Webcasting with Adobe Connect
I’ve used various webcasting tools over the past few years such as Ustream, livestream (formerly mogulus), on24, Webex, and in-house developed solutions built on top of Content Delivery Networks such as Akamai, Highwinds and Limelight.
Depending on the project and needs, the recommended solution may be different. A concert doesn’t require the audience to follow PowerPoint slides. So no need to dedicate lots of real estate to the “sharing” area and use a more corporate tool such as WebEx. uStream and a twitter feed work just fine.
Adobe Connect is kind of like the Cadillac of webcast tools. And a Cadillac with all the options. It’s definitely geared towards the business market.
I used Connect earlier this week to broadcast multiple, concurrent live video webcasts from a conference. Each day there were multiple sessions going on at the same time. Remote attendees could go from one room to another, just like in person participants can walk out the door and into the session next door.
The conference organizer wanted to make sure that only people who paid could tune in remotely to watch the conference sessions.
The organizer sent me an excel file the night before the conference kicked off with a list of registrants. I batch registered attendees in Connect. It was also easy to register late registrants on the fly so they could log in and participate.
I created a unique Web address for each conference room and set the permissions so that only people whose email address and password are in the database can log in. I sent an email out to participants with the conference schedule and a link to the room where they could watch each session.
I created two views for participants. Each view included a number of “pods”, which are modules that you can incorporate into the webcast window. For example, there is a video pod, a chat pod, an attendee pod, a pole / survey pod, a file library pod, a notes pod, a PowerPoint / desktop sharing pod, etc.
The first view was for when speakers used PowerPoint. I made the PowerPoint pod large, with a small video window next to it. Right before a session started I would grab the upcoming speaker’s presentation on a thumb drive and upload it for the online attendees from my laptop. When the speaker moved from slide to slide in the room I’d just click the next button for the online audience so they could see the slide he was referencing.
The second view was for when speakers had no PowerPoints, like during a panel discussion. In this scenario I don’t need to take up much real estate with the sharing pod, so I made the video pod bigger and featured the polling pod in case we wanted to get audience feedback.
I could transition between one view and the other with a click of a button and often found myself going back and forth.
When an online participant had a question, I’d just raise my hand like anyone else in the room and wait for the speaker or moderator to call on me. Appreciative thank you’s from the online audience often followed.
We had the same gear set-up in each room. One goal was to simultaneously broadcast a live mix and record the sessions so we could create on-demand video of each session by the next morning.
A Panasonic DVX camera has one firewire out and composite outputs for audio and video. Since we wanted to capture what we were shooting to an external hard disc recorder, we used the firewire output to go to a Firestore. This saved us from having to pull tapes. We sent the composite to a Canopus ADVC110. The Canopus converts analog to digital. I sent the digital signal via a firewire output on the back of the Canopus to the Mac laptop we were using for the webcast.
Adobe Connect detected the video signal coming from the external source and broadcast it to my online audience.
Peter Cervieri is co-founder of and Director of Business Development for ScribeMedia.Org. He has many fetishes. Among them is collecting business cards.
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