Hello customization
Okay, so many different solutions offer degrees of customization, but far fewer have down-to-the-pixel capabilities. When clients demand that, you’ve got to deliver. Further, there’s customization of user experiences, such as different tools you might make available to a presenter versus what the marketing department sees when they need to pull down a report. And then there are web services for the data integration geeks (I say that with love, mind you).
Hello remote presenters – but wait, there’s more
A point of differentiation here is multiple presenters, each with different camera types. One can have a webcam in Sydney, one can be standing in front of a hi-def broadcast camera at a conference in a New York hotel…you get the idea. Need to switch back and forth like a television newscast? Can do.
As is my style, my goal isn’t a vendor-by-vendor shootout, to talk about price, or make a recommendation. I’m excited and privileged to be independent, talk to great people with their own angle on the market, and share with you my own spin on it. It sounds like IVT has a solution if you need to reasonably reach 100 people and the horsepower to reach 20K if you need. If you need flexibility and reach and a commitment to knowing their core biz, IVT (or one of their partners) might be someone to add to your must-investigate list.
 
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Enterprise Video Fulfilling Its Promise
Video is beginning to fulfill its promise as a transformational technology. Beyond merely cutting communications costs, video is starting to change the way companies do business, and is rapidly being accepted as a "need to have" rather than a "nice to have."
Cisco CEO John Chambers predicts video traffic on the internet will increase six fold by 2012. Here is a link to Cisco's August 5 earnings call where he makes that prediction.
A classic example of the power of video is that of electronics manufacturer NEC. They have a network of nearly 500 dealers across the United States that sell their products. They saved more than $250,000 annually in training costs by delivering product training with video webcasting rather than sending trainers to the dealers or bringing the dealers to the trainers.
They also dramatically reduced the time it takes to train the entire network on new products. Click here to watch a video case study.
A newer example shows how video can literally transform the way a company does business. A major sneaker company manufacturers its products in China. Each time they re-tooled to manufacture a new sneaker, executives would have to fly to China to ensure the tooling was correct and the sneakers were meeting specifications before they began mass production.
They began to use high definition cameras at the plant in China to webcast video of the sneakers to allow executives to make their inspection virtually. Sure, they save money on travel to China. But more importantly, there was a practical limit to the amount of people who could go to China to see the actual design come off the assembly line. The video process allows them to solicit input from a much broader segment of the company, and even get input from retailers while there is still time to respond to suggestions.
The end result is that they can bring their products to market faster than their competition, which creates a significant competitive advantage. Click here to see the video discussion.
I am particularly pleased to see clear evidence of unmistakable, game-changing ROI.
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IT Departments Utilizing Virtualization
IDC released its Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker on September 2, 2009, which reports that "factory revenue in the worldwide server market declined 30.1% year over year to $9.8 billion in the second quarter of 2009 (2Q09)."
According to IDC, this is the lowest quarterly server revenue since they began tracking this market in 1996.
The obvious implication is that the economy has been awful and companies have been avoiding / deferring IT spend. But beyond that it seems that virtualization has both benefited from and contributed to this decline.
With a single server now able to run multiple workloads, it seems inevitable that the server footprint is destined to continue getting smaller within the corporate data center. But the benefits of virtualization do not stop with simply running more apps on one machine; the whole datacenter becomes more agile, more flexible to deal with unexpected changes in workload.
The ability to get more from fewer boxes is certainly a contributing factor to less boxes being bought. And tight budgets in the 2009 economy have certainly contributed to IT managers seeking out less costly options.
It will be interesting to see how the server market rebounds.
Andy Patrizio in his InternetNews.com blog quotes Rahul Agarwal, co-founder of Infiniti Research. Within the dismal sales figures, Agarwal notes that both Gartner and IDC report that unit costs are going up for server sales. Agarwal believes that this is due to sellers trying to widen margins by selling more feature-rich machines:
Our view is that to offset this volume pressure, hardware vendors will be
forced to improve unit margins by building in virtualization capability, memory
and I/O interfaces in the hardware.
So the strategy to improve revenues will enable IT departments to further utilize virtualization, continuing the trend toward fewer individual servers.
Agarwal noted that many servers out there are quite inefficient, particular amongst small-to-medium sized businesses, so the more successful players will focus on consolidation to increase efficiency and reduce the footprint. He says:
The server market of tomorrow will be a value game and not a volume game.
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Health Chief Sebelius Webcasting Today at 1:00 pm EDT
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is hosting a webcast at 1 pm EDT today, Friday August 7.
Use the hashtag #HCRQ to ask a question via Twitter or email hhsstudio@hhs.gov.
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