Another cool ePresence user, Ferrari, chooses our system for their worldwide training sessions. We are getting used to high profile events as more schools, corporations and high-level government officials start using this new media to address large audiences. This time, thanks to our Italian partner, KSoft, we have the privilege to provide the technology to such a distinguished company.
Recently, Healthcare Information Management & Communications magazine featured an article on ePresence by Captual Technologies. Author Dominic Covvey interviews Captual CEO, Peter Wolf, on the differences between webcasting technologies (such as ePresence) and web conferencing tools.
For a PDF version of the article, see below:
Achieving Presence in Cyberspace
H. Dominic Covvey, with Peter Wolf, CEO, Captual Technologies, Inc.
H. Dominic Covvey, Associate Editor, is a professor in the Faculty of Science at the University of Waterloo, the President and Director of The National Institutes of Health Informatics (NIHI), and a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics and the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, in Waterloo, Ontario.
To improve quality of service and scalability, we have expanded our hosting cloud infrastructure with new extra large x64 servers. As a result, current ePresence Hosting customers will now be able to invite up to 600 simultaneous viewers to a single interactive webcast (with chat), or up to 5000 viewers to non-interactive, video webcast events. If you expect more than 150 simultaneous viewers for a live webcast event, simply contact us in advance to book temporary extra infrastructure for the day.
We appreciate your business, and hope you will enjoy our improved service!
Sincerely,
ePresence Support Team (support@epresence.tv)
PORTO SALVO, Portugal – October 19, 2010 - In Portugal, the ePresence partner Identity has been actively pushing awareness and sales of ePresence. In the past few months, Identity has been present in high-profile events, communicating the solution and getting some important contacts and leads.
On the 17th-23rd May 2010, Identity participated in the “1st IST Technology Showcase”, organized by a major Portuguese University, IST-Instituto Superior Técnico. This event aimed at showcasing the most interesting technological breakthroughs, as well as related products and services. The Identity presence featured an eye-catching stand which resulted in good visibility and many contacts.
Just a month later, on the 24th June, Identity was present with its stand at a high-profile event featuring enterprises born in the Oeiras area, organized by ANJE – Young Entrepreneurs National Association, an important Portuguese organization. This event was honored with the presence of the President of Portugal, who visited the Identity stand with interest and to whom Identity was able to present the ePresence solution.
Continuing the marketing effort and awareness development, Identity also sponsored the Innovation Forum 2010, promoted by EFQUEL – European Foundation for Quality in E-Learning, which took place on 8th-10th September in Lisbon. Identity featured a stand presence and developed relevant contacts, as the Forum participants were mainly VIPs and decision-makers in the academic and e-learning areas.
As the awareness increases and more relevant contacts are made, Identity is expecting to close more important deals in the near future!
Founded in April 2005 in TagusPark, Identity is a Portuguese company that bases its activity on three separate, but complementary projects: Data Identity, Life Identity, and Everywhere Identity.
Identity’s mission is to provide solutions and services developed in cluster with business partners, universities and R&D labs, always with innovation, excellence and distinction.
For more information, visit: http://www.identity.pt/.
We are always thrilled when our technology receives great interest overseas. A number of new resellers in Spain, France, Italy, Portugal and UK joined the ePresence family in 2010 due to demand for the technology.
One of our most recent additions to the family is Brullov Consulting, a leading Russian system integrator firm.
Our friends at Brullov Consulting recently presented ePresence technology at the Moscow Music Fair. The Moscow Music Fair is a large, well-attended international exhibition for Acoustic & Electronic Musical Instruments, Stage Technologies, Studio Technologies, Audio Visual Equipment, and Computer Software and Hardware.
This is our first attempt to enter the Russian market and we were happy to hear the exhibition turned out to be a great success for them.
Peter Wolf
We are very pleased to announce that ePresence has been nominated into the 2010 Streaming Media Readers’ Choice Awards for the category of best Webcasting/Presentation Solution.
Please take a moment and VOTE FOR US for a chance to win an iPad – voting ends October 8th!
The top three finalists in each category will be announced October 18. Winners will be announced at a reception at Streaming Media West in Los Angeles on November 2.
We are very honoured to have been nominated for this prestigious award and would like to extend a big thank you to our customers and friends for their continued support of ePresence.
The ability to caption presentations is one of our most-requested features, and we’re happy to announce that basic support will be introduced soon in the form of a small Server update. Here’s a preview of what’s coming.
Basic caption support will be added to Server 6.0 in the form of a small update. Initially, we are integrating against the SubRip subtitle format (view specification). SubRip is perhaps the simplest and most widely-supported subtitle format, and can be created in a wide range of applications, such as Subtitle Workshop (Windows) and MovCaptioner (Mac OS X). Using ePresence Producer, you will be able to add a subtitle file to any presentation on your ePresence portal. Once added, viewers will see the subtitles played back along with the presentation.
To a newcomer, the world of webcasting may seem a lot like web conferencing. It’s true that some of the features overlap. So does it follow that the two technologies might be more or less interchangeable? Well as you may have guessed already, we’re here to tell you that’s not always the case.
So how do you decide when to use one technology over the other? Consider this the top 10 reasons why webcasting is different from web conferencing, and how it would apply to your specific needs.
