Webcast or Webinar
June 24, 2006
Many people use these terms as if they were interchangeable. In reality, these two web based communication services are completely different.
Webinar: this is a web based collaborative meeting with audio delivered via the telephone. A webinar is a very good replacement for a meeting you would hold in a conference room. Leading providers of webinars are Webex, Microsoft Live Meeting and Go To meeting. All of these share the same exact telephone/web based delivery system.
Webcast: This is where the audio and or video is delivered via the Internet directly to the desktop of a targeted group of users. The webcast attendee hears the audio via their computer speakers and, if video is present, see the video on their computer speaker. A webcast is very well suited to events such as product launches, large scale training, financial quarterly reporting and web based seminars.
Both of the above communication tools serve a very good purpose but only if they are used correctly. Here are two examples that should help you understand how to best use each of these tools.
Webinar:
Take a scenario where you have five to ten managers based around the country. You need to meet and review plans on a regular basis. A simple webinar lasting one hour for these ten people (based on pricing found on the Webex site) would cost 40 cents per minute per participant for a total of $240. A webcast for the same amount of people would run much more since a webcast has an initially higher price because of the set up.
Webcast:
Now let’s look at moving a typical road show event onto the Internet with a webcast. Let’s assume a one hour event with 250 viewers. An interactive audio webcast with registration, slide show and moderated audience Q&A for this event would cost around $1000. But, if we take the same event and try to use the webinar service as the delivery tool we would see a budget breaking price of $6000!
As you can see from the above examples, webinars are for conference room sized events that need a lot of collaboration while your bigger events will be always be best served with a webcast.
