Going Virtual in 2020: Resources For Video Enabled Remote Work – Epiphan Video
By Jennifer P
Organizations everywhere are grappling with the consequences of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19): cancelled conferences, quarantined campuses, shuttered offices. Video will be an essential tool as corporations, universities, government offices, and other organizations try to keep things (as close to) business as usual during these unusual times.
We’ve put together lists of articles and videos that can help organizations like yours:
Pivoting To Remote Operations – Quickly
If your company has a video infrastructure already, shifting to remote operations probably won’t be too much of a hassle. If you don’t, you may find yourself scrambling to cobble together something serviceable.
With no time to deploy an enterprise video platform, the fastest option is to use a public video platform like YouTube and Facebook:
Both YouTube and Facebook offer privacy settings you can use to restrict viewership. However, sensitive communications are best kept to a private platform. All you need to stream to either platform is a computer, an Internet connection, and a webcam – built into a laptop or computer monitor, or, for slightly better quality, an external webcam.
8 best webcams for live streaming
For more information on how to live stream, see Epiphan’s detailed beginner’s guide: How to live stream: a beginner’s survival guide
Turning A Live Event Into A Virtual One
Live event production companies often stream out to video platforms during conferences and other events. In light of the current pandemic, you can forgo a live audience entirely and make your events fully virtual:
How to host a virtual conference in 2020
Government live streaming: how to set up a city council live stream
Church live streaming guide – learn to easily stream live church services
Keeping Class In Session
If your school doesn’t have video infrastructure in place, you can shift to virtual classrooms quickly using a free platform like YouTube, enabling privacy settings for the live streams and on-demand content on your channel.
Beyond lecture capture: the ever expanding video learning applications in education
How to record lectures: software vs hardware
Optimizing Video Production For Your School
In the short term or further down the line, you can improve your school’s video capabilities by deploying a professional video platform such as Panopto or Kaltura and/or by setting up video production space for faculty to produce and publish high-quality video content:
6 best video platforms for education
5 steps to creating the ultimate lecture recording studio
Pearl-2 and Pearl Mini hardware encoders feature comprehensive integration with Kaltura and Panopto. This simplifies video production setup for schools, letting users record or stream from non-USB video sources (e.g., HDMI, SDI) and capture audio from professional-grade microphones (i.e., XLR, TRS). Users can even authenticate to Panopto or Kaltura through Pearl’s built-in touch screen to automatically upload unscheduled event recordings to their folders.
Fostering Internal Communication
If your organization doesn’t already use video conferencing software to enable communication between, you have plenty of options to choose from. Many video conferencing solutions charge a fee though some offer free plans, including Microsoft Teams and Zoom.
7 best video conferencing software for businesses
Company Town Hall Meetings
Many companies live stream their town hall (or “all-hands”) meetings to include remote workforces and distributed offices. You can still organize and run a company town hall meeting during a quarantine, but rather than bring employees together in one room, you can make the meeting fully virtual:
How to live stream your company town hall meeting
Video Training
You can build a dedicated video production space on premises or offsite to make it easier to create high-quality training videos for new and existing employees alike. Setups range from pop-up to elaborate:
3 video studio setups for better training videos
6 steps to create effective training videos
Enabling Customer Outreach
In place of face-to-face meetings, your salespeople can meet with or engage customers over video. With the right tools, video can help your sellers more quickly get up to speed and engage buyers at every stage of the sales cycle:
5 ways video can support your sales enablement strategy
Webinars are a tried-and-true method of customer outreach – and, by their nature, feature a fully virtual audience:
How to create a webinar your audience will love in 6 easy steps
Projecting A Professional Image
Interested in a more sophisticated video setup? Consider adding a capture card or a hardware encoder to the mix. An AV.io HD or AV.io 4K frame grabber makes it possible to connect HDMI cameras to standard computer hardware. Software will recognize any device connected to one of these cards as if it were a plug-and-play webcam.
19 best camera for live streaming for any budget
Epiphan Pearl systems can live stream to a broad range of content delivery networks – including YouTube and Facebook – and offer a number of tools to produce high-quality live streams and on-demand video content. Pearl’s custom layouts tool is well suited to content that features a slide deck, such as university lectures and conference presentations.