From live-streaming football games to watching videos of investor conferences, people are consuming a massive amount of online programming. The healthy appetite for digital content is good news for event organizers who are looking to spread their messages to bigger audiences, but broadcasting content involves much more than hitting a button or archiving educational sessions. At the Digital Experience Institute Summit broadcast online on Nov. 15, the legal concerns behind live-streamed and on-demand content took center stage. If you’re hoping to grow your organization’s digital footprint, make sure you are answering these three questions first.
1) Where Will Attendees Watch Your Program?
In today’s digitally focused viewing environment, prospective attendees are accustomed to engaging with content in a variety of ways on a range of devices. Maybe they watch some programs as they happen live on Facebook, YouTube, or an event platform, and consume other material on-demand in a mobile app. That flexibility creates more opportunities to expand the reach of content, but it can also create additional potential headaches if those channels aren’t determined in advance. “As an organizer, you have to think about all the channels where your content might live,” Scholar said. “Is it live? Will it be on-demand? Will it also be on the web or in an app?”
There are disclaimers to consider for each of those channels. For example, if an organizer is including music in the program, the number of channels may impact the type of license that he or she needs to secure to avoid any copywriting infringement.
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2) How Long Will the Content Be Available?
After the program concludes, the content can be further monetized with on-demand sessions. However, the insights may only be relevant for a certain period of time. Scholar told DEI Summit participants that it’s crucial to think about the lifespan of that content before recording it and posting it to an organization’s library. “How long are things going to be preserved?” Scholar asked. “How soon will they be deleted? Are there extra costs in taking it down or updating the content?”
Those questions are applicable to speakers who may not want their content available forever at no additional charge, and they could also affect how the material’s sponsorship should be priced.
SEE ALSO: Talking Digital with Debi Scholar
3) What Kind of Data Are You Going to Collect?
When attendees are logged in to your online-event platform, you have the opportunity to understand a lot about them: what questions they asked in the chat forum, how many minutes they stayed engaged in the program, what kind of browser they use, and much more. However, monitoring their movements carries some additional risks. “You need to think about how much data collection will be done,” Scholar said. “Are you collecting names and email addresses, or are you tracking their behavior, too? And if a sponsor is paying for the program, are you sharing any of that information? All of this plays into privacy concerns.”
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