Audio Streaming

Teleseminars cost money for you and others to attend. One way to help bring more people into a teleseminar is to create streaming audio of your teleseminar over the Internet. Unfortunately, most methods of streaming audio over the Internet can be expensive, difficult to setup for the average user or both.

The good news is, you can now broadcast a streaming audio of your teleseminar very affordably, in a secure and private manner so you won't find any gate crashers if you sold access to the call. Here's how.

First, get a web conference room. Web conference rooms vary a lot from company to company but to broadcast your teleseminar you'd want to look for:

Good streaming audio quality. This is a given. While every technology is not perfect -- even telephones have a lot of annoying beeps and static -- many web conferencing services today have little problem with streaming audio. Often, issues with audio come from user inexperience or computer settings but this can easily be remedied with a little bit of help documentation and education.

The next biggest consideration is a room that'll give you flexible or good number of number of seats. You'll want this because it's often difficult to anticipate number or attendees. You can ask people to confirm and send reminders but there will always be a certain percentage of no shows.

This will be a little challenging because most web conference rooms sell by number of seats or per minute or both. Look for flat rate options instead.

Don't get distracted with the rest of the services like video if you're only looking for streaming audio. These usually bog down the system because of the huge amounts of bandwidth required to transmit video. Most web conferencing systems will have video conferencing capabilities already built in. Does that mean you shouldn't go with them even if everything else is right? No, because often you can 'turn off' the video or simply not use it and performance won't be affected. The point is it shouldn't be a major factor in your consideration unless you plan to transition to web conferencing and reduce the use of the telephone bridge.

Once you've nailed down the web conferencing service provider of choice, you'll need a key piece of equipment that'll pipe your telephone audio into the computer and vice versa. One of the best we've seen is the Dynametric TMP 636 or TMP 636S. Once you have this, hook it up and you're ready to broadcast streaming audio of your teleseminar online.




Now, you may ask why go through all that trouble when you can simply look for a web conferencing service who has built in telephone and streaming audio capabilities. That's a good question and can only be answered by you. Consider the cost for these integrated phone and streaming audio solutions? They will naturally cost more but beyond dollar amount, are there any limitations? Compare them with the cost of your existing teleconference call line, your (preferably fixed rate) web conferencing plan and the one time telephone patch.

So there you have it. One last pointer, consider how often you conduct teleseminars and the number of people attending as these are the biggest variables affecting cost. As a rule of thumb, if you don't conduct that many teleseminars or you have less people calling in, it'll work out better to have an integrated solution. After all, why buy a piece of equipment for streaming audio that you'll use infrequently. Given this information, you'll be able to easily figure out which is best for you.