Peter Keše is the founder of Viidea, a company with a mission to make online knowledge preservation ubiquitous by offering a turnkey solution and a novel business model for conference organisers to turn knowledge preservation into revenue generating business activity. For many years, Peter has been focusing on generating, collecting, preserving and sharing educational knowledge. Since 2006 he has built an online video hosting technology which, among others, has powered the VideoLectures.net web portal to become world’s largest independent knowledge repository with more than 15,000 hosted educational videos.
“Presentations at conferences have great professional, technical and educational value. The problem is, when the conference ends, this value disappears. And so do the revenues from that conference. Imagine you could capture and retain that value? You could turn it into new revenues and a powerful marketing tool.”
Lightning talks and carefully prepared conference presentations, if not recorded, are just transient knowledge being forgotten a few days later. Indeed! With the enormous technology expansion in the digital age, everything is being recorded, stored and put online. You are using Facebook to keep in touch with your friends, follow their activities on Twitter and read their opinions on their blogs. But when you go to a conference, you have to carefully choose which parallel breakout session you want to attend or whether to continue a coffee break discussion with a colleague while the next lecture is about to begin. Because you just can’t make-up for the talks you have missed. Conference talks haven’t entered the digital era yet.
Why so? The technology is here and available! There are several companies that are recently building wonderful web services offering high quality online lecture playback experience, including seamless video, presentation slides and multimedia support. But conferences often operate with closed budgets, while online video hosting may result in recurring costs. And besides, streamlined web video technology itself does not solve for the conference organiser’s problems related to on-site recording, video production and publication. Accepting that there’s no way to publish conference talks online without some extra costs and effort, let’s evaluate the benefits and opportunities arising from these extra activities to find the point where they start making sense. A sound implementation of a conference video archive can not only cover for the extra production costs but even turn it into a profitable asset.
It is easy to imagine that being able to see the missed parallel breakout sessions is a great benefit to conference attendees. However, providing online access will also drive other people’s attention and awareness to your conference, which will consequently result in more tickets sold next year. Online talks may also benefit conference sponsors. In-video advertisements that are placing your sponsor’s brand next to sparkling conference content by well known personalities are an extremely valuable marketing space reaching a far bigger audience and having a far longer lifetime than other in-conference advertising activities.
Many additional benefits can be reached by choosing a video hosting platform with content protection and configurable access restriction. Such a platform will let you set the separate access policy for each individual video to be promotionally available to everyone for free, access-limited to conference attendees only, or commercially available to a wider audience through an integrated online payment system, thus transforming the initial investment into a recurring revenue stream. Once the reasoning is done and things start making sense business-wise, preserving conference knowledge and building online talk archives can start becoming a reality. The only thing you will wish for next is having someone to take away the stress and untangle the complexity of having to hire a video crew, dealing with new technologies and making everything fit together.
This is what Viidea, an online video technology enterprise, is solving for you by integrating recording service with web technology, while at the same time solving the accompanying business aspects of online conference publishing. Approaching the problem holistically, Viidea is offering a turnkey service that will bring a recording crew to the conference, publish videos online and build each conference its own customisable and brandable video web site ready for public dissemination or commercial exploitation. You can get your conference recorded by contacting Viidea at http://viidea.com/ .
Peter Keše
