Earlier this week, we announced Podium 2, the newest version of our webcasting platform. As I mentioned in a blog post yesterday, our release had three prime areas of emphasis:
- Beautiful HD Experiences
- Engaging Global Audiences
- Priced for Everyone
The features I outlined yesterday focused on providing Beautiful HD Experiences provide unparalleled quality and control for event producers. HD quality video and audio, dynamic smart-streaming, global reach, and control over how video and event content are displayed will enable our customers to achieve new levels of creativity and polish in getting their message across to webcast audiences. But Podium 2 also includes a series of exciting new features focused on providing a best-of-breed experience for event viewers. Early on in our development cycle, we challenged ourselves come up with ways to provide webcast audiences with interactive tools for events of any size.
The common belief is that as event sizes grow, interactivity decreases. We're aiming to change that.
One of the challenges that Michael, our CEO put in front of us is visualized in the graph above. Typically customers have had to make trade-offs. If they wanted interactivity, they had to use a product that only scaled to a limited audience size. Once they reached those maximums, features started to display performance issues or become less useful, because their design was meant to facilitate not just a web event use case, but also team collaboration and eLearning use cases as well. A perfect example of this is note taking. Sure many products out on the market provide note taking capabilities from within the event. But because note taking was imagined as a feature used in a collaborative team meeting, where you’d want all attendees to share the same notes. Yet if you think about a webinar or webcast scenario, where audience members do not know each other and who have differing interests and objectives, having the ability to take shared notes for the entire audience simply does not make sense. So what do event producers end up doing? Disabling the notes feature for everyone, and taking a potentially powerful capability out of the hands of viewers (keep reading to see how we’ve tackled this challenge in Podium 2).
At the other end of the spectrum, where customers wanted to reach large audiences of 2,500 or more, they had to use a different set of products that provided limited interactivity, and which provided a noticeably more passive viewing experience. Viewers are left to simply “sit back and take it” and this lack of interactivity and engagement gives audiences ample opportunities to click away to a website, email, or simply leave the event all together.
A typical event experience touted by one of our competitors in their showcase site.
Note: You can experience the typical event experience yourself and I actually encourage you to do it and see how long you watch for: http://event.on24.com/view/presentation/flash/EventConsole.html?titlecolor=000000&eventid=133495&sessionid=1&key=B2499CB2DC56E195668833FD952CE9C7&contenttype=A&eventuserid=305999&playerwidth=1000&playerheight=650&caller=previewLobby&text_language_id=en&format=fhaudio#
Our team truly believes that webcasts do not need to be a passive viewing experience and the new engagement features in Podium 2 prove that.
Engaging Global Audiences
Podium 2 includes many new features that provide engagement tools to webcast audiences regardless of the size of the audience. In the release we’ve added some of the features you’d expect in any web event platform such as Chat or Q&A. But our past experiences in the web collaboration space (both the CEO and I were former Product Managers for the Adobe Connect product) provided us with the years of customer feedback to add these features to the product in a way that they would still be useful in large events.
Take Q&A for example. In Podium 2, audience members can ask questions and review answered questions as you’d expect, but if a user’s submitted question is answered, we provide a special visual treatment drawing that users attention to the fact that this has occurred.
If a user's specific question is answered, it receives a different visual treatment to grab that user's attention.
Another example of this is in the Chat feature. We have personally experienced too many events to count where Chat became unruly and impossible to follow simply because the chat messages were flying off the screen. To account for this, we’ve added in an Auto-Scroll option so that users can scroll through chat messages at their own paste should they choose this option.
Scratchpad is also a new feature in Podium 2, that revolutionizes how event audiences take and share notes within a webcast. This feature enables viewers to take individualized notes within Podium, save them as a PDF or distribute them via email. Instead of having to tab away from the webcast to take notes in a separate application or on paper, viewers remain focused on the event and message. Notes are time-stamped, so viewers can easily return to noteworthy parts of presentations. Think about this for a second. Not only are you drastically reducing the number of opportunities a user has to get distracted, but also providing an seamless way for a user to review the points they found interesting in the event and best of all, share your message with others.
The Scratchpad provides audience members with the ability to take personalized notes within the webcast window. Viewers can also save the notes and share them with colleagues.
The Viewer Video Responses feature is another example of how we are bringing a fresh approach to the webcasting space. Event producers have never been able to put a face to a name and event viewers have never been able to provide any sort of visual feedback or respond to event content with video, that is until now. In Podium 2, Participants can record feedback about an event to convey thoughts and ideas. Video Responses provide rich, multimedia feedback about the event content, while promoting a sense of community among event audiences. Responses can be reviewed by event producers and made available for download or later viewing by other attendees. Imagine being able to post customer video testimonials about a new release recorded by event attendees, or better yet, playing back a gushing response by a viewer about how valuable the content was to your boss as part of a justification for expanding your webcast programming.
Viewer Responses allow attendees to record video segments to provide feedback or give their opinion on event content.
Bringing viewers into the event through video and other multimedia in a controlled, moderated is an area we think is a key component to the next-generation of webcasting, and the Video Responses feature is just the tip the iceberg. Look out of some mind-blowing features in this area in the months to come!
We are also introducing the Podium Events Guide in this release. The Events Guide is a video portal that provides organizations with the ability to provide a destination site where viewers can learn about upcoming events, launch into in progress events, and watch event recordings. With the Events Guide, customers can combine the power of interactive live events with a web-based Events Portal to view live and on-demand broadcasts. Upcoming or in-progress events can be organized into Channels to encourage repeat viewership and target content to relevant audiences. Think of this as a private-labeled YouTube that you own and manage where viewers can engage with a library of events.
The Podium Events Guide gives event viewers a destination site where they can engage with a library of upcoming and recorded events.
Last, but not least, is the Vanity URL feature. While some products have provided users with the ability to attach a natural-language URL to their web conferences, to date, no providers in the webcasting space has provided this functionality. Recall the example event URL I provided earlier. Good luck trying to recite the URL to a colleague over the phone that you think might be interested in the subject matter. With Podium 2, customers now have the ability to assign a custom, easy to remember, easy to recite URL to their events. This capability will not only provide event viewers with the convenience of being able to easily enter your events, but this can go a long way towards helping your events go viral.
The engagement features in Podium 2 go a long way towards solving “The Interactivity Challenge” I introduced earlier in this post and it for this reason that we believe Podium 2 is redefining webcasting. Come back tomorrow to see how the new pricing model we’re releasing with Podium 2 will change how you buy and ultimately use webcasting in your organization. And don’t forget to attend one of our upcoming webcasts and experience a Podium event first hand.
O’Reilly Media is best known as the publisher of technical manuals, but also conducts online learning, and conferences. Their brand is most recognizable because they always feature a distinctive woodcut pictures of an animal on their book covers. Since the team at O’Reilly specializes in education, we will also get some great ideas about producing a successful webcast.
