Is the Blended Conference Here to Stay?
Greetings from a warm Summers evening in Dublin Ireland. On Friday our Taoiseach (Irish Prime Minister) provided us with a further road map for Ireland re-opening claiming the end of the pandemic is “within grasp”. It has given the Irish people some encouragement however I’m cautiously optimistic about the future plans.
I’m very envious of seeing Joe Way and other Americans traveling between States to in-person conferences knowing that America is massively ahead on its vaccination rollout plan. Here in Ireland, we are just into the stages of providing vaccination for citizens aged 40-49. On writing this article only 36% of the Irish population have received their first dose and a mere 13% have received their second dose. Numbers are still very low despite talks of a fully vaccinated Ireland by the end of the summer. With the “digital green card” travel could be permitted in July and the return of students to Higher Education in September.
Scenes from the weekend show Irish people on the streets acting as if the pandemic is over. It is bound to happen with the glorious summer weather we are having however I fear we’ve been here before. The cost of celebrating with family at Christmas had a long-term knock-on effect with a strict level 5 lockdown. 2 weeks ago our Healthcare (HSE) computer systems were subjected to a ransomware attack with repairs still ongoing. When the computer systems return to normality and statistics are counted correctly, will Ireland hit another spike? Especially with the Indian variant recognized in the South of Ireland?
As I write this article I can’t help but reflect on the fact that it is June. We’re halfway through the year. We’re nearly 18 months into this pandemic. Ireland has been in a strong lockdown for most of this year right up into mid-April. Secondary Schools are now finished. The Leaving Certificate, our State exam that determines placement into Universities is going ahead with the student having a choice to sit the exam or have a graded approach based on past performance. Though will this new group of students actually be able to sit on campus in September?
For many students who entered University last September, they have gone a year into their course and have not had a proper 3rd level education experience. It’s difficult to comprehend.
This month, Integrated Systems Europe returns as a mix of live in-person and digital. Honestly, it has crept up on me and I find that the social media is very muted on ISE actually happening this month. Usually, my Twitter feed would be hopping with the excitement of AV professionals from Ireland and England looking forward to traveling, meeting other AV professionals, networking, and seeing the latest equipment and software on offer. Though currently, my feeds are very quiet. I’ve seen a few photos and I’ve signed up digitally and no, I won’t be traveling to London to attend Evolution on the 23rd/24th June. Sadly, I don’t know if I would have even gone if I got my first jab of vaccination by this date!
Despite this caution, we must think of the positives from this pandemic. It has increased the demand for digital events and I strongly believe blended conferences and events are here to stay for the foreseeable.
In the non-pandemic time, 3 years ago I could only dream of attending ISE for a full week. The cost of attending an event for the whole week, accommodation, flights, and food would have ranged in a few thousand euro. In fact, once I priced InfoComm against ISE and realized I could probably fly to Vegas or Florida and attend InfoComm for the whole week and it would have been cheaper than staying in Amsterdam.
This is not the fault of the organizers of the event. Mike Blackman and his team work incredibly long hours to provide stunning
events and over the course of the pandemic I’ve heard mixed comments of “Why don’t they move it to this month, why don’t they have the event in this country?” If only the logistics were that easy!
With the uncertainty of conferences taking place during 2021 and into 2022 in my Higher Ed role, I have been busy the past couple of weeks actually testing virtual event software.
Our University is a Zoom campus and although Zoom webinar has been the solution for many smaller events we needed to find a solution for conferences that would be (virtually!) staged over 2 days, have a ticketing structure, have parallel sessions, break out rooms a lounge area and networking facilities. Preferably a one-stop shop to promote a digital conference.
I have recently heard of Zoom creating a Zoom event software that will be open to beta testers however there has been no date of this launch and I believe Zoom is a little behind in offering this solution. Hopefully, when this is launched they have a few tricks up their sleeves to offer something different to their competitors at an affordable price.
Through the pandemic, there has been a rise in companies providing virtual events solutions as a service. The other issue we had was to make sure the provider we chose was GDPR compliant, especially when a lot of the providers were US and Indian-based companies.
We were not short on the choice of providers. When we went looking and scheduling virtual demonstrations as always our inbox was full of vendors wishing us to purchase their services and solutions. Though as usual they always left the price until the end and myself and my colleague were at times blown away by the cost.
Some virtual event software offered a tiered approach where they would take a commission on every ticket sale. Others would charge you per day for a networking lounge, or how many virtual breakout rooms you were running simultaneously. One left me completely flabbergasted as they were charging a price per document uploaded to their conferencing system. So if each speaker had a PDF that they wished to share with attendees it was costing us easily an extra thousand euro!
We learnt about systems that integrated with Zoom webinar and Zoom meeting via the meeting URL or SDK. However, having tested some of the platforms we learnt that the virtual conference software took us out to the Zoom webinar interface where I could clearly locate the meeting ID and password and if I bought a ticket could easily share this information with a non-paying attendee. We also considered this a security risk especially if the conference contained sensitive information.
What we discovered was that it was very difficult to find a virtual software solution that ticked all the boxes without spending a small fortune due to this tiered approach and some solutions offered company and enterprise solutions that would not fit into the requirements of a University for example sponsored rooms and “virtual tradeshow floors”.
We eventually settled for a solution that offered an annual price without the extra expenses should we have attendees over a certain capacity and a solution that offered us multiple days, parallel sessions, and private breakout rooms.
For any AV professional reading this, let me explain how awkward it is to test virtual event software inside a virtual environment! Eventually, when we narrowed down our choices I met my colleague on campus, we set up about 4 different PCs in different scenarios of Host, Speaker, and Attendee to make sure the software worked accordingly. Many times we confused ourselves on which computer was doing what as we double jobbed on our virtual roles attending a virtual conference!
While testing the software I kept thinking, I wonder how ISE and InfoComm are going to be delivered digitally. ISE will be using a Cisco-powered online platform. I just hope that it is easy to navigate. Some of the solutions I’ve trialed over the past few weeks have been very busy “glorified websites” with disgusting end-user interfaces, far too many panels where an attendee could virtually get lost in one page while trying to find the main stage. Hey, not like that was any different from walking large exhibition halls in Amsterdam and getting distracted!
So why do I think the blended conference is here to stay? If done correctly, the blended conference can provide a larger viral message to a company or event. It can provide an extra stream of revenue and
provide access to those who may not be able to travel due to the cost of accommodation and flights.
I do miss the physical networking at Audio Visual conferences and I believe it’s at least another year before we see the large capacity events return. However, I would love to think that in the future I could attend an event like this for a day or two physically to network and see new equipment and know that I could attend the rest of the event virtually or on-demand and keep my conference allowance budget reasonable.
For those who are availing of solutions from these virtual conference providers and setting up virtual events for their University, I would hope that the pricing from the service providers reduces over time. Whether this happens as the technology increases or more providers remove the tiered pricing approach and offer their services as one simple annual or monthly pricing package.