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reviewMediaPlatform WebCaster By Jan Ozer

Webcasts are a great tool for acquiring and retainingcustomers. They’re also great for training andcommunicating to both employees and partners.

If you’re considering presenting webcasts for any of thesereasons, MediaPlatform, Inc.’s WebCaster should be on yourshortlist of platforms or platform providers.

Why? A number of reasons. First, the basic webcastingfunctionality is comprehensive, and it can include livestreaming audio and video, on-demand audio and video,PowerPoint slides, Flash animations, and screen demos.The system enables audience participation features such aspolling, surveys, and Q&A.

The system itself is available as a SaaS (software as aservice) for companies that don’t want the hassle ofinstalling and maintaining a webcasting server, but it canalso be licensed and installed on-site for usage behind afirewall. As a SaaS, your webcasts are delivered by AkamaiTechnologies or other CDNs, ensuring highly scalabledelivery to as many fannies as you can get in the seats, plusthe licensed system can efficiently deliver within corporatenetworks via Adobe’s multicast fusion. You also get rarefeatures that only a cloud-based solution can inexpensivelyprovide, such as the ability to integrate audio and videofeeds from multiple speakers at different physical locations.

Plus, the system is template-based and totally easy touse. How do I know? Because to test WebCaster, Iproduced my own webcast—“Encoding Best Practices for theEnterprise”—from soup to nuts (www.streaminglearningcenter.com/blogs/webinarencoding-best-practices-for-the-enterprise archive-is-up .html). What, you missed it? I won’tshare the pitiful attendee numbers precisely (OK, I will—only20 attended). Missing the webcast did put you in theoverwhelming majority of the world’s connected population.

Though I’ve been the speaker in plenty of webcasts, thiswas my first time as producer, and some self-inducedrough edges during the webinar made me glad thatmore people didn’t attend. Still, my experience does highlight that having the technical ability to produce awebcast—which MediaPlatform provides admirably—doesn’t guarantee bountiful attendees or a smooth webcast:You’re in charge of both of the latter activities.

So in this review, I’ll devote 98% of my attention to howWebCaster works and 2% on the marketing andperformance aspects of the webcast. You’ll learn whatWebCaster can do and how it works, plus you’ll pick up atip or two about webcasting production. Hey, no reason

you shouldn’t avoid the mistakes that I made as a first-time producer.

Getting StartedGetting started in WebCaster is simple. You log in and

then choose your project type. If you’re working on anexisting project, you click Open Existing. If it’s a newproject, you can clone an existing project or create a newlive or on-demand audio or audio/video project. Myproject type was live audio/video, which you can convertto on-demand after the show.

Then you choose a template from the Theme Explorer.As you can see from the tabs on the window on the rightin Figure 1, a template controls multiple aspects of thepresentation, from the Lobby that contains informationabout the presentation including the Registration page,the presentation itself (shown in the figure), and thearchived presentation’s appearance.

After choosing a template, you input the basicpresentation data such as name, time, date, and duration.Then you upload any marketing-related graphics such asspeaker image and company logo. This gives you the basicinformation that you need to save and publish thepresentation, which gets it on the calendar and provides aURL for the Lobby and Registration page so you can startinviting attendees.

You can also upload PowerPoint slides at this time andcreate polls and surveys (more on these later), but you cando all this at any point before going live with thepresentation. Basically, you need enough information to

Figure 1. Choosing a template from the Theme Explorer

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Figure 2. Here’s the Lobby page, ready for folks to sign up. Figure 3. Entering the basic presentation data

create the Lobby page so you can start inviting folks, andthat’s it—you can add the rest later.

Note the Downloadable items button that’s four slots downfrom the top, which is where you upload and manage files tobe downloaded by the viewers. My first rookie error was toforget about this detail until about 10 minutes before gotime, when it was too late to upload the handouts. It was adefinite bummer because they contained so many technicaldetails. You already knew this, but you should start thinkingabout what you want the viewers to download from the start.

