Meet with More People than Teams Allows

meet

with more people than Teams allows

In the history of the human race, there have never been so many ways to reach a dispersed audience, advances in technology and the internet have enabled an infinite number of participants on a call.

Over the last year, Zoom and Microsoft Teams have moved from occasional use platforms to arguably the most needed applications for collaboration. These tools are amazing for reaching audiences of a certain size with up to 100 people available on standard Zoom, and up to 250 on Microsoft teams. If this is the audience size that you want to engage with then Teams and Zoom could be what you need. It’s easy to plug in cameras and stick production systems into Teams and Zoom. The problem is you need to invite your audience and schedule events in diaries.

Before the internet, a Canadian communication theorist Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase ‘The medium is the message’. This could even be more relevant today than it was when he wrote it in 1967. Teams and Zoom have their place but the best way to reach a large audience is through the beasts that are YouTube and Facebook.

Servers at YouTube and Facebook have replaced the TV transmitters of previous broadcast infrastructure to ensure that your video stream can reach the maximum number of people. They effectively act as a good old-fashioned amplifier, without this type of infrastructure one video encoder box can only send picture to a couple of screens but with them, you can reach millions.

The problem with today’s world is there are so many different platforms competing for your audience’s attention. The easiest way to combat this is by ‘transmitting’ on as many different channels at once. Streaming video to Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn simultaneously will ensure a bigger audience, as long as they want to hear what you have to say.

In 2012 the world record was set for the mostviewed live-streaming event in YouTube’s history. To this day, the most-views live-stream remains the 2012 space jump by skydiver Felix Baumgartner, which more than 8 million people watched live on YouTube worldwide.

This technology has transformed from competing with traditional TV channels and has been recently adopted by businesses and educations sectors. Universities that used to house large lecture halls with hundred of students have had to adapt and offer online lectures. Similarly businesses that offered seminars or even company update meetings have had to move online and stream these services.