The primary concern for conferencing technologies are small, highly-interactive meetings. Webcasting tools on the other hand focus on presentation capture and streaming (e.g. for lectures and seminars). As you can imagine, the two have rather different agendas. Web conferencing centers on real-time interactivity and collaboration (i.e. heavy two-way communication). Webcasting on the other hand gives priority to scalability for delivery to a large number of viewers – as well as to video quality, on-demand recording, publishing and post-production.
In webcasting, speakers do not need any special software or specific training to be able to present. This is beneficial because the people presenting tend to be such a diverse group, each with different levels of comfort with technology. With webcasting technologies like ePresence, they can just plug in their laptop and present as they normally would.
Some web conferencing providers require viewers to download proprietary software in order to participate in conference sessions. Possible compatibility issues aside, this is another task that is placed on the viewer. Webcast providers tend to utilize browser plug-ins instead (e.g. Flash, Silverlight), which are used by many other applications. ePresence, for example, currently uses Flash, which most viewers already have installed on their systems.
Some web conferencing systems stream in lower resolution video to reduce the bandwidth load on participants. Again, because of the heavily two-way nature of web conferencing the priorities are different: since everyone streams to everyone, bandwidth is a limited resource. Webcasting technologies deliver one stream to many viewers. In turn it can afford to deliver much higher quality audio and video – including HD. Audio quality is also a factor to consider. Often phone conferencing or VoIP will be used in web conferences to accomplish communication. Although perfect for small-group discussion, VoIP can be unreliable and not production worthy, making it less than satisfactory for important presentations.
A connection to the internet is not always guaranteed. Unfortunately it often seems that network stability conspires with Murphy’s Law to come crashing down right when you need it most. Webcast hardware cannot control your connection to the Internet, but it can offer a backup. While the presentation is being streamed live to your viewers it is also being captured locally, even when your connection to the Internet drops. Once Internet access is regained you can resume streaming your presentation, then publish a seamless archive for on-demand viewing. If the Internet drops during a web conference, not only are there gaps in the live presentation, but in the resulting archive as well.
When you subscribe to Software as a Service (SaaS) solution such as web conferencing, you often rely on that vendor’s storage for access to recordings. If you are no longer willing to continue with that vendor you can lose those presentations. With webcasting solutions such as ePresence, there is always the option to own the system and therefore own your content – so if you leave ePresence your content leaves with you.
Webcasting is one-to-many, which means it’s designed to grow – both with the number of capture clients that can be used simultaneously, and with the number of viewers that can access the webcasts at the same time. Web conferencing is a many-to-many streaming technology, so bandwidth consumption can increase exponentially with each additional participant. Therefore costs seem to rise significantly along with the number of viewers. Even when the web conferencing provider can offer hundreds of ‘seats’ they still tend to fall short of the goal, with the stream becoming unreliable after 20 or so people.
Meetings don’t often need to be edited or easily searchable. However both those features can be quite helpful with presentations. Webcasting solutions often offer a searchable repository of your content along with some form of a post-production tool. In addition, webcasting technologies focus on the ability to easily publish high quality archives of live sessions, so those that missed out on the live webcast can catch it on-demand.
If you often need to stream, record and publish recurring events you can benefit from having an automated deployment. Many of the more popular webcast providers, including ePresence, offer an “automated-mode”, in which you may pre-schedule event sessions and have the webcast stations execute automatically – no manual interaction required.
One of the most attractive aspects to web conferencing solutions are their relatively low entry price points. However, what is inexpensive up front does not always translate into what is inexpensive always. The initial cost for webcasting technologies are higher because you are purchasing to own, i.e. buying hardware and software. This will save money in the long run though – especially with increased use and larger participant numbers.
In the end it is up to you to decide what it is that you need. One technology is not better at everything. Another equally valid post could look at all the situations where webcast solutions fall short for your online delivery needs.
Often the best solution to encompass all your needs is to use a little bit of both: web conferencing for collaborative small meetings, and webcasting for scalable presentation delivery.
ePresence will be exhibiting at the ED-MEDIA 2010 conference, being held in Toronto, Canada, from June 29 – July 2, 2010. Please drop by! We’d love to meet you and show off our latest and greatest developments.
Place: Room #15, The Westin Harbour Castle – 1 Harbour Square, Toronto
Date: Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Time: 5:30 pm – 7:30pm
Abstract:
Originally developed at the University of Toronto, ePresence (http://epresence.tv) is a complete solution for streaming, capturing, and publishing rich media content. Used globally by leading universities, hospitals, and businesses, it is designed to fit a variety of production scenarios – from remote webcasting to fully-automated room deployment. Learn how ePresence is currently being used at various universities for lecture and content capture, how the system integrates with Moodle and Blackboard to seamlessly publish course content, and how to create a hybrid Webcasting + Video Conferencing solution to bring a wider audience to meetings. Presentation includes full demonstration of the ePresence system.
About ED-MEDIA 2010:
ED-MEDIA – World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia & Telecommunications – is an international conference, organized by the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE). This annual conference serves as a multi-disciplinary forum for the discussion and exchange of information on the research, development, and applications on all topics related to multimedia, hypermedia and telecommunications/distance education. For registration and program information, see: http://www.aace.org/conf/edmedia/.
This is a quick note to let everyone know that our support line may be affected by the G8 and G20 summit, as our office is located close to Toronto’s Downtown “Red zone” and we rely on wireless connectivity for our voice services. Please try using the support email support@epresence.tv for tech-related inquires for the remainder of the week. Our services are not expected to be interrupted otherwise.
Peter Wolf, CEO