Audio Visual Insights for Web-Conferencing and Live Streaming

It’s certainly a unique time for those of us in the professional audiovisual industry. For designers, integrators, re-sellers and technology managers, the niche industry that usually consumes us with the deeply technical side of things has now shifted into mainstream conversations. 

Why? As most of us have noticed, the news media, local municipalities, counties, schools and businesses have been working feverishly to convey critical information to the public about the recent outbreak of COVID-19, known commonly as coronavirus. While many may disagree about the severity of the virus, two things are certain. The virus is spreading, and businesses are cancelling conferences, meetings and other events to prevent their employees' exposure. 

According to The Lancet, “the national security strategy for COVID-19 within China has shifted to so-called wartime control measures,” with cities on lock down.

Zoom Video Communications seems to be dominating the world of video conferencing with lovers of the platform using over 39 billion meeting minutes a year. We wanted to find out their story and see what it is that makes people choose Zoom over the multitude of other options. Listen as Laura Padilla shares Zoom's Past, Present, and Future on ConferenceCast.

Hello Pro AV & IT Professionals,

Hello Pro AV & IT Managers,

Last week we talked about Slack adding video conferencing and Zoom adding live streaming. It’s interesting to watch each company adding features outside their core product as if they are worried about a turbulent 2017 in an already overcrowded market. February 13th, 2017, Amazon just announced their latest product, AWS Chime. It’s a full-featured video conferencing and chat application ready for immediate deployment. Amazon will take on Cisco and Microsoft in a market Gartner estimates to be $12 Billion last year and expected to climb to $22 billion by 2020.

Hello IT & AV Pro's!

This Friday Nov 20th Paul Richards & Patrick Kirby the hosts of HuddleCam Live will be interviewing, Doug Devitre, author of “Screen to Screen Selling”. Paul Richards, Dir of Business Development for HuddleCamHD said “I first found out about “Screen to Screen Selling” when I saw a LinkedIN post from Eric Yuan, CEO of Zoom Video Communications. After reading the book I have to say it was a refreshing outlook on the amazing new technology tools available to sales teams.”

Panelists

@dougdevitre, @maroonloon, @simplequaker

GoToMeeting vs Zoom.US

As a long time GoToMeeting customer I was so surprised how easy it was to move over to Zoom.US. For 1/5 the price I thought there was going to be huge feature gaps but acutally Zoom.US has features like SIP and H.323 integration that GoToMeeting does not! In fact if you are a Gmail user like me starting with Zoom.US is incredibly easy because you just login with your GMail account.

Hello AV & IT Professionals!

Hello AV & IT Pros!

We hope this will be an interesting post for anyone who has wondered: Should I set up a video conference call or a webinar? 

What events are best suited for a video conference, a webinar or just a plain old live stream?

Sometimes the video conferencing service your using can't host everyone your expecting... Sometimes you only want to broadcast a one-way live stream. With the rise of YouTube Live, will the world of video conferencing and live streaming find synergies? 

If your planning a big event you might ask yourself if your video conferencing service has enough space for everyone that your expecting. When you plan larger video conference calls, most services like GoToMeeting, WebEX and Zoom suggest webinar packages. These packages are great for adding more "view only" participants and they solve most meeting capacity limits up to 3,000 users.

But what if you want to do more of a live broadcast? You might not really need to set up a video conference at all! Maybe you can use a service like YouTube Live to stream to thousands of viewers around the world for free!

In this post we will discuss these options plus a way to combine them! That's right, tips for live broadcasting your video conference calls using YouTube Live :)

When to Video Conference:

If your used to video conferencing you will find any excuse to use it. Let's face it. Video conferencing is super easy these days! Once users start benefiting from the time savings, the cost savings and the superior communication it starts to make an impression. This is not just some "honeymoon" with a cool new piece technology either. Video conferencing usages "Grew by 100% in the past 2 years 2013-2015" (more in this Vytopia report). So using video conferencing is coming naturally to today's tech saavy workers.

If you are interested to learn more about when to meet "face to face" vs "online" check out this great article by Joe Mullich of the Wall Street Journal. 

Hello AV & IT Pros!

                Usually in our industry when a company become the market leader they set a standard price for their services which does not normally remain the most competitive price. This is the case with GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar. When this happens companies like Citrix will claim that they have a superior product and justify the additional cost by the benefit of their services.

                In this review we will do a side by side comparison of GoToWebinar, Zoom Webinar and Cisco’s Webinar service called “WebEX Event Center”. We will compare the basic features required to host effective webinars and the pricing. Let’s start with pricing to get a overview of each service

Good Day AV & IT professionals!

Skype has just announced a new pricing plan for its Skype for Business service! It's the kind of announcement where you have to stop and say "Wow? Is this going to be game changing? What will this mean for the online video conferencing industry?". Skype for Business is one of the most popular video conferencing tools for professionals using video conferencing. In this blog post we look at the latest features and compare them with other popular third party meeting providers available as alternatives to Skype for Business such as GoToMeeting, Cisco WebEx and Zoom.

Cisco WebEx has the advantage of producing video conferencing hardware as well as providing the software (WebEx) for an optimal video conferencing experience. Just like Microsoft, Cisco also provides a enterprise level unified communications product called Cisco Jabber that offers similar server level plans that can merge with WebEx. GoToMeeting has a very simple design and has a huge "business user" apeal for users who just want something that works. Citrix offers a large suite of online cloud based products but none that usually compete with Microsoft & Cisco's unified communications platforms. To mention a few: GoToMeeting, ShareFile, GoToWebinar, Podio, OpenVoice and Grasshopper.  Lastly, Zoom is the most in-expensive compared to the others but provides some unique features such as iPhone/iPad screen sharing, H.323 room system compatibility and Zoom Rooms for instant meetings. While all three alternatives to Skype for Business provide widely different feature offerings, Skype remains the most widely pleasing option for both price and attendee flexibility. Most pricing plans are split in to 10, 25 and 100 attendee caps while Skype for Business allows up to 250 people in one business plan. For a more detailed feature list of all 4 providers click here (written before Skype for Business release).

The new Skype for Business pricing plan is as follows: