Reusing Conference Content – Our Video Experiment
One of our experiments with the Web Content Conference was to video record all of the breakout sessions. Admittedly, we hadn’t completely planned out what we would do with the content once we had it. But we knew we had only one chance to capture the live event Our annual conference is always a work in process so, well, we’d figure it out. When set free, content finds its own level. We had all the time after the conference to consider how to free it.
Content Delivery Network
Throwing these videos up on our YouTube or Vimeo account would’ve been easy, free and social. But our videos were too long for these services. Instead we are storing the videos using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Cloudfront as our content delivery network. Because this is streaming media, we’re using Real Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP). These services charge for storage and bandwidth.
Delivering Content
Once the video was uploaded, we started posting the videos individually to our company blog. For each we wrote a short summary and then embedded the video into the post. Because we found that each video actually loaded on the page when the blog was accessed, page load times were unacceptably slow. So we used the “more” feature in our WordPress blog and embedded the video “below the fold”. Now the blog visitor can read the short summary and only when they click the “read the rest of this entry” does the video load. Not perfect, but good enough. And we were learning.
Packaging the Product
We went back to the drawing board and created a friendlier “wrapper” for the video, branding the video frame with video session title, presenters name, company logo and a prominent start button. To encourage viral distribution we also included the embed code which brings the video, the quick start usability and branding assets. Now any person can lift the video and place it wherever they’d like. We created a video page on the conference website. Pretty cool.
Content Lives
Web Content 2010 was a great event. And as most who attend conferences know, the presentations are rich chum for stimulating dialogue among the attendees. There is tons of great actionable information in these videos. Special thanks to our presenters for giving us the permission to video and release their valuable information. If you were unable to attend the Web Content Conference and/or web content is your thing, watch the videos. And pass them on. We’ve given you the tools.







