Streamingmedia's Industry Sourcebook -2004 edition

Web-Based Presentations:
Mass Medium for the new Millennium

Thanks to the Internet and streaming media, there's been a paradigm shift in the use and delivery of presentations. Once the medium of the lone viewer at his or her desktop or a handful of people in a cramped meeting room, presentations are now streaming to unlimited audiences around the globe. And the world will never be the same.

Back in the 20th century, the Web was the Web and presentations were presentations. One was something on the desktop or in the meeting room; the other was something on the Internet, but the two didn't get together much.

Most 20th century Web-based presentations solutions were quite unattractive—
financially, technologically, and logistically—or they simply didn't provide the function ability necessary for effective communications. Online PowerPoint presentations were often without video and required each individual slide to be converted to a GIF or JPEG and uploaded separately. Video teleconferencing was (and still is) expensive, somewhat archaic, and aimed more at live, face-to-face communications among small groups.

Now, entering the 21st century, a new broadcasting/presentation solution has evolved. It uses the same viewing platform as many past offerings, the desktop computer, but does so in a way that redefines the way we communicate. Say hello to Web-based presentations, a multimedia communication medium for the 21st century.

Benefits/Advantages

Online presentations mix the ease, immediacy, and interactivity of telephony with the sensory power of multimedia through the inexpensive and universal Internet. But what gives this technology the upper hand in the evolution of communication is the way in which it allows viewers to interact with presentations and presenters to create a dialogue with their audience, as well as its ability to present information live, via a Webcast, or on-demand, archived in online libraries.

Interactivity takes on many forms in Web-based presentations. Presenters can use it to learn more about their audience through registration pages and about their audience's opinions through online polling. Live Q & A via email (aka, moderated messaging) provides for a discussion that can be held during or immediately after a presentation. Email plays an important interactive role in online training modules, sending a student's answers to questions posed during a presentation directly to the instructor for immediate review or grading. This kind of training also takes advantage of being online by including hyperlinks, which direct students to relevant Web pages, thus adding layers of informational depth without increasing the girth of the presentation.

With Web-based presentations, there are no blank discs to buy or stamps to lick. Many solutions encode video and audio, synchronize to slides or other media, and publish to the Internet on-the-fly or (at the very least) minimize the strain of a typical post-production process into a simple, non-technical, and inexpensive process—if you've got the IT know-how in-house. Conferences, annual meetings, and training can be conducted virtually, negating the need for travel expenses such as airplane tickets and hotel rooms. Plus, it's not necessary for online viewers to own or download special software, since both live and on-demand content can easily be made available through an ordinary Web browser.

Trail Blazers

While corporate communications has been the primary driving force behind the development of Web-based presentations, the government has actually been the sector at the forefront—wholeheartedly buying into and finding real-life uses for it. The state-funded California Association for the Education of Young Children (CAEYC) has developed the Child Development Facility Accreditation Project (CDFAP) with the help of presentations solution provider Vodium®. This project offers low-cost, online training for educating licensed family childcare homes and state-funded centers, with the overall goal of helping them achieve accreditation, and thereby, providing better service to infants across California. The curriculum combines video of a lead presenter, supplemental video clips and interviews, online questions with answers that are sent directly to accreditation centers via email, and hyperlinks to relevant information on the Web.

Another early adopter in the government sector has been the Air Force. The United States Air Force (USAF) Academy trains the future pilots of unmanned aerial drones, which have been touted as essential to the military's battlefield intelligence and could be just as important to homeland security, once the technology has been refined and sufficient pilots have been trained. The audio, video, and telemetry data that these drones continuously collect necessitated the use of streaming technology. Unfortunately, getting that information to the classroom in a format that was timely, accurate, and preserved the data's inherent synchronization so that it could be effectively used as a teaching tool wasn't easily accomplished until the USAF turned to Web-based presentation technology, specifically, Accordent's Presenter PRO. Now, this technology is being considered for a broad range of military uses.

Myriad Uses/Real World Examples

Hyperion, a global leader in business performance management software, is one company that has quickly recognized the power of Web-based presentations. The Sunnyvale, California-based company is currently working to make multimedia content from its marketing department, such as customer success stories, available online and on-demand through the "Hyperion Zone," according to Adrian Vernon, Senior Operations Manager at Hyperion. The Hyperion Zone is a custom, interactive destination, developed through presentations service provider Sawyer Media and designed to lead users through online libraries of multimedia presentations and videos. Assisting users while they're in the Zone is Harry Hyperion—a David Letterman-meets-James Bond cartoon avatar voiced by Vernon. Through the avatar and the Zone, Vernon hopes to utilize online presentations to better and more efficiently educate Hyperion's sales force. "Salespeople are bombarded by documents, which can't be easily sorted through to find the most relevant. When they do find the right one, its 100 pages long...you can condense that whole process down into 10 minutes of video with slides," says Vernon. "Better educating your sales force gives the best ROI of any investment."