Once you click Save & Publish, the system processesthe uploaded information and creates the Lobby pageshown in Figure 2. MediaPlatform could make it easier toformat the description, perhaps with a WYSIWYG editor foradding bullet points. You can do this, but you have tomanually insert the necessary HTML into one long line oftext in the Description text box, as seen in Figure 3. I’msure I would have gotten more than 20 attendees if I wasable to put the three major topics in bullet points so thatinvitees could easily discern the value in the presentation.Just kidding, but since this screen is the face of thepresentation to the folks you invite, MediaPlatform shouldmake it simpler to add basic formatting.

System OverviewNow that you’ve got your presentation set up, let’s take

a quick look at the WebCaster interface, shown in Figure 4.The tabs on the top left walk you through the various stagesof the presentation. This includes Overview (shown inFigure 4), which provides links to the Lobby andPresentation pages; Manage, where you managepresentation data and registration information; Email,where you create emails to send to your registrants andproduction team; Present, where you actually present yourwebcast; and Analytics, where you analyze the results.

Getting RegistrantsLet’s start with getting fannies in the seats. You can add

users manually for small-scale internal events; an API is

available for large-scale insertion. The system isn’tdesigned to be your first point of contact with your targets,however. Rather, the preferred workflow is to use yourexisting email system to invite your target viewers with alink to the Lobby page, where they can sign up for thewebinar. Once they enter their data, they’re in the system,and you can easily communicate with them via email.

In this regard, WebCaster contains four editabletemplates for Registration Confirmation (shown in Figure 5,which includes an Outlook and iCal compatible reminder; areminder note (Scheduled) to send to registrants before theevent; Missed Event, which sends the URL of the archivedevent to those who registered but didn’t actually attend; anda thank you note with the archived event URL for those whodid attend. The Registration Confirmation is sentimmediately upon registration, and you can schedule theothers within the system.

Rookie mistakes Nos. 2 and 3 were failing to include theOutlook/iCal reminder in the Registration Confirmationemail and failing to send an automatic notificationsometime before the webcast. In my experience with otherwebcasts, about half of the registrants actually attend, whilemy attendance was slightly below 33%. No doubt I could

Figure 4. The control center for the WebCaster system

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have improved this by using the tools that MediaPlatformprovided.

If you’re marketing your event through multiple sources,you can create a custom URL for each source so you cantrack their effectiveness. The directional URL is the same,but the reference can be different and will be reported assuch by the program. For example, the URL that I used inthe link from my website, www.streaminglearningcenter.com (SLC), ended with the phrase “ref+SLC.”

I was fortunate to have two other organizations helpannounce the webinar: MediaPlatform and Wowza MediaSystems. Each had its own custom reference in its LobbyURL. You can see how this appears in the registrationform in Figure 6. Obviously, this information is critical indetermining which sources produced the best return.

Team BuildingThough this wasn’t relevant to my presentation,

WebCaster also includes the ability to create productiongroups and easily communicate with them via email. Youcreate the group as shown in Figure 7, name the group,choose its functions and permissions, and add emails onthe bottom. Once the group is saved, you can email all

members simultaneously by selecting that group andcreating your message.

During the event, the assigned permissions will determinewhich functions the group can perform. For example, ifyou want to restrict access to the analytics for some groups,make sure the Analytics check box is empty for those groups.

Staging the EventLet’s spend a moment on the physical setup for the event.

I decided to use my MacBook Pro to produce the webcastbecause its webcam and internal microphone work wellfor web conferences and because its 3.06 GHz Core 2 DuoCPU was more than sufficient for the 320x240 stream that Ibroadcast. I also wanted to keep things simple, so aseparate camcorder and lavaliere system (which I definitelycould have used) were out. Using a webcam, however, meantthat I would have to be very close to the camera andmicrophone, so I would need lots of light.

As you can see in Figure 8, I have one light-blue wall in myoffice that I keep blank to use as a background for videoshoots. I keep an inexpensive light kit (the ePhoto INCSFT2KIT, less than $200 at Amazon) with two 1,000 watt softboxes assembled and ready to go for these occasions.

