Why the NCAA Tournament is not Webinared

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]

Because of the need for production quality and audience scale, these games are streamed out as what we refer to as broadcast-style webcasts, not as what are often referred to as webinars using services such as desktop sharing software.

The Relationship to Town Hall & All-Hands Meetings

This is an extreme analogy, but Town Hall Meetings are often webcast as so-called webinars using a service like desktop sharing software instead of as a broadcast-style webcast, and we are often asked to shed light on the difference.

Two of the main differences between these two center on production quality and scalability based distribution method.

A broadcast-style webcast will use powerful computers to encode broadcast-quality camera and audio signals for distribution over a global content delivery network.

Desktop sharing software may encode the video and audio signal though the computer camera and microphone and distribute the content with the host computer acting as the server.




Both are powerful methods of online communication, each serving a purpose for a different communication goal. It's like the difference between a meeting and an event. The broadcast-style webcast is designed for larger scale and higher quality.

For these reasons, the broadcast-style webcast may make it a preferred method of webcasting for your Town Hall & All-Hands Meetings.

As one executive told us after their second Broadcast-style Town Hall Webcast…

"We realized after the first one, this is the way to do it - that speaking into a telephone from a closet wasn't the way to go."

If you would like to know more about this subject, we invite you to download a copy of our white paper, The Difference Between Webcasts and Webinars for Town Hall Meetings.

Please click the button below to receive your copy.



[1] http://time.com/money/4283816/ncaa-basketball-tv-ratings-streaming/
[2] http://time.com/money/4697909/watch-2017-ncaa-march-madness-live/