Flights are restricted. Large events like the very popular SXSW event in Austin, Texas, are cancelled. American schools and businesses are closing doors and scrambling to figure out how they will continue to operate. Here’s a quick look at coronavirus impacts this month alone:
- 500 trade shows representing $26 billion in potential revenue have been cancelled.
- More than 776.7 million children and youth are out of school.
- Dow Jones experienced its greatest drop in value of all time, plunging 2997 points on a single day.
It’s staggering. Without doubt, the emergence of COVID-19 has many organizations thinking about contingency plans to help them continue to be operable as the situation become worse – which it is by the day. This is especially true for organizations that operate globally as many universities and corporations do. They’re concerned about how they will be able to continually engage in two-way communication with their audiences.
Organizations are modifying, scaling up and pivoting their use of Mediasite to meet their new communication needs. Read on for some considerations and options for creating a contingency plan to address COVID-19 with Mediasite.
The Need for Contingency Plans
COVID-19 isn’t the only type of disruptive impact that organizations may face, and it certainly isn’t the last. Hurricanes. Fires. Shifting job markets. The continued trend to doing work remotely. These are all environmental impacts that challenge companies and schools to keep communication channels open and accessible.
That’s where Mediasite, increasingly, comes into play. COVID-19 is impacting all aspects of business from supply chains, to attendance at events, to how to deliver education in both K-12 and higher education settings, to how to maintain normal business operations. With streaming video at the heart of their pandemic continuity plans, many organizations already know the answers to these tough questions:
- How do you keep classes going and provide both instructors and students access to tools to both create and share educational information?
- How do you keep communicating to employees, holding meetings and conducting business remotely?
- How do you ensure that your conferences and events that you spent months planning can go on and that both presenters and attendees can share and access information seamlessly?
Managing and Preparing for System Demand
Technology exists to communicate and share just about anything these days. That includes aiding students and staff who are learning and working from home. Here are some practical ways your organization can keep students, staff and employees in the loop and productive:
- Create pre-class videos for students
- Record pre-meeting overviews for staff
- Produce town hallsfor on-demand viewing by employees
- Record training videos and classroom lectures
- Create micro-learning modules
- Add interactive quizzes to videos
- Allow students to submit video assignments
- Record assignment feedback
But first, to be successful with these tactics the technology used to create these videos must work in concert with the other systems in use to ensure seamless delivery and access.
This starts with consideration of your internal infrastructure. Sometimes the structure you have can meet demand. Sometimes it can’t.
You may need to add more servers.
You may need to leverage a content delivery network (CDN).
You may need to consider the use of internal devices to cache and optimize content.
Mediasite can help organizations consider and respond to all these questions to ensure that infrastructure can support creation, demand and access.
Record – Manage – Deliver
Once you figure out your infrastructure needs, there are several options for creating and capturing videos with Mediasite.
1. Create Videos Fast
There are tools that let users simply click a button to record. Capture the content, save it and then upload it into your learning management system (LMS), content management system (CMS), or a video platform (e.g. YouTube) of your choice. Among the options best suited to assist during this public health emergency are:
- My Mediasite personal capture software: Users easily create, edit, manage and share videos (think lecture videos, micro learning content, trainings, executive communications, etc.) right from their own devices. It captures your built-in camera and microphone and automatically publishes the video to Mediasite.
- Mediasite Join video conference capture: The software automatically records and manages everything said and shown during collaborative web and video conferences for easy playback on any device. Just invite Join to your video meeting. It integrates seamlessly with the web- and video-conferencing systems you already use and creates a much more robust, searchable and useable meeting transcript for on-demand reference.
As you consider the type of recording tools you need, think about the options you will offer your content creators.
- Will they be recording from their desktops? Laptops? Mobile devices?
- How will you deploy the software?
- Will they need to go through some on-boarding? Will they be using webcams and microphones?
- What support procedures will you offer?
It’s important to make sure that you are giving content creators the tools and support they need to be successful.
2. Manage the Videos in One Place
Once recorded, you’ll need to think about how you will manage and host the videos.
- On premises or in Mediasite Video Cloud?
- Where will the media server physically reside? If on-site do you have adequate storage?
- What network constraints do you have in terms of the amount of content that can be accessed and streamed at one time?
3. Share the Videos Far and Wide
From a delivery standpoint, you need to think about not only how users will access the videos (and whether you have the infrastructure to support this access), but also about how they will learn about it in the first place and how they will get access.
- Will you provide access through a link sent in an email?
- Through your LMS or CMS?
- Through some other means?
As you develop contingency plans to ensure connections between key audiences, make sure you consider:
- The potential demand you will be dealing with and its impact on your infrastructure
- The various delivery options available to you
- How you will capture, record, store and deliver content
- How you will ensure that your audience is aware of and can easily access your content
No matter where your audience is or where your presenters are, Mediasite can help.
Ready to draft your contingency plan? Get started www.mediasite.com/coronavirus