The kit uses 5500K compact fluorescent bulbs that youcan control individually if you’re trying for a shadowed,three-point lighting look. I was trying for flat lighting, so Ipowered on all the lights in both soft boxes and placed themequidistant at about 10 o’clock and 2 o’clock just slightlyabove my head and pointed down. Technically, I should alsohave a backlight shining down on my head and shoulders,but the contrast between my solid dark-blue shirt and solidlight-blue background was sufficient without it.

Those solids were by design, of course, since pinstripes andother fine patterns quickly turn to mush under low-bandwidth, low-resolution compression. I also didn’twear my black turtleneck because the contrast ratio, or thedifference between the brightest brights and darkest darksin the frame, would have been too high for the webcam and

Figure 5. WebCaster comes with these four emails, which you can modify, or you can create your own.

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Figure 6. The Registrants screen let me know which registrants came from which sources. Figure 7. Creating a production group for easy communication

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compression technology to preserve. As it was, the blue shirtwas a bit too dark and turned into a dark blob (but at least anartifact-free dark blob) during the webcast.

Not to go uber-geeky on you, but the differencebetween the detail that you see in my shirt in Figure 8 andthe detail you don’t see in any of the webcast shots is whatcontrast ratio is all about. In Figure 8, the Panasonic digitalSLR that I use has a much greater ability to preserve theextremes of contrast, as does the JPEG compression usedby the camera. That’s why you see the collar and otherdetails quite clearly, even though there was a great rangebetween the brightest regions (such as the MacBook) andthe dark shirt.

In the webcast shots, the collar is gone because theinexpensive webcams and VP6 encoding just can’tpreserve the same range of contrasts. You also see that thevideo is darker in the webcam, also the product ofcompression. The bottom line is that you should light likecrazy and avoid extremes in brightness in your clothingand background.

Returning to the scintillating narrative, I also muted allthe phones in my office and turned the heating way down soit wouldn’t start up loudly in the middle of the webcast. Icouldn’t do anything about the dogs in the neighbor’sbackyard, so I crossed my fingers and hoped for the best.

The Software Side of ThingsBy default, the WebCaster application uses the webcam

interface from the Flash player to encode the audio andvideo. I was told by MediaPlatform reps that I could gethigher-quality results by using the free Adobe Flash MediaLive Encoder (FMLE), so I did. To tie WebCaster andFMLE together, I clicked the Settings button on the leftside of the WebCaster interface (see Figure 9). Thatopened a window containing the Flash Media Server URLto plug into FMLE, which I entered in the FMS URL shownon the right (Figure 10). Note that the stream name isWebcast, which I’ll refer to again later.

Figure 9 shows the MediaPlatform command center. Ithas separate widgets for each type of content or interaction,such as the PowerPoint slides or Viewer Questions.Starting to the left of the Video 1 window, note the Settingsbutton that I referred to previously, which contains the FlashMedia Server credentials. There’s the Test Event button thatlets you take a practice run, which is published to a privateURL that no one else can view. When you’re ready to golive, click Start Event, and it then toggles into the StopEvent button.

Figure 10 shows the encoding parameters that I used forthe webcast, as recommended by MediaPlatform. I wouldhave preferred to use the H.264 codec and produce at 30fps, but since it was the first time out, I went withMediaPlatform’s recommendations. Note that audio was afrugal 48Kbps mono, which is really all that you need for atalking-head webcast.

We started our event about 10 minutes before thescheduled start time. To fill the dead air before the eventactually started, we played a video available in the On-Demand tab beneath the video window. You can uploadthese into the system before the event and then open thetab and click the video to start playback as needed.

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Figure 8. Here’s my physical setup, including the fancy notebook stand. Figure 9. I encoded the live stream in the Adobe Flash Media Live Encoder.

Figure 10. Here’s the command center.

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When you’re ready to go live with the speaker, you clickback to the Live tab and see all of the speakers who havesigned into the webcast, identified by their stream names.In this case, it was just me using the name Webcast, whichis what I plugged into FMLE on the right in Figure 10. Clickthe little head icon, and you’re live.

