Webinar Wire

Video Clips In Webinars

Posted by Ken Molay January 14 2009 11:26 PM EDT

It's time for another answer to our Top Webinar FAQs. Today's question concerns the use of video clips as part of your webinar content.

I'm referring here to playing a prerecorded video snippet for the audience rather than using webcam video of a presenter (that was FAQ number 4, answered previously).

Your first concern is whether your web conferencing technology supports videos as content. Some do, but many do not. Most of the technologies that identify themselves as focusing on "webcasting" (ON24, Stream57, and others) support video content, as they are designed for carrying high bandwidth data to large audiences. Some of the vendors concentrating on "webinars" also handle video. WebEx Event Center and Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro are two examples. Most of the technologies designed for "collaborative meetings" (such as DimDim) will not allow you to show video content.

Once you have determined whether it is technically possible to include a video as part of your presentation, you then face the bigger question of whether it is a good idea or not. Here are some of the tradeoffs and considerations.

NEGATIVE FACTORS:

1) Videos add tremendous overhead to the data you are sending out to the audience. Large data streams coming over the Internet are prone to problems. It's not the fault of the web conferencing vendors, it's a result of the way the Internet was designed. Large amounts of information are broken into packets and are distributed over the network through a variety of paths. They are reassembled on the receiving end. There may be delays in getting bits of information and sometimes a packet gets garbled in transmission and needs a resend. This all happens very very quickly, and with a little delay at the beginning to account for later assembly delays, most data streams can give the impression of a smooth transmission. But audio and video use so much data and need such an unbroken perfect assembly and playback that there will always be some members of the audience who see video stutters or the infamous "Buffering..." message. The problem is exacerbated by people on slow connections, people using slow processors, people running lots of applications simultaneously, or people experiencing heavy loads on their local network.

2) Because different audience members may get different amounts of buffering, you as a presenter can never be completely sure when they will finish viewing your video clip. Someone with a perfect connection sees it in an unbroken stream and finishes first. Others with lots of buffering are still watching and listening to the video. When do you continue with your live presentation content? If you start talking early, you are talking over the end of the video for the slowpokes. If you wait a long time, the fast viewers are staring at a blank, silent screen.

3) Watching video is a passive activity. A well constructed webinar should be as interactive and engaging for the audience as possible. Once they sit back and start "watching TV", concentration and involvement in your content often declines.

4) If you offer your webinar audio over the telephone, you need to make sure the audio from your recorded clip can play back for your telephone audience. Ask your web conferencing vendor how they handle this... Some products force you to run patch cables on a specialized device between your computer and a presenter's phone line. It could be trickier than you think!

POSITIVE FACTORS:

A) If "a picture is worth a thousand words" then moving pictures can be even more valuable. The wow factor or descriptive power of a well made video can be immensely valuable in helping to get your message across.

B) Very short videos (30 seconds or less) are often immune to many of the negatives I mentioned. The amount of buffering delay in a short clip is unlikely to cause big differences in viewing time between different audience members. Watching a short clip can actually increase concentration and interest as a break from a succession of static slides. It takes a while for the thrill of seeing video content to turn into the passivity I mentioned.

C) Sometimes video is the only practical way to share the information you want to convey. If you just produced a new TV ad for your company and want to show it to your sales and marketing teams, it doesn't help to show them screen captures and a description. They need to see the actual video spot.

Only you can make the determination of whether video content is right for your presentation, your audience, and your web conferencing technology. But I will mention one other potential workaround.

Some webinar technologies give you the ability to browse your audience to a web page. Rather than showing the web page as an application running on your desktop, you open the page in a web browser on their local computers. If you host your video clip on a streaming server and set it to start playing automatically as soon as the page appears, you may be able to get good widespread viewing performance for all audience members simultaneously. I think the use of a streaming server rather than a standard web server is important here. The former uses a different delivery protocol that can help minimize delays and differences among the viewers. There are third-party hosting services that let you put your content on their streaming servers. Look into it as a possibility if you have web browsing capabilities in your web conferencing product.