Allergan, makers of the infamous Botox(among other drugs), has already implemented a Web-based presentation system. "We Webcast very large meetings in which nearly 1,000 concurrent users can log on," says Sandy Clarke, Employee Communications Manager at Allergan. Unlike Vernon, Clarke had prior experience with an online presentation system—"However, it didn't allow us to capture in real time and wasn't very ease to use...very cumbersome." Clarke continues by defining what "cumbersome" meant for her, "A lot of pre-work had to be done, relying heavily on support from IT...had to save each slide as a GIF or JPEG and upload to the server; then we had to outsource the post-work…it would be days before employees could watch it over the intranet."

Since acquiring a MediaSite Live unit from Sonic Foundry, the only tech support she uses is to have her Webmaster nearby during presentations to troubleshoot in case anything goes wrong with the Internet stream. And the process of updating slides has become effortless, enabling last-minute changes that formerly would have proved problematic. (For more about this solution, see sidebar: "Monkeypox and the Need for Speed")

Some Consumer Education Needed

The ways in which Web-based presentations can increase a company's productivity are numerous. In fact, the potential uses encompass such a broad range that it may have actually hampered the growth of the market. Vendors end up having to spend more time consulting with their clients as to how they're going to utilize the product than they do convincing them that it's a good thing.

This problem stems from Web-based presentations being a mature technology in a "nascent market," as Cameron Clarke, CEO of Vodium, puts it. Over the last couple of years, educating potential customers has been a major focus for online presentation companies. But while there has been progress in defining terms (such as "Webcast," for example) "Customers still don't fully realize the benefits of these tools," says Clarke.

This nascence is part of the reason why many companies have positioned themselves more as service providers than simply software vendors. It isn't so much a product they sell, but a package of services, encompassing even content production in some cases. At the same time, most companies with software to sell have no qualms with offering it on its own; it may cost more upfront, but leveraging your company's IT know-how can provide savings in the long run.

Currently, the majority of neophytes choose to outsource some portion of the work, including hosting Web servers, integrating the technology, managing data, producing content, and/or (as mentioned earlier) consulting on how to get the most out of this technology. The wide variety of ways to get online with multimedia presentations takes its cue from the varying landscape of companies' technical abilities to produce and publish in-house.

Questions To Ask Before Implementing

Those interested in successfully implementing a Web-based presentation system have a number of questions which they need to answer first. Once you've determined the answers to these questions, you can go on to choose a tool or service provider, or you can attempt to do it yourself.

• Who are the presentations aimed at, and how, where, and when will they be watched?

• Do the presentations include time-sensitive information?

• What level of technical support can you (or do you want to) provide, or how much do you want to do inhouse?

• Once you've got the infrastructure set up, who's going to assure that there's content worthy of such a robust medium that can consistently engage the audience?

Demanding Live Versus Lively On-Demand

The choice of doing presentations live versus on-demand hinges upon the nature of the presentation and the who, how, where, and when of the audience. Some professions require information as it happens, as in the case of investment bankers, who must react to earnings reports nearly instantaneously to catch the market. Online quarterly meetings can include live interaction with the audience, and multimedia marketing campaigns can get off to a good start through a dramatic live announcement. While these are opportunities for effective Webcasting, the ability to archive them in online libraries prevents high-quality content from disappearing into the wild, blue yonder. Thankfully, most platforms offer the flexibility of both.

In terms of cost, Webcasting demands more resources, as it necessitates having enough bandwidth to withstand the weight of streaming media to hundreds or thousands of users simultaneously.

For some uses of Web-based presentations, especially training or elearning. Webcasting can actually be counter-productive, requiring that "students" be online during a certain timeframe—something that shouldn't be necessary. Through questionnaires, hyperlinks, and online polls, complete training courses can be made interactive without the need for being there live. On-demand frees "students" to watch lessons at their convenience, instead of trying to force them into an already hectic schedule. The decision to go live or not revolves around the nature of the content rather than the specific platform.

Is There A Doctor In-House?

There are basically three ways to implement Web presentations in your organization: 1) hire one of the many service providers; 2) buy a standalone software tool available from a few service providers and a few software vendors and do most of it yourself; or 3) hire a SMIL coder and do it ALL yourself in-house.

The more you do on your own, the lower the overall overhead. Of course, that is easier said than done. If you don't already have the technical expertise in-house for creating Web-based presentations, acquiring it can be a daunting and expensive task. But, if you do have that expertise, or just really want to implement Web-based presentations on the cheap, a couple of options are available to you.

Microsoft Producer 2003 allows you to create multimedia PowerPoint presentations in HTML for free. A host of partner companies enhance PowerPoint and Producer's functionality through one-click capturing and synchronizing of live video and audio to PowerPoint presentations, Webcasting, interactive learning, and secure, managed delivery systems. These third-party products and services all come with a cost but still can create multimedia online presentations for less cost than their all-in-one competitors. Putting these solutions to use may be easy on an individual basis, but incorporating multiple software tools from different companies into an entire presentation package will take some in-house expertise. Plus, there's no over-arching support structure for consulting on how best to use this technology.