Operation of the other widgets is straightforward in allcases: For example, to change slides, you choose Next inthe PowerPoint window. To show a poll, you click the pollin the Audience widget and click Show.

Attendees watch the presentation in the window shownin Figure 11, and tabs that allow attendees to access thedifferent kinds of content are included. Most of the tabsare straightforward, though a couple could use someexplanation. For example, the difference between asurvey and a poll is that poll results are shared with theaudience in real time (beneath the video window), whilesurvey results are not. Survey results appear only in theAnalytics window.

Otherwise, moving from left to right, attendees click thePresenters tab to see the presenters’ bios, the Q&A tab(shown in the figure) to ask questions, the Download tab todownload materials (when available), and the Help tab forminimum system requirements. On the bottom left, four

icons let the viewer change the presentation display. Thisenables large-screen video, large-screen PowerPoint,swapping of the video and PowerPoint windows, and thedefault view that is shown in Figure 11. Presenters havesimilar control over what the viewer sees via the TemplateControl widget, on the bottom left of the presenters’interface, shown in Figure 12.

What mistakes did I make during the presentation?Well, I attend most of the Streaming Media webinars, andone of the first things that Dan Rayburn or EricSchumacher-Rasmussen always says is, “Ask questionsduring the presentation, and we’ll answer them at theend.” I forgot to say that and had no questions when thetime came, which was embarrassing to say the least. Withonly 60 or so registrants, I should have anticipated thisissue and created a few questions to prime the pump (suchas, “Hey Jan, when will your new book be available?”), butI didn’t do this either.

Before producing your own webcast, attend a fewStreaming Media webcasts, pay attention to what pros suchas Dan and Eric say at the start, and make sure you havethat material covered at the start of your presentations. Aneven better general rule is to divvy up the presentation andproduction functions to separate individuals or groups. Asa presenter, you’re always concerned with getting yourmaterials together and rehearsed, so many of thepresentation details can fall through the cracks.

The WebCaster software is simple enough for one personto operate during the presentation, but having a moderatorto set the stage and perform triage on any questions takes ahuge burden off the presenter and makes for an overallbetter webcast. I’m sure most readers knew all of this, buthopefully the reminder is helpful.

Finally, at least for marketing-oriented webinars, don’tunderestimate how hard it is to get fannies in the seats.Ultimately, I learned that Brightcove, Inc. held a webinar atthe same time as mine. It covered many of the same topicsthat I did, which no doubt poached at least some of mypotential viewers. Though I loved the WebCaster software, you

Figure 11. This is the presentation seen by the viewer.

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Figure 13. Synchronizing the video and slidesFigure 12. Controlling the screen in the viewer’s presentation window

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should recognize that there’s a big difference betweensuccessfully producing the technical aspects of a webcastand producing a webcast that achieves the desiredmarketing results.

Synchronizing and ArchivingOnce the event is complete, it’s time to polish up the

presentation and archive it for on-demand viewing. Thisprocess is called synchronizing (Figure 13), and if you’reusing the same PowerPoint presentation that youoriginally uploaded, you’ll probably only use the function totrim video from the front and back ends of thepresentation. For example, to delete the dead air at thestart of the presentation, I dragged the faint green box onthe upper left of the timeline to the actual start of the video.This is why there are no slides (the little numberedcallouts) beneath this area.

Otherwise, the synchronization process is simple; youplay the video and then drag the slides on the timeline tothe desired location in the video. You can see the contentof the slide by hovering the pointer over the callout.Behind the slide announcing my upcoming book is a list ofslides by PowerPoint title, which you can add and deleteas needed. When you’re done, click Save & Publish, andWebCaster archives the presentation where it can beviewed at the same URL as the live presentation.

As mentioned, you can easily send emails to yourregistrants to let them know that the archived version isup. In my case, this was important because it was the onlyway for the attendees to download the slides. If you makethe on-demand presentation generally available, potentialviewers will have to register to watch it.

