How To Create Streaming Audio For Your Teleseminar
Teleseminars cost money for you and others to attend. One way to
help bring more people into a teleseminar is to create a
streaming audio of your teleseminar over the Internet.
Unfortunately, most methods of streaming audio over the Internet
can be expensive, difficult to setup for the average user or
both.
The good news is, you can now broadcast a streaming audio of
your teleseminar very affordably, in a secure and private manner
so you won't find any gate crashers if you sold access to the
call. Here's how.
First, get a web conference room. Web conference rooms vary a
lot from company to company but to broadcast your teleseminar
you'd want to look for:
Good streaming audio quality. This is a given. While every
technology is not perfect -- even telephones have a lot of
annoying beeps and static -- many web conferencing services
today have little problem with streaming audio. Often, issues
with audio come from user inexperience or computer settings but
this can easily be remedied with a little bit of help
documentation and education.
The next biggest consideration is a room that'll give you
flexible or good number of number of seats. You'll want this
because it's often difficult to anticipate number or attendees.
You can ask people to confirm and send reminders but there will
always be a certain percentage of no shows.
This will be a little challenging because most web conference
rooms sell by number of seats or per minute or both. Look for
flat rate options instead. Don't get distracted with the rest of
the services like video if you're only looking for streaming
audio. These usually bog down the system because of the huge
amounts of bandwidth required to transmit video. Most web
conferencing systems will have video conferencing capabilities
already built in. Does that mean you shouldn't go with them even
if everything else is right? No, because often you can 'turn
off' the video or simply not use it and performance won't be
affected. The point is it shouldn't be a major factor in your
consideration unless you plan to transition to web conferencing
and reduce the use of the telephone bridge.
Once you've nailed down the web conferencing service provider of
choice, you'll need a key piece of equipment that'll pipe your
telephone audio into the computer and vice versa. One of the
best we've seen is the Dynametric TMP 636 or TMP 636S. Once you
have this, hook it up and you're ready to broadcast streaming
audio of your teleseminar online.
Now, you may ask why go through all that trouble when you can
simply look for a web conferencing service who has built in
telephone and streaming audio capabilities. That's a good
question and can only be answered by you. What is the cost for
these integrated phone and streaming audio solutions? They will
naturally cost more but beyond dollar amount, are there any
limitations? Compare them with the cost of your existing
teleconference call line, your (preferably fixed rate) web
conferencing plan and the one time telephone patch.
So there you have it. One last pointer, consider how often you
conduct teleseminars and the number of people attending as these
are the biggest variables affecting cost. As a rule of thumb, if
you don't conduct that many teleseminars or you have less people
calling in, it'll work out better to have an integrated
solution. After all, why buy a piece of equipment for streaming
audio that you'll use infrequently. Given this information,
you'll be able to easily figure out which is best for you.