Remember the days when every meeting and event took place in person, in a packed conference room or office space? If you don’t, that’s not surprising — those days seem like a distant and fading memory.
In today’s world of virtual meetings and conferencing software, virtual town halls are becoming more and more popular as a way to bring teams together and coordinate — even when they’re far apart physically and geographically.
Running virtual town halls can be a challenge, but an eCDN can be enormously helpful. This article will highlight some of the pitfalls and risks you face conducting a town hall without an eCDN.
The importance of a virtual town hall
A virtual town hall is a live stream event. Company leaders and experts connect with team members around the world to provide key information and updates. It’s a way to bring teams together and ensure everyone is connected and on the same page.
Virtual town halls are perfect for remote teams, and during events like the pandemic. Virtual meetings are also more convenient, cheaper, and more environmentally friendly than large, in-person gatherings.
They’re also scalable — not constrained by physical space requirements or physical resources. However, this high scalability requires certain technical assets; an eCDN is one of them.
The pitfalls of going without an eCDN
If you attempt to run an event like a virtual town hall without an eCDN, you risk running into a number of challenges.
Poor quality communication
With any virtual company event, you’ll need to communicate effectively and smoothly. This means video quality is paramount, and any delays, distortion, or buffering can cause problems for your audience. If even a few viewers are experiencing issues, it could mean a complete failure to deliver the intended message. A poor video experience can also reflect poorly on the company and appear unprofessional.
Failure to share high-quality video content
One of the actions typically needed during a virtual town hall is sharing video content. This sharing is essential to showcase key information and communicate important details that have been pre-recorded. A larger virtual event can be vulnerable to interruption, a sluggish pace, or even complete derailment.
Struggle to fully scale and optimize event
The beauty of a virtual event, such as a company-wide meeting, is its ability to bring everyone together in one single event. Sharing all relevant and necessary information all at once without the need for multiple time-consuming sessions. With various actions taking place and greater traffic on the corporate network during an event, there could be a struggle to scale across the organization properly without supporting tools.
Lack of useful, real-time insights and analytics
Data and analytics are incredibly useful when wanting to derive learnings and better understand overall employee engagement. When running a virtual event this information allows you to pinpoint issues, understand the audience, and make positive changes going forward. Without the ability to track metrics, every event can feel unpredictable.
Video Delivery and Optimization with Ramp eCDN.
eCDNs — enterprise content delivery networks — allow you to scale video delivery and network optimization. Ramp’s eCDN solution enables organizations to stream live and on-demand video in high quality and to larger audiences. Most network infrastructure were not created to handle high volumes of video communication. In order to support this increasing demand on the corporate network, it’s crucial for companies to adopt an eCDN.
To find out more about Ramp’s eCDN solution, and how it can help you deliver high-quality video and superior network optimization: contact us.
