Live Streaming Town Hall Meetings: 4 Things to Consider

Live streaming video has become increasingly accessible in recent years with the growth of consumer offerings like Facebook Live and YouTube Live. Naturally, internal communications teams want to utilize this technology to facilitate accessible and engaging corporate town hall meetings. But unfortunately, internal live streaming can be a bit more complicated than hitting the “Go Live” button on Facebook.

Here are 4 things to consider when live streaming town hall meetings:

Network optimization

When live streaming internal meetings, you want to have a large number of people tune in. Unfortunately, when too many people try to stream high-bandwidth video at the same time, it causes an enormous amount of strain on the corporate network if it doesn’t bring the network down altogether. To combat this, some teams decide to drastically lower the video resolution or herd everyone into a conference room to watch a broadcast – neither of which are acceptable.

This is why it is critical to partner closely with your IT team and video platform provider to develop a WAN optimization strategy for live streaming events that is tailor-made for your organization’s network infrastructure.

At uStudio, we address WAN optimization with a variety of technology solutions – peer-to-peer, transparent caching, multicast, and hybrid deployments – to accommodate the varied network architectures and needs of our customers. These solutions reduce network constraints by up to 95% when live streaming internal meetings.

Interactivity

Once you know your network can support live streaming the event, it’s time to start thinking about the viewer experience. How can you make the event more engaging and interactive?

At uStudio, our customers are big believers in adding interactive elements to live streaming players. Real-time commenting, sign-ups, calls to action, polling, and live chat are just a few examples of ways to engage your viewers during a town hall meeting. In the screenshot above, you see uStudio customer Keller Williams prompting employees to purchase branded apparel during one of their town hall live stream events.

On-demand viewing

In large organizations, it’s nearly impossible to schedule a town hall meeting when the entire company is available to tune in. This is why it’s important to make sure the live streamed event is available on-demand for employees who missed it. It’s important to consider how quickly you’ll be able to make it available and where you’ll want to make it available.

A corporate intranet is a good place to start, but think about reaching your employees in other ways. If your customer-facing teams work in Salesforce every day, add it to the home screen of Salesforce. If you have a large chunk of employees on the road, make it available to listen to in car mode in a secure podcast app. The key is to try to make this important content as accessible as possible.

Additionally, you’ll want to consider the on-demand viewer’s experience. It’s common for town hall meetings to be very long. Many uStudio customers’ town hall live streams last multiple hours. In these cases, we recommend using our Chapters player to break up the content and make it easy for viewers to navigate to the portions of the event that are most relevant to them.

Security

Security is an important consideration when distributing any private, internal content. When live streaming a town hall meeting, you need to consider at which layers you require security – page, player, and stream – and how granular your security configurations need to be. Some organizations decide they’re comfortable restricting access to a certain region or IP address, while others need to limit access to a precise set of users.

Many uStudio customers decide to configure SSO on their internal live streaming players that’s connected to their existing authentication providers. This ensures that wherever that player is embedded, the content streaming through it will only be accessible to a certain set of users. It also enables the tracking of named user viewing analytics which can be very helpful in assessing the success of the event.

To learn more about uStudio’s Secure Live Streaming Solutions, click below.

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