A Guide to Live Streaming and Web Conferencing Services for Events and Remote Meetings
By Adam Noyes
As the year continues we see more and more businesses, organizations, and individuals investigating live streaming for events, meetings and more. With live streaming and web conferencing having a bigger and bigger hold on the industry, AlfordMedia.com has put together a great guide on getting started.
Check out some highlights from that article, below.
WHAT ARE THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN LIVE STREAMING AND WEB CONFERENCING SERVICES?
Live streaming is a type of streaming in which audio or video is broadcast live over the internet. The media is transmitted while it is recorded, allowing viewers to watch or listen to it in real-time. Multiple users can “tune in” to a single stream, providing an efficient way of delivering the audio or video to several locations at once. Certain live stream services also allow for simulcasting, a single live stream being broadcast to multiple platforms or webpages at once.
Web Conferencing is an online service by which you can hold live meetings, conferencing, presentations and trainings via the internet. Web conferencing usually allows real-time point-to-point communication as well as multitask communications from one sender to many receivers in separate locations. Certain web conferencing services provide end-to-end encryption of video streams, providing an additional level of security for the streams and data protection.
The main differentiators between these two types of services is the levels of attendee interaction, attendee control, and event production control via the software. Web conferencing software usually offers more attendee engagement options and allows those producing the event more management control.
When trying to determine which service or platform is right for your event important factors include, how public or private is your event, how large is your audience, are engagement features essential, is attendee data crucial to you, and do you have remote presenters. The information below will help you determine which platforms best meet your needs based on these factors. In some instances, you may need a web conferencing service in conjunction with a live streaming service to fully meet your event’s needs.