If you already have that technical know-how in-house, you might want to go the route that JPMorganChase chose. "We own our own streaming media distribution structure supported by an internal tech group and create our own content," says Nicole McLane, a consultant for JPMorganChase, acting as a production manager. This content often revolves around training and keeping up with ever-changing tax laws. Other uses include Webcasting earnings announcements and as a replacement for video tele-conferencing. McLane mentions that they do use some third-party software, namely Accordent's PresenterPRO, but that doesn't keep them from getting their fingers dirty. "We do a lot of coding with SMIL; it's the only way to ensure exactness," McLane says.

SMIL (pronounced "smile") stands for Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language. It enables simple authoring of interactive presentations that integrate streaming audio and video with images, text, and any other media type. Due to it being XML-based and HTML-like, "it's really simple...the same thing as doing a Web site," according to McLane. She nJds tliiil when work-ing with SMIL, it's best to keep things simple, asserting that SMIL is a picky language to program in. Her division has developed series of templates to circumvent that drawback.

McLane says that so far, she hasn't seen anyone but RealOne actively creating products with SMIL 2.0, its latest incarnation. In July 2003, RealNetworks released the source code for SMIL 2.0 to their Helix community. With this code and that of the Helix DNA Client, Helix community developers can support the display of complex presentations in their products. But since becoming a W3C standard in 2001, SMIL hasn't made much progress anywhere other than in the RealOne camp. Consequently, it's future may be tied to that of Real's for the foreseeable future.

The 21st Century's Communications Evolution

Web-based presentations represent a new paradigm in multimedia content, capitalizing on a growing consumer broadband infrastructure and the movement of all media towards a digital format. But until recently, the technology had not matured enough to the point where it could be painlessly implemented. That point has now been reached, although it might still be a few years before people's attitudes towards content adjust. "The problem is that the pace of technology is significantly greater than the pace of change in human behavior," states Cameron Clarke. Three generations have now grown up with television, so receiving information from a screen is nothing new. What Web-based presentations fundamentally alters is the way in which users interact with that multimedia content, shifting the experience from passively taking in to actively searching out, or rather from a lean back in the chair to a lean forward attitude.

Hyperion's Vernon sees at least one major remaining hurdle to the implementation of Web-empowered presentations. "The biggest thing isn't so much cost...there's a fear that we'd invest in and publicize it, putting everything into an initial launch, but then 2-3 months down the road not be able to produce exciting content on a regular basis." And outsourcing production, as the marketing department at Hyperion does, isn't necessarily an option for everyone, as it's too expensive.
Viewers expect multimedia content to match the production and entertainment value of television, a feat that usually cannot be accomplished without additional funding, expertise, or heavily leaning upon the creative faculties of your current employees.

Even still, Web-based presentation technology will one day be integral to how businesses communicate internally and externally. And that day is just around the corner. But don't wait for it. It will take time for your corporate culture and its attitudes towards communications to adjust to this new way of interacting with and receiving multimedia presentations. Get started now so that when Web-based presentations become the 21st century's status quo for communication—much in the same way as cell phones and email did at the end of the 20th—you won't be stuck in the past, eating the dust of your competitors.

The Big Guns Add Caliber

While the Web-based presentations market may be nascent. corporate giants like Microsoft and Macromedia have made moves during 2003 towards Web-based presentations becoming significant technology in the near future. Microsoft released Producer 2003. a free downloadable plug-in for PowerPoint 2002 and ?003 that introduces a timeline-based approach to adding video and that exports presentations directly to HTML. And while, by itself, Producer doesn't offer much in the way of interactivity or Webcasting capability, Microsoft is the 900-pound gorilla that can define markets seemingly on a whim. Perhaps eventually it will use Producer to dominate Web-based presentations the way it used PowerPoint to dominate slide-based presentations.

Macromedia acquired Presedia in January 2003, and one month later released rebranded versions of Presedia's Express Presenter and Trainer under the Breeze product line. Both of these products integrate multimedia content with software, such as PowerPoint, through Macromedia's Flash for online presentations and training. This line expanded further in October with the availability of Breeze Live, which adds the ability to Webcast. Some of Breeze and Breeze Lives competitors also display content via Flash technology, but Macromedia invented it. So while they are relatively new to the market, the future of Flash in Web-based presentations may rest on their shoulders.

The movement of corporate giants into technology-driven markets via acquisitions typically comes in bunches and represents a coming-of-age Vodium CEO Cameron Clarke welcomes this trend as a sign of growth and stabilization in the market. "It helps establish a baseline in the industry. We're at the point where there are a lot of ways to implement Web-based presentations.. as the market matures, there will be development towards normalization and standardization." He hopes that this will further educate the market, freeing companies from having to evangelize big-picture concepts so that they can spend time defining products by their specific features. Jereme Pitts, Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Accordent, seconds this notion. "Our biggest marketing expense is differentiating ourselves from the others"
—Geoff Daily