Go Hybrid: A Live Streaming Cheat Sheet

This article was written (well, ghostwritten by me in collaboration with Dave Lutz) for Dave’s People & Processes column in PCMA’s June edition of Convene.

You’ve convinced your team that providing a hybrid event is good for your organization, your customers and your stakeholders. You’ve alleviated any fears about the virtual experience cannibalizing your face-to-face revenue. You’ve researched how other companies have used hybrid events successfully to serve their members and positively impact future face-to-face events.

Here’s what you need to know to live stream and extend the reach of your best live meeting content.

You know that a hybrid event will:

• Extend the reach of your meeting’s messages and content
• Increase ROI for a remote audience that would not normally attend the face-to-face experience
• Improve your membership value proposition
• Reduce your remote participants’ carbon footprint
• Help convert fence-sitters from remote attendees to live participants.

You’ve weighed all the options of the following five types of hybrid events:

1. Audiocast — telephone-based conference, sometimes with live Q & A
2. Bannercast — video broadcast in an in-banner ad using streaming technology
3. Backchannel — on-site and remote attendees communicate together about the face-to-face experience, sometimes done through Twitter using a hashtag
4. Live Streaming — live audio and video of face-to-face presentation streamed via the Internet
5. Slidecast — a set of slides broadcast over the Internet with synchronization of video and audio effects

After careful consideration, you’ve decided that your hybrid event will use a live stream of the general session speakers, along with a moderated backchannel to engage the participants.

Here’s a checklist of what you’ll need to live stream your face-to-face experience to your remote audience:

• Digital camera
• Venue with Internet access of at least 512 kbps
• Interface hardware for digital camera to computer
• Laptop or PC
• Online live-streaming provider (there are a variety of free and fee-based options)
• Permission from your speakers and panelists to live stream their presentations
• Twitter hashtag for the backchannel

Here’s how the live-streaming process works:

1. Film the event and send it in real time to an online provider via the Internet.
2. The online provider software encodes, compresses and formats video.
3. The online provider transmits video to servers.
4. The video rebroadcasts in real time.

Make sure you check with your meeting venue as well as equipment and service providers before committing to live streaming an event.

1. How is the room set?
2. What’s the ambient lighting like?
3. Will someone be behind the camera or will it be stationary on a tripod or from a webcam?
4. What’s your Internet access?
5. How fast is your Internet connection?
6. Do you have appropriate PC hardware interface?
7. What live streaming online provider do you use?
8. Is your online provider broadcasts password-protected?
9. Does your online provider integrate with social networks?
10. Are you going to charge for virtual participants? If yes, just nonmembers or members too? And how much?

Takeaways

• Read the book The Back Channel, by Cliff Atkinson, for tips on how to use a backchannel at your next event.
• Watch Cliff Atkinson discuss how to use a social media and a backchannel at conferences.
• Distribute speaker and presenter Olivia Mitchell’s free eBook, How To Present with Twitter and Other Back Channels to all of your speakers.
• Join the Virtual Edge Institute, an organization for those involved in virtual events and meetings.
• Download The Virtual Edge Institute’s free eBook The Virtual Event Resource Book.

Now that you have your logistics covered, it’s time to think strategically about the differences between your face-to-face and remote audiences. You can’t expect your virtual audience to have the same experience as your face-to-face attendees. We’ll focus on what you can to do onsite to improve your remote audience’s experience while maintaining a quality experience for those attending in person in the next column in Convene.

This post was reprinted with permission of Convene, the magazine of the Professional Convention Management Association. © 2010

What logistical live streaming tips would you add to this list? What live streaming resources have you found beneficial?