Splendid Streaming at IWMW

We’ve had a go at streaming the plenary talks at the Institutional Web Management Workshops for the last 5 years now. Allowing people at home to watch the talks is all part of the amplified conference role that we see IWMW playing.

The AV unit and one camera at IWMW, by Mindfieldz

This year was no exception and the University of Essex did a stirling job of live streaming talks for us and hosting them on the University Web site.

They had 3 video cameras (with female camera people as Liz Azyan pointed out!) filming the main area and pushed out some really great quality content. We also pulled this content into Nevibes so we could offer it along with all the other IWMW2009 resources (like tweets, slides and live blogging using CoveritLive).

The University of Essex have now added some statistical data about the streaming viewers including a map of viewer location and a time graph of viewers. Numbers peaked at almost 60 viewers during the second morning plenaries.

Map of streaming video viewers

Timings of streaming video viewers

Twitter Comments on the Streaming

There were a lot of Twitter comments on the streaming which were on the whole really encouraging. They also helped us maintain good quality during the three days by pointing out problems such as the mikes being too loud.

The streaming that we currently provide is usually courtesy of our host institution so it can be difficult to offer different outputs and support all users (e.g. Linux users had a few problems). We are aware of these type of issues and do our best to offer as many solutions as are within our means.

What Next?

An archive of each of the plenary talks will be made available soon. Watch the main page video page on the IWMW 2009 Web site for updates.