Christine's Communication Blog

Entries tagged as ‘equipment’

VII – Before the camera starts rolling

29.10.2009 · Leave a Comment

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. Solutionpark equipmentThe 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

IMG_1520The 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.

Categories: corporate communication · event communication · investor relations · marketing communication
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III – Talking from a communicator’s perspective

01.10.2009 · Leave a Comment

As a busy communications professional you surely have a lot on your plate and don’t want to be bothered by yet another communications tool. I know how that feels, believe me. But, and there is a big BUT, I was able to set up an easy process that became so automatic that I didn’t even have to think twice about it. So why not opt for something that will make your life so much easier?

Building my own webcast teamPicture 14

Step by step I convinced our IT guys, asked the men and women from the internal services/facility department to help me with our employee information events and listened to the streaming and video specialists from Solutionpark as they tried to explain what they needed from our side. It’s always good to listen to your external partners, especially if they are so helpful and reliable. Honestly, it all developed into a great collaboration and team work all together. We learned from each other and with increasing experience everyone fell into their role and knew exactly what to do. All the while I expanded my famous binder listing contacts and processes for the various scenarios, adding new possibilities of application as we went along. I will be sharing those insights with you as we go along. I also used my network of company contacts in all the local offices around the world to keep them informed and involved in our webcast developments. It became a ritual of sending out the e-mail announcing the next webcast and receiving people’s comments on how they were looking forward to watching it.

P1040178I truly enjoyed working with ‘my personal webcast team’ and we all shared in the success of making ithappen every time no matter what. Despite a little adrenalin rush before the start of every recording or even the live transmission, I was always excited to work with the team and have the people from Solutionpark come by with all their sophisticated equipment. Actually, that was the best part of it all. Who doesn’t like new gadgets, ha?! It seemed as though they brought a new piece of hardware every time. They use some really cool stuff. Plus, the technological advances simply make it easier to get the job done.

Categories: corporate communication · event communication · internal communication
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