Online Seminars with Windows Media Services Q&A

April 6, 1998

Brad Brunell shares with us the origins and business justifications for creating the Microsoft Seminar Online site .

Editor: What are the origins of this program?

Brad: For several years, Microsoft delivered training sessions, seminars, demonstrations, and presentations via Microsoft TV, also known as MSTV. These presentations were delivered by satellite to customers. The sessions were very well received, but they were expensive and time-consuming to produce. Each hour-long session took about a month to professionally produce with high-quality audio and video, and cost between $30,000 and $50,000. It was also difficult for us to measure how many people were viewing the sessions. And customers told us they wanted accessible on-demand content, which is not practical to accomplish by producing and distributing video content over the analog infrastructure. That's when we started investigating delivering the content over the Internet so that we could provide the content with the "how, where, and when" that customers wanted.

Editor: We notice that instead of using video on your site, you use Windows Media Services-based audio with URL flips to the speaker slides. Why don't you offer video?

Brad: In our original tests, we offered video feeds. However, we received complaints from customers who said that the video quality just wasn't what they expected and was more annoying than helpful. This problem was compounded because expectations were high -- they expected TV quality -- and because our presentations usually include software demonstrations, which don't play well in a small window. So we decided to provide the most important piece -- the audio -- very well, and supplement it with the PowerPoint slides. This would provide a familiar metaphor and one that would work at 28.8 Kbps. We believe that the highest value in the seminar is the audio. This has proven to make good economic sense, since the costs to produce audio only are significantly lower than producing video. For example, today it costs us less than $2,000 to produce a segment, including professional-quality audio. If we produced the segments without audio created in the studio and prepared by audio specialists, that cost would go down to less than $500 a segment. The flexibility and control for the customer, the speed to produce, and the economics all align.

Editor: What kind of traffic have you had on the site so far?

B>Brad: The Seminar Online "proof of concept" beta has been up for seven weeks and we have had over 60,000 unique accesses per month.

Editor: Have you evaluated what it costs for you to produce these seminars on a cost-per-head basis? How does this compare to the MSTV numbers?

Brad: We were accustomed to a $1 per head cost with MSTV ($40,000 per segment, with an audience of approximately 40,000 viewers). Using Windows Media Services, this cost per head goes down substantially since the costs to produce Windows Media Services-based content are so low. As an example, a segment we produced on Microsoft Internet Information Server cost $2,000 to produce, and we had 11,000 unique accesses, for a cost per head of only 18 cents. Another reason this approach makes so much sense is that since the barrier to entry is so low, we are able to present a wider variety of topics that might appeal to a smaller group of people than we could afford to before.

Editor: Where does most of the traffic for your site come from?

Brad: We are careful to construct our pages so that a customer or Microsoft product group can link directly to the page containing the content that is relevant to them. Therefore, one of the major sources of hits to our site is links from customer and product group Web sites. These audience-specific Web sites and listservs have driven initial interest, and word of mouth has driven it even further.

Editor: Where does the money come for the presentations? Does your group pay for these presentations to be created?

Brad: Initially, our group funded getting content created. However, as the word got out about the seminars, it became apparent that our small group couldn't fund all of the seminars that needed to be created. So now we ask the product group requesting the seminar to pay for its production. Since the economics make sense, the product managers have been very interested in using the medium.

Editor: Your group created a tool called AddASF. Why? What is it used for?

Brad: This tool was created out of necessity. We looked for a third-party tool that could do the job, but couldn't find one, so we created it ourselves. AddASF is a small Visual Basic program that matches ASF files with the HTML pages created from PowerPoint's Save as HTML feature and puts them together with a template to create a finished online seminar that's ready to host. We did it to save time in creating content. We are sharing it with our customers so that they can also benefit from it and start creating online seminars of their own. Because it is basically a text search-and-replace engine, a customer can easily customize it for their specific intranet or Internet needs.

Editor: What are your plans with regard to AddASF?

Brad: Our seminars have been extremely popular with both customers and product groups within the company. That's why our plan is to enhance AddASF so that the product groups can create content themselves, and our role would be more to assist and advise them on how to create great Web-based seminars instead of having to do the content production ourselves. This makes sense to us as we scale and add more and more of the seminars customers are asking for. We also plan to take advantage of some of the new features that will come in Windows Media Services, such as playlists. This will allow us to chain together presentations with different types of media, with very little buffering time between clips. For example, a seminar could involve several minutes of audio with slides, then a few minutes of video, and then a few minutes of demonstrations.