The role of the event manager has perhaps changed more than any other, as a result of Covid. The skills required to negotiate with hotels, schedule flights, coordinate transfers, build stages, and green rooms have, temporarily at least, become redundant. The growth mindset behind most intrepid events people has propelled them to learn video skills fast, many events now resemble the TV studio.
Live Event Streaming or Pre-recorded Video
The biggest question of all is whether to shoot live or to simulate live events by pre-recording video and delivering it on demand. The advantages of live include the spontaneity of the performance, the ability to give market-making news without leaks, and, most importantly, to interact with the audience. The excitement, or frustration, is of course that sometimes live events can go wrong. On Canapii, viewers can express their likes and dislikes, chat about the themes and post questions that a skilled presenter can then respond to on the spot.
Simulated live keynotes on the other hand can have higher production values, are tightly scripted with cool handovers, multiple participants, perfect subtitles, and translation, and mixing in different virtual and real venues. Apple set the standard for the on-demand simulated live keynote at its WWDC event in June 2020, complete with drone shots of its nearly new Campus. Apple reached a far wider audience than before, with a format that it will almost certainly conclude will replace its on-stage keynote forever. Few companies have the budgets, and access to movie directors, to match Apple’s performance of course.
Canapii supports live and simulated live events equally, with most customers mixing between both formats. We broadcast in HD quality and attendees can always ‘pause’, ‘replay’, and ‘start from the beginning’. Some of our competitors think it acceptable to post messages like “come back in a couple of days to replay this stream”, we feel that approach is antiquated. And have we mentioned that all our live streams have integrated AI-based voice recognition and translation to any of 32 different languages? The AI-based translation is not perfect but is far better than nothing at all and it improves every time we use it.
