When you are working with external providers I find it most helpful to get to know them personally. It makes life much easier in the long run. At the beginning I invested a couple hours to travel across town with one of the company’s IT professional in tow, to get to know the streaming guys at Solutionpark. This was a number of years ago. And they were not as I expected. No weird IT geeks sitting in a corner glued to their PC screens. They welcomed us with open arms and couldn’t wait to show us around. 
The place was full of interesting equipment they had built into mobile trolleys themselves as they explained how they’d go on location and record, encode and stream a company’s investor presentation, press conference or other live event onto the web. So how would this work for us? Basically we wanted to replace the old way of recording a staff event on VHS cassettes (!) which would be copied manually and then sent by mail to the various offices around the world. How endlessly tedious and time-consuming!
The technical side of it all
The good thing was that our streaming provider has their own encoding center where all the equipment is permanently installed on site. This means that they are always ready with many encoders and backup devices available, a redundant and reliable Internet upstream, optimized connectivity to Akamai (a Content Distribution Network) for live streaming and access to any European satellite for live webcasts. All recordings are done in broadcast quality. This set-up has proven to be flexible, reliable and cost-efficient and a number of times I’d call to say we’re having an event on short notice. They bring everything, i.e. usually two people, a streaming engineer and a web TV producer, and the full equipment. All I had to do is get the speakers and audience organized and off we went. Following the recording, I’d receive a link which we then placed on the respective company webpage. That’s it.
Before you get started, here are some things you should clarify in advance:
- When and where do you want to record your video?
- At what time do you want to publish your video and to whom?
- How big will the video file be?
- How long do you intend to record?
- How time-critical is your event?
- Will the webcast be done live or on demand?
- Does your organization have a strong enough pipeline and bandwidth for uploading and playing videos?
- How many people will be watching simultaneously?
- Can you bypass your firewall, proxy and are there IT security issues with your local IT department?
- Do you have electrical power and a phone line available onsite?
Once you have checked out the technicalities, you are set to go. Your external partner can surely help you in finding out some of the points. These usually just have to be ticked off the first time you webcast an event. Assuming you will conduct your future events in the same location, the set up will already have been established. From then on, you can lean back and enjoy the event.
Set realistic expectations, allow yourself enough time for the preparation and testing phase. Take the lead in organizing the location and briefing the speakers. It helps to clarify the logistical details in advance, to make sure you have things in place before you get started. Once the camera is rolling it’s much harder to fix something that isn’t already working.