And they’ll probably be glad that they did. The archivedpresentation is impressive, as you can see in Figure 14.Beneath the video window in the Slide Index are the titles ofall the PowerPoint slides, so viewers can click to the desiredtopics and quickly access the desired content. Or you canclick the Search tab and search for any text item in the

original PowerPoint slides (see Figure 15). For example, tofind where I mentioned Wowza, type “wowza” in the text boxand click Search. All locations will appear in the results box.Click the red Wowza to jump to that slide.

Scanning the rest of the archived presentation, you cansee the Download tab where folks can (finally) downloadthe PowerPoint slides. The Survey tab will show thesurvey questions that were asked during thepresentation, and if there were any polls, they wouldappear in a separate tab beneath the player window. Onthe bottom left, you see the same icons that let viewersconfigure the presentation window to their liking.

Overall, the archived presentation is a highly efficientway for viewers to find and watch exactly the contentthey’re interested in. In my view, the index and searchfunction adds a lot of value. If potential viewers knowthat they won’t have to slog through 60 minutes of videoto watch the 5 minutes that they really care about, they’llbe much more likely to pull up a chair and have a look.

AnalyticsWebCaster presents analytics in two basic categories, as

shown on the left in Figure 16. At the top is Viewers, whichshows where they watched from geographically (Map

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Figure 14. The archived presentation Figure 15. The search function in the archived presentation

Figure 16. WebCaster analytics

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Overlay), their identity (Unique Viewers), where they camefrom (Campaign Tracking, shown in the figure), and howlong they stayed (Length of Visit). Note the Export button onthe upper right, which lets you export these reports in eitherPDF (for graphic-oriented reports such as CampaignTracking) or Excel (for more data-oriented reports, suchas creating a list of registrants or attendees).

The second category details all of the interactions that eachuser had with the system, including when they signed on, howthey responded to polls and surveys, and whether they askedany questions. In most categories, you can see this in list viewfor all participants or zoom into the view shown in Figure 17for any single registrant.

What’s It Gonna Cost You? MediaPlatform pursues several business models,

predominantly entering into long-term contracts withtheir various customers. When I asked about pricing, thisis what I got back.

“Pricing for WebCaster can vary significantly dependingupon the size of the company and the breadth of usage

within the company, but a typical range is $25,000 to $75,000per year for a mid-size company, and $75,000 to $175,000 peryear for a large company, for unlimited webcasting. Theprice range is based on usage, allowing the client to startsmall and grow as needs dictate.”

In addition, MediaPlatform offers simple pay-per-eventpricing for service providers and for enterprise customerswho do not require unlimited webcasting. The pay-per-event pricing varies based on a number of factors (e.g.,audio versus video, size of event, length of event, bitrate),but a typical 60-minute video event for a few hundredviewers might cost about $1,200.

What’s my take? I love the web-based operation, and Ifound the software exceptionally easy to use with somegreat functionality throughout. To present, all yourspeakers need to do is click Next in their PowerPoint deck,and you can even do that for them. Unless you want aversion behind the firewall, there’s no software to install ormaintain. And back-end operation is far less technical thanother products that I’ve seen. Heck, a tech-savvy marketingperson should be able to handle 99% of it and free up IT folksto conquer more serious issues.

I should also say that the MediaPlatform WebCastermanual comes with lots of checklists that you can use toavoid the problems that hindered my efforts, and they canhelp streamline your webcast. Overall, if you’re consideringpresenting your own webcasts, you’ve got to giveMediaPlatform WebCaster a serious look.

Jan Ozer (jozer@doceo.com) is a frequent contributor to industry magazines and

websites on digital video-related topics. He blogs at www.streaminglearningcenter.com.

Comments? Email us at letters@streamingmedia.com, or check the masthead for other

ways to contact us.

Figure 17. Individual viewer details

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This article is reprinted in its entirety from the June/July 2011 issue of Streaming Media magazine, published by Information Today, Inc. Used with permission. All rights reserved.

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