For the past six years we at iStreamPlanet (www.istreamplanet.com/) have conducted several hundreds of these events for companies in different industries ranging from manufacturing, education, government, information technology and the list goes on and on. One common challenge we have encountered when doing many of these events is the integration of different technologies required to deliver a successful live webcast. Note that posting media for on-demand viewing/listening does not require same steps or sets of technologies. Here we are going to stay focused on live portion. Following is a list of technologies, not necessary in order of importance, required to deliver successful live webcast:
1) High-speed Internet connection
2) Audio-visual program feed
3) Media digitization (also known as encoding)
4) Media delivery
5) Webcast integration
Managing these five technologies or procedures and making sure they all work seamlessly is commonly known as managed webcasting. In any event, the extent to which each procedure is managed is a topic of many discussions and something we wanted to discuss with folks involved in the streaming media industry or people/entities who have ordered streaming media services from companies such as iStreamPlanet.
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I would add that if the event is a pay-based event (meaning, end-users have to pay a fee to get access to it), it's important to manage e-commerce side as well. Here either customer already has a merchant account, payment gateway and shopping cart in place, or you use one of the external payment processors with shopping cart APIs (see Google Checkout blog). Alternatively, customer can opt to use a turn-key (ASP) based model where we host the website, merchant processing and license delivery. We offer this type of service through PayCast Services. Customers without merchant accounts can use our merchant account or for those who have the online merchant account but don’t have a shopping cart engine, we integrate their merchant account so all monies flow directly into their bank account. We have done this for customers who have the VeriSign PayFlow Pro payment gateway account (now owned by eBay/PayPal). It’s the most reliable system and fairly well documented – PayFlow Pro SDK (software developer kit) offers lots of features and ability to control the payment process as well as manage processing errors, etc. For those less experienced in payment processing, in order to process online payments, you need the online merchant account with your bank and payment gateway. Nonetheless, all transaction should take place over 128 bit SSL (secure socket layer) so all data exchange between client’s computer and server is encrypted.
It's good for your business to subscribe to pc based credit card processing services if you travel at all. Trade shows and satellite offices both benefit from the ability to process payment on an online server host from any internet connected PC.
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