The world’s largest companies stream live events to connect their customers with their brands. There are many examples of this, every year, at CES. 

The reasons are simple. As TJ McCue writes in Forbes, video drives purchase behavior and creates stronger customer engagement. [1]

Successful workforce training events are essential to winning organizations. A well-trained workforce increases employee performance and improves business results.

With so much at stake, organizations get ahead by producing content for training events that keep participants fresh and engaged, replacing the drag of long PowerPoint presentations and lectures.

This is especially important when training thousands of participants, where the investment to the company for a single event can be in the millions of dollars.

Last year, the NCAA Men’s Basketball Final was watched by over 3.4 million viewers online, extending the broadcast television audience by nearly 20%, per Time magazine. [1]

This year, the games will be available on the NCAA March Madness portal and on various video streaming platforms like Amazon Fire, Xbox, Apple TV, Chromecast, and Roku. [2]

Streaming Live Events for the Broadcast Quality Generation

According the 2015 MPI Meetings Outlook, virtual attendance is expected to grow 3.1 percent in the coming year, compared to 2.4 percent for live attendance.

It suggests further, “planners must know about new technologies to be able to provide them to clients without their having to ask.” [1]

In this post, we will review how internet broadcasting creates value by streaming live events and how hybrid vents are being produced for the future to the "Broadcast Quality Generation." [2]

The Future Event Technician

As the digital world influences the way events are produced, event professionals are having a positive impact on the outcome of events, by applying skills with a greater emphasis on technology. 

Let’s look at some skills being applied to make positive contributions on events and how producers can defend, and in some cases increase, budgets to account for the demand for professionals with these skills.

We’ll look at…

- The technical skills that are in-demand in the market at large, and
- How they’ve been applied in digital event production

Where Money is Spent on IT

Heritage Action for America Presidential Forum Stage

Corporate Events Online was selected to manage the live video streaming for the “Take Back America Presidential Forum” by Heritage Action for America.

We recommended live video streaming through the Heritage for Action YouTube channel to support the organization’s communication goals of promoting traffic to their YouTube channel and their other social media assets through the sharability of the content.

YouTube has been steadily increasing their capacity and support for live video streaming dating back to their partnership with NBC to broadcast portions of the 2012 London Olympics. [1]

Source: Cisco VNI Global IP Traffic Forecast, 2014–2019

The Future of Video Communication for the Enterprise

According to the Cisco Visual Networking Index, IP video will account for 80 percent of all IP traffic by 2019. It will take an individual over 5 million years to watch the amount of video that will cross global IP networks each month in 2019. [1]

This growth will not be restricted to consumer video. Increased adoption of advanced video communications in the enterprise segment will cause business IP traffic to grow at a Compound Annual Growth Rate of 20 percent from 2014 to 2019. [2]

As organizations march toward aggressive goals in 2020 and apply advanced communication technology to connect and engage their workforce, let's review briefly, two important components of successful Town Hall Broadcasts for internal communication, in order to maximize the value of this medium.

Two Essential Components: Production

“Franklin D. Roosevelt,” The History Channel website, http://www.history.com/photos/franklin-d-roosevelt (accessed Jul 2, 2015).

Engagement Drive Business Performance

Establishing an Internet Broadcasting Platform as an on-going vehicle for internal communications can be a valuable component in connecting and engaging an increasingly mobile and global workforce - because as we hear repeatedly in many of our feedback sessions, engagement matters because it drives business performance.

The Broadcast-style Town Hall

As organizations push toward higher levels of business growth and develop new markets internationally, the Town Hall Meeting is an excellent point on an organization's yearly communication calendar to establish an internet broadcasting platform.

Let’s take a quick look at an example of how an organization could use this platform to reinforce organizational initiatives related to business performance that might not, at first glace, appear directly related to growth.

Photo Credit: United Press International

The Communication Opportunity in Leadership Change

According to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas, 1341 Chief Executive Officers vacated their positions in 2014. [1] This means hundreds of organizations will have the opportunity to create an internal communication plan around the introduction of a new leader to the company.

The Medium is the Message

The communication plan regarding the introduction of new leadership to an organization will likely include messages delivered through several different communication mediums, like email and the organization’s website.

It may include a conference call so the incoming leader can communicate verbally with the entire organization. In planning out the communication strategy surrounding leadership change, there may be opportunities to break the mold and communicate in a way that the workforce can see and hear.

The Town Hall Meeting is usually the centerpiece series of communication within an organization’s communication plan. A Broadcast-style Town Hall Webcast allows an incoming Chief Executive to establish their identity with a global workforce, “face-to-face.” The audience, in turn, has the opportunity to identify important non-verbal cues associated with leadership: vision, confidence and authenticity.

Technical Challenges

Photo Credit: Chicago Blackhawks/Banner Collective

The Decision to Broadcast Home Games

The rise of the Chicago Blackhawks, as a team and as a franchise, was profiled in a New York Times article earlier this month. [1]

In the article, Victor Mather identifies the organization’s decision to broadcast home games as one of the key components of the team’s increased financial value, after ownership had passed to Rocky Wirtz in 2007.

The Blackhawks previous owner Bill Wirtz, Mather writes, “declined to allow team’s home games to be shown on television, thinking that it would hurt attendance.”

Ridiculous Rise in Franchise Value

By broadcasting home games, the team increased the demand of it’s product, by increasing the supply. This business decision by the Blackhawks helped create more opportunities for fans to connect to their content, and has contributed to the increased value of the franchise, from $168M in 2006 to $825M in 2014. [2]

As well, broadcasting home games has not had a negative impact on attendance. The Blackhawks led the NHL in attendance in 2015, edging out Montreal, Detroit, Philadelphia and Washington, with an average home attendance of 21,769. [3]