After the economic decline at the beginning of this decade, many companies started looking for ways to cut costs. One such expense was travel – whether sales or training, needs were evaluated and budgets were cut.
Web Seminars
During this time, many new ways of online training emerged – one being Web-based seminars. Many companies found that hosting weekly Web seminars ranging from 30 to 90 minutes was very effective for their clients and customers.
Here at AutomationDirect we don’t offer a direct sales force that continuously beats on doors trying to sell products, take customers to lunch and promise everything under the moon. We have always offered a different way of doing business by offering products directly to our customers, and by doing so, we are able to keep prices low.
Nearly six years ago, we looked into the idea of Web seminars that would offer our customers a new way of learning and still fit into our “way of doing business”.
At the beginning of the Web seminar era, the only option to host an event was to sign a contract with a hosting company. AutomationDirect tested many companies and found one that worked.
A few years later we moved on and selected another hosting company that offered better service and lower rates. Then another few years later – well, you get the idea. If you were going to host Web seminars, you were most likely going to sign a contract and be limited to whatever tools the “host” offered, not necessarily what you wanted.
At the time of the Web seminar push, streaming video was not yet incorporated and still today, some hosting companies don’t have a good tool for streaming video in a Web seminar.
This was an option we always wanted here at AutomationDirect. All our previous formats required the end users – our customers — to log in through their computer to watch slides and software demos, and listen to the audio separately over the phone. It worked great, but posed a problem for some if they only had a cell phone.
Why couldn’t we incorporate the audio over the Internet? After years of changing hosting companies, some of them being bought out by others and forcing us to change our formats, we finally said, “Enough!”
At the time, we were also looking for a system that would allow us to broadcast live audio and video of our weekly company meetings from our main auditorium to our surrounding buildings and home-based employees. Through research, we found this to be expensive and complicated, but it could be done.
In April 2007, a co-worker and I packed our bags and headed out to Las Vegas for the annual NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) tradeshow. We were in search of better ways to record videos for our customers and company, as well as searching for a solution to our desire to broadcast live.
If you have an interest in any type of audio/video and its equipment, NAB is the place to go. There, you can spend four days walking the trade show floor, talking to vendors about anything and everything related to A/V, plus attend a full week of training classes.
We stumbled across a couple of vendors who offered possible solutions, and to our surprise, one of them had exactly what we wanted. We purchased some hardware and the associated software from a company called Vbrick Systems, Inc. and tested it extensively here at our campus.
After purchasing a video switcher and a few monitors, we were up and running like a television talk show.
The system allows us to send a PowerPoint presentation to the end user as well as audio and video all packaged together. This was a perfect fit for our company meetings.
After weeks of testing, we decided it would be the perfect fit for our customers who desired Web seminars.
Soon, a second VBrick was delivered. We quickly re-arranged the studio, set up some additional equipment and voila! We have a full in-house studio for hosting live Web seminars right here at AutomationDirect.
You would think that equipment like this would cost far more than the return, but we were able to set up our new studio and outfit it for the cost of what we were paying for a few months of hosting services. In the end, it saved us money which allows us to keep our cost down and pass the savings to you, the customers.
Now that we had the equipment and knowledge, we had to get to work on the program’s new look and feel and meet the demands of our customers. We created a new Web site called “AutomationTalk” since that will be the main topic: talking about automation products.
I really don’t like to call them Webinars– I feel we have a different look and feel. We offer something different than the traditional “webinar.” I like to refer to them as our “talk shows”.
Automation Talk is currently running and we offer bi-weekly topics in a live show format, where our customers see our products as we talk about them. If you are too busy to watch our scheduled shows, you can log in and watch any of the previous shows in a recorded format.
It has taken several months to get the project up and rolling, and we are excited to finally offer this revitalized service. Some of our presenters had been a little shaky on camera but they are slowly defeating the stage fright and now feel like talk show stars.
We encourage you to stop by the site at: www.automationtalk.com and watch one or many of our shows. These are filled with current and new products that we offer at AutomationDirect. We also have a video learning site that is filled with video tutorials on how to effectively use our products – it can be found at:
http://learn.automationdirect.com.
As always, we strive to meet the demands of our customers and we try to stay ahead of the curve. I am sure we will improve on this system in the future, as Internet audio and video improve. Can you imagine sitting at your desk watching a Web-based seminar in HD while listening to it in surround sound?
We hope to see you soon.
By Shane Crider
AutomationDirect,
Digital A/V Media Specialist
Originally Published: Dec. 1, 2009