Pro Webcasting Blog

Delivering quality in your webcast plays a critical role in helping you not only connect with viewers but also retain the audience for the duration of your content stream. Although everyone wants to watch anything in “HD,” in the webcast and webinar streaming world this term is sometimes confusing from what is wanted verses what the audience can connect to.

Here are a few key points you can use to help determine if an HD webcast is right for your content delivery to audiences:

1) What type of platform will your audience be connect to your streaming event from?

Will most of your targeted audience be on their mobile phone or tablet device, or will they be viewing this on their laptop? Understanding this can help you define the streaming limitations and the size of the viewing area which your audience will be watching your message from. A mobile phone or a tablet device will not on the average have the viewing capabilities for watching a TRUE HD 720 or 1080 live stream. Many phones have screens that offer full resolution that isn’t close to half of that scale. If they can’t view it in HD, then give it to them in a lower resolution. This will save you the possibility of using excessive bandwidth and eliminating high-valued audiences simply because they cannot view your HD content on their device.

2) What will the average bandwidth access be for your audience?

Is your audience viewing this from a corporate desktop in their office, or will they be viewing it in a coffee shop on a WiFi connection that’s shared with many other users on different devices? Knowing not only the limitations of screen viewing, but also the bandwidth that your audience will have is critical in creating a standard criteria for connection success with your audience. Even if you have the capabilities of providing HD, if your audience doesn’t have the ability to have access to enough bandwidth to take advantage of that quality of stream, the stream will be broken, cut off, pixelated, or not work all together. Providing for multiple bandwidth connections that allows your viewers viewing device to automatically choose the type of signal they will be viewing based on their connection is helpful in eliminating the loss of viewers with this issue.

3) What are YOUR capabilities for streaming your content?

You can focus on providing every opportunity available to make it easy for audiences to stay connected to your content, but if you don’t plan on the technical aspects from where you are streaming, your whole strategy for live streaming will come to a screeching halt. It doesn’t matter how good your cameras are, if you have the best lighting, how cool the set is, or how captivating the content might be; if you don’t have the infrastructure in place for you to properly send out your stream from your location, no one will be able to connect with you. The problem will be however instead of a bad connection limiting one or a few users, your connection limitation will be restraining you from connecting with ALL of your audience. Remember, the higher the quality of stream you want to produce the more bandwidth will be required.

If you plan beyond your vision to implement successful goals to connect with your audience consistently, your live streaming experience will provide a connection to your audience that will impact viewers to deliver your content with quality.