Rank : Webinar Presenters Who Don't Understand Their Medium

[AldPixto 10]

I thought I'd just let off a little steam and complain about webinar presenters who don't seem to grasp the limitations of online screen sharing technology.

 

In many online seminars the hosts act as though the audience is in the same room as them, looking over their shoulder so to speak. They assume that you see and hear the exact same thing as they do. The reality is that the remote audience gets both their audio and video with some delay. The delay is side-effect of their computer sampling their audio and video (saving some of it in memory in their computer as data), then compressing that data, the uploading that data to the web hosting server. In addition to delay, sometimes video gets thrown away so your computer can catch up. The presenters apparently have no warning this is happening.

 

If you were speaking to someone using the telephone and skype simultaneously the skype conversation would likely have delays compared with the telephone. The telephone companies configure their networks so that voice calls have very low latency (very short delays), but general computer data (i.e. Skype) travels via larger data packets that often have to be buffered and re-sorted before they can be de-compressed and turned back into audio. The result is more delay. Most of the time the audio in webinars is fine because audio data is compact and efficient compared with video.

 

A computer display is a rectangular collection of dots (pixels) where each dot can be one of many colors. A laptop, for example, might have a 1200 x 800 screen , where each dot can theoretically be one of about 4 million colors. Even if we "simplify' this screen so that there are only about 1000 unique colors, it would take around 10Mb of data to accurately reproduce this screen. Few home internet connects can receive 10Mb/second. Engineers have developed algorithms that do a lossy-compression of display data, and that loss is very hard to see. This is what makes it possible to fit a few hours of a high-definition movie on a Blue-Ray or DVD disc. Receiving a compressed movie in realtime requires a lot of bandwidth, more than many DSL connections and even faster than some cable-internet systems can provide, which is why internet movies will "buffer-up" for a little while before they can play back smoothly. This is true even though movies from Netflix, Hulu, etc..., are being streamed from ultra-fast computers with very expensive high-speed internet connections. The webinar hosting companies like Adobe Connect, GoTo meetings, etc.., have computers and internet connections that are just one step below the online movie companies, still very fast, but they do not have unlimited speed.

 

Engineers again write software to compress computer displays, sometimes skipping small screen changes, sometimes reducing the resolution of some parts of a screen while leaving others alone. Instead of transmitting the data for a display several times a second, they might transmit the full screen every second, and then compute and send only updates for the next few display changes before sending the full display again. What ever technology is employed, the end result is that video data has a lossy compression (more fuzzy or less detail than the original). Webinar video will have a delay, and that delay is almost always longer than the audio delay. If a presenter showed three powerpoint slides in rapid succession while saying One, Two, and Three, many remote viewers might still see slide One while hearing the word three. For some viewers their computer might throw away slide Two in an attempt to catch-up with the data being sent..

 

When you have a poor telephone connection it usually helps to speak slower. The computer equivalent would be sending less data. A powerpoint presentation with simple graphics that is advanced slowly, allowing several seconds for each "page", has a very high probability of being seen correctly by all the remote viewers. Rapidly changing computer data, for example showing a quote page with changing prices or a time and sales window has very high odds of data being either being ignored because its changing too fast, or thrown away because the viewer can't receive the data quickly enough.

 

Besides attempting to transmit rapidly changing displays, presenters also try to share bigger and bigger screens. This is natural because big screens are sexy and can have lots of charts on them. The larger the screen, measured by horizontal x vertical pixels, the more data that needs to be sampled, compressed, and transmitted to your computer. So when a presenter shares their 1920 x 1080 pixel screen, they're not doing anyone a favor because that screen will need much more compression than a smaller screen. Because the viewer's software usually adds things like menu bars, they would need an even higher resolution screen to see the presenters data without their image needing to be compressed (down-sampled) to fit on their screen.

 

I've sat through many a webinar where the presenter was saying something like "see these two things" and they are likely circling some part of their screen with their mouse (or maybe they're totally lost and just pointing on their display with their finger.) I have no idea what they're pointing at because my computer isn't able to show their mouse pointer movements in real time. I've had to listen to crackling audio because a presenter has left their camera on a large rapidly changing tick chart or time and sales window - something they're not speaking about at the time, but their computer and mine are very busy trying to compress their display information and in the process the audio data gets degraded or even partially lost.

 

Okay, thanks for reading my rant. Am I the only person is bugged by webinar presenters who don't know the limitations of the technology they're using?

[mslk 10]

who were you watching that got you so worked up!? - mslk

[AldPixto 10]

If there's twenty or more people (* an arbitrary but precise number) who contribute ideas to this thread then I'll try to summarize our observations or gripes with the goal of writing a short list of recommendations for webinar presenters.

 

I think my observations generally apply to several different webinars I've attended this year.

 

I'm not going to single anyone out.

 

My perspective is that of an attendee not a presenter, so I'm not familiar with the options that are available other than pacing a presentation in such a way that most people can keep up, and using more descriptive language than "this one" and "did you see that" when referring to things on a screen.

[steve46 12]

  AldPixto said:

If there's twenty or more people (* an arbitrary but precise number) who contribute ideas to this thread then I'll try to summarize our observations or gripes with the goal of writing a short list of recommendations for webinar presenters.

 

I think my observations generally apply to several different webinars I've attended this year.

 

I'm not going to single anyone out.

 

My perspective is that of an attendee not a presenter, so I'm not familiar with the options that are available other than pacing a presentation in such a way that most people can keep up, and using more descriptive language than "this one" and "did you see that" when referring to things on a screen.

 

I have been using "GoToMeeting" for my training class and have noticed a slight lag in the audio portion, but no discernible lag in the cursor movement. So when I circle a series of prices on a chart everyone seems to see it in real time (or very close to it)...I noticed more lag in other mediums but have not had extensive experience with alternatives. Would be interested in what you think the best webinar software choice are...(if you have any opinion).

 

thanks