Webinar Wire

127 Choices And Counting

I sat in the back of a conference room yesterday during a presentation on why companies should do webinars. People nodded, wowed, did all the usual things they do when exposed to how cool and powerful these tools can be. Then someone asked the question that all of us who deal in the virtual communications world hate: "How many vendors are there and how do we pick one?"

The answer to the first one is easier than the second one. According to my spies in the business, there are 127 recognized providers of web conferencing services. I defy you to name them all. Heck, I do this for a living and off the top of my head I stalled out at less than two dozen.

To make matters worse, there's a push among the smaller companies to catch up in the single biggest differentiator between them and the big players- recording audio as well as video.

Given that I have no dog in the platform fight (although I do cringe when customers ask me to help their team and they use a platform I've never seen or heard of) here's a quick list of things to pay attention to.

• Cost They range from free to reasonably costly (although still cheaper than renting a room at the Ramada). As far as which one you choose, you still generally get what you pay for
• Interaction tools Polling, chat, SCORM compliance (and if you understand SCORM compliance you don't need an idiot like me preaching to you) and other tools increase the richness of the experience for your audience and boosts the credibility of the presenter, again the more you pay the more you get. How much do you need?
• Firewalls Flash-based services generally can scoot through company firewalls pretty easily- unless you're in a financial services company where God herself couldn't slip through. Your IT folks will have something to say
• Audio This is a huge differentiator between the low-cost and the standard providers. Basically there are now two types of audio: use the phone or use a headset through your computer. Many companies don't have 2-way audio on their computers so you may be forced to use the telephone and reduce your options
• Recording This is a huge issue and a big differentiator between companies- after all the ability to easily record your webinars and post them later is a major driver for doing webinars int he first place. This is the biggest scramble among providers. At least 4 of the lower-cost providers will provide audio and video recording through VOIP by the end of the summer (programmers and bugs willing).

So there are 127 choices..... but what's happening is really pretty amazing. Pretty soon the differences will be even smaller and the features overwhelmingly identical. Either the little guys are going to disappear and/or consolidate, or they'll lead in new innovations. Personally I'm looking forward to the ability to send coffee and doughnuts virtually so I don't have to go into that conference room again.