Posted on Sat 2nd Nov 2019 at 2:17pm
Silverstream’s Simon Walton on smart ways to work your event content
When it comes to attracting visitors to your tradeshow – content is king. It’s one of the main reasons visitors give for turning up. Often there are CPD points to be earned and it’s a great way to catch up with industry trends. So organisers invest a lot of money and effort putting together a conference programme.
But increasingly they want that content to be working harder. With so much video being consumed online, it makes sense to capture those presentations for the long term benefit of the show’s community and to keep the event in people’s consciousness for the rest of the year.
Up to now camera crews and live mixing of powerpoints have been expensive. As soon as you have more than one camera you need to coordinate them with a director on talkback. Afterwards there’s costly post production to stitch in the powerpoints at the appropriate time. Viewers are become accustomed to the high production values of TED Talks. So doing it on the cheap can reflect badly on a brand. There had to be a smarter way.
It’s something our technical team have been working on for a while. Then New Scientist Live challenged us to capture more than 120 talks over 4 days. Our development programme went into overdrive.
We brought together new technology that allows one operator to coordinate multiple cameras and use video mapping software to add the presenter’s powerpoints in real time. It means the viewer can see the presenter and their visuals together. So the production is complete, so the conference can be streamed live or captured in real time to be available as video on demand almost immediately. We call the system ConferenceStream.
Live streaming via ConferenceStream has proved to be a great way to boost the impact of an event, without increasing its carbon footprint.
With World Architecture Festival we streamed live from Amsterdam to Facebook Live. But not just to the event’s own account. Because it’s a global event, the organisers want to reach as many architects as possible. So we also streamed live to ArchDaily – the world’s most visited architecture site - bringing the event to hundreds of thousands of people around the world via Facebook Live.
ConferenceStream also allows us to follow a panel discussion in a similar way to what you’d see on Question Time.
But what about the New Scientist Live challenge? New Scientist’s Chief Technical Officer, Chris Corderoy said:
“The live capture and mapping technology used by our partners Silverstream worked seamlessly in creating a real-time blend of presenters, slides and picture in picture for over 120 of our speakers.
“The final product perfectly encapsulated the feel of the event and the feedback has been exceptional, especially with the speed at which we have been able to turn this around to our digital subscribers”.
So there’s no need to let content go to waste. There’s a world out there hungry to watch it.