We had a great meeting yesterday with HTG ALL.  We talked about the future of our Peer Groups and how we will grow and make strategic decisions as we move forward.  As I mentioned, we used Live Meeting to cover the meeting for folks that weren’t there, and we recorded the Live Meeting as well.  We had some stumbles – here’s the learning I took away.

One – if you’re going to use an internet meeting tool, DEMAND early access to the room.  Although we’d tested everything ahead of time in the same hotel, of course when we packed everything up and moved it three floors – we had the odd issue.  As we only had about 10 minutes before we went live – it was a little bit exciting/terrifying to pull off.

Two – Ask yourself the normal questions you should ALWAYS ask before you do a recorded event.  What is the audience?  Is the focus on the audience of people in the room, or the people viewing offsite?  Is the recording important or critical?  If so – you need to have a live camera operator so that people asking questions are captured on the recording.  We had the cameras on tripods and could switch between them, but didn’t have live operators at the camera.

So…  For this meeting, we ended up focusing on the people in the room, and didn’t focus on the recording or the offsite meeting.  A bit rough of a recording, but that created way less impact on the folks attending in person – as we had 60 in the room and 12 offsite – I think we had the right focus.  The recording, sadly, is only so-so.  Next time we’ll do better based on our learnings!

For those reading from HTG – we’ll have the Live Meeting archives posted on the new portal later this afternoon.

Today I’m partnering with Pat Dolan and Al Bias of TCC Technologies and Robert Lindley of ISI to cover our HTG ALL meeting in Houston.  Normally our groups meet over 2 days – and there are 12 member companies in each group.  Today we’re having a half day meeting with over 60 companies represented, from all 12 Groups.  Because of the Webcasting work I do in my business – Hardlines Company – I offered to do a live webcast of the meeting so that those who couldn’t make it to Houston could still “participate” in the meeting. 

Our original plan was to do a traditional multicamera webcast using the Windows Media Codec and one of my CDN’s.  This would let those connecting via the internet watch the meeting – then ask questions or give feedback via a Chat forum or using the Discussion Board in the HTG ALL Groove site.  As we strategized via email this past week, Robert had the great idea to use his companies Live Meeting subscription so that all the internet “attendees” could be true participants in the meeting – rather than being passive viewers.  We did a dry run this past Thursday (with Robert presenting from his car in a parking lot in East Texas!) and Live Meeting really seems like the best choice for this event.  The video quality is low with Live Meeting at less than 8 frames per second, compared to TV or most webcasting being at 30 frames per second, so Live Meeting has really “jittery” video.  However, we felt that the Powerpoint slides and the interactivity are really more important than the video for a meeting format, as opposed to an announcement format.

If we really felt that video quality was the most important thing – then we’d have stayed with our original plan. The other problem with a traditional webcast is that there’s a 20-30 second buffer built into webcasting.  For internet presented high quality video – the buffering solves many problems especially so that temporary internet congestion isn’t noticed by the audience.  Also a traditional webcast can scale to 10s of thousands of simultaneous viewers (our maximum for one client was almost 5000 simultaneous viewers!).  On the other hand, the buffering in webcasting makes it really tough for the audience to give feedback.  We’ve found that chat or newsgroup feedback (not conference calls!) works best – because then those on video can respond to older questions without the buffer being as obvious.  For all those in HTG attending the Live Meeting – now you understand how we made our choice – so don’t complain about the video quality!

This is cool – Microsoft is going to have a site to feature the work that Partners do.  Even if you only experiment with video – get some video posted and get some attention on what you do for your clients!  Great way to get some local PR attention for your business too – newspapers and TV could really glom onto this and run stories about your firm if you point them at something you’ve submitted to Digital Forum TV.

Digital Forum – www.digitalforumtv.com will officially launch at Worldwide Partner Conference. “Digital Forum is a new community video website to showcase partner innovation and allows all participants to comment, rate, and spread their story virally to others online.”

I wanted to speak to the pros and cons of using free video hosting (YouTube, Soapbox) versus paying for a Content Delivery Network/CDN (Akamai, Mirror Image).

We recommend both for our clients – and for different reasons.  If we have video that we think might go "viral" – get popular by being found on a site like YouTube – then YouTube and similar sites are the right place to post that video.

On the other hand, if you have video that you’re using to give attention to your business, why are you promoting YouTube’s logo as part of your video?  Every YouTube video builds their brand at least as much as it builds yours.  Also, by using a Content Delivery Network (CDN), you have control over quality and formats – do you want to use Windows Media (VC-1 is a KILLER codec) or do you want to use Flash or Quicktime or Real Media?  With a CDN you have choices – with a free site, you use whatever they choose, and at their quality.

For next week, as we do video blogging at WPC – we’re choosing YouTube and Soapbox as our primary delivery methods.  We are hoping that some of the stories we do will go viral – and that folks will find the video serendipitously – as well as because they subscribe to this blog.