Stream Globally, Save Locally: Using Webcasting and Intelligent Audio-Visual Design to Unite International Employees and Clients

Hello, and welcome to our continuing series of live

webinars documenting creative use of

Mediasite around the world.

I'm Sean Brown, vice president of Sonic Foundry, and today's

webinar is entitled Stream Globally and Save Locally--

Using Webcasting and Intelligent Audio-visual

Design to Unite International Employees and Clients.

Once again, we have a lot of people joining us from all

over the world.

By the time we were going to broadcast, just under 150 were

joining us online.

We have corporations and government institutions from

most of the United States and Canadian provinces

represented, as well as corporations and government

agencies from many countries all over the world, including

first time guests from South Africa, New Zealand, Belgium,

and Iceland.

Welcome to all of you.

Before we get started, I just want to cover a few

housekeeping things.

I will be your moderator today.

If you have a question during the webcast, I'll be taking

them at the end and relaying them to my guest, who I will

introduce shortly.

If you're watching the Mediasite in one of two

different interfaces that we're broadcasting, there's a

speech bubble that is permanently available in our

classic player, which has a primarily white background,

and if you're using our advanced player that has a

black background, if you hover towards the bottom.

In either case you will see a speech bubble, and if you

click it, you will have the opportunity to fill out a form

and ask me as many questions as you wish.

If you'll include your email address, which is optional,

we'll be able to respond to your question, even if I'm not

able to get to it during our time on the air.

There's also a links, or attachments, icon in both

interfaces, behind which you will find supplementary

information about today's webinar, including my guest's

PowerPoint slides, which he's graciously offered

to share with you.

Now to introduce my guest, an old friend, Pete Gorton.

Peter Gorton joined the law firm of Faegre & Benson in

2005 after nearly 20 years as a freelance television

journalist. As presentation services coordinator, he

executes all things AV related for an international legal

practice with offices in six cities and three countries.

He specializes in facilitation and seamless integration of

technology, including online seminars webcasting and inner

office communications.

We just got him back from Florida where he was following

the Twins for spring training, reluctantly.

Glad that you're here.

Thank you for having me.

How's my tan?

Looking good.

Well, thanks for having me.

I appreciate being here.

And that's quite a long introduction, which I

appreciate.

Speaking of long introductions, the title of

this webcast--

Using Webcasting Intelligent Audio-visual--

et cetera, et cetera.

We thought we could make this a longer title.

It's very long now.

So we decided, maybe an acronym would work, so I put

together what it would be.

I don't think this means any particular secret code or

anything but--

I work for Faegre & Benson.

It's an international law firm, as Sean said.

We work using an IP network backbone to do video

conferencing and video streaming.

When Sonic Foundry came to us with the Mediasite product, we

thought that was a good way to touch clients externally.

So I not only manage an internal network of video

conferencing sites around the world, we also touch our

clients externally by using Sonic

Foundry's hosting services.

We have about 500 lawyers worldwide currently in these

different offices.

And I'll go over the offices a little bit in a moment--

a little bit more as to what each office has that's unique.

I'm based in Minneapolis, Minnesota,

which is our head office.

Most of the employees are there.

And our conference facilities are much larger there.

We'll do anything from a the standard presentation for

clients, internal meetings.

And we use Mediasite in a variety of ways, and

I'll get into that.

We are recognized by The American Lawyer as a top 100

firm, which is important.

Here's a slide of some of our conference facilities in

Minneapolis.

We have 30 conference rooms there currently and each has

various AV capabilities.

All of them have AV incorporated somehow.

We have large conference facilities that can handle up

to 150 people in a multipurpose space, and I'll

show you a couple photos of that a little bit later.

Generally, we'll have boardrooms, conference rooms,

that we handle the AV side of.

Our next largest office worldwide

is in Denver, Colorado.

They currently have 19 conference rooms. Most of them

are AV integrated in one form or another.

We do have standard offices without--

not all of our offices have audio-visual support built in,

but a great majority of them do.

A little up the road from my Denver is Boulder, Colorado.

We have seven conference rooms there.

One of the things that I'll get into a little bit more

later is trying to have conference rooms that are

similar in every office.

We go to great lengths to make sure that the experience, as

lawyers travel between offices, is the same so that

they feel comfortable using technology.

It's a crucial point to some of the services we provide.

Des Moines, Iowa, currently has two conference rooms.

London, England has three video conferencing-capable

offices so that we can stay connected internally and

through external client discussions.

Our most recent office opened in Shanghai, China.

We have a couple partners there who maintain monthly and

weekly meetings with the lawyers back in Minneapolis

and our other offices.

We connect to them over our IP backbone, which is really how

our streaming services became more used.

We started with just having ISDN video conferencing.

Well, as technology evolved, it turned into an IP network.

Keeps everybody together for monthly meetings of the

partnership, in particular.

And monthly group meetings that are across offices, when

you have lawyers all over who are in the same practice areas

and the same groups and they need to stay

connected that way.

As we started looking at that and using our video

conferencing system, we add Mediasite to that to be able

to reach out and primarily touch external clients but

also do the standard recordings that we do on a

daily basis of different meetings

that need to be recorded.

But we started with that as a model.

So, in essence, someone in London, England can video

conference back to Minneapolis.

Then we can turn around and turn it into a stream and

stream it back to people in England, which is one

application that we've used.

I'll show you that in a little bit.

Faegre & Benson has been recognized as a technology

leader by The American Lawyer, and we're ranked among the top

five US law firms for overall technology.

Just needed to get that plug in, Sean.

I knew you would.

Here's an example of one of the original

webcasts that we did.

You'll notice, if you're familiar with the product,

some of the antiquated graphics.

In 2006, we did this one.

A lawyer came to us and said, I need to stream to the London

Stock Exchange.

It's called AIM, which is the equivalent of the NASDAQ here.

I need to stream to some clients about different legal

related matters.

And we came to him and said, well, we can use our IP

backbone to bring you back to Minneapolis, have one

centralized streaming recorder, send it to Sonic

Foundry here in Madison, have that turn around to the rest

of the world.

And we had 20 to 30 different viewers viewing in England.

So it was a global process that we were able to capture

and gave our legal teams the opportunity to provide

information to their clients by crisscrossing the globe.

We will do standard meetings that are trying to keep our

client teams together.

For each different client, there's a group of lawyers who

come together from across offices and they will give

updates on different legal matters.

And then we will set the Mediasite recording so that

people who might be traveling or are not there can go back

and reference.

We've taken our Mediasite portable recorder off site and

captured conferences that we hold at local hotels for--

this is an example of a continuing conference that we

do each year that brings in mergers and acquisition folks.

And we'll have a huge event center filled with 400 people

and we'll be capturing it in the back.

And then we can play it back on our faegre.com page.

One of our most recent applications, that I've been

really pushing and trying to get our legal teams to adopt,

is the idea of a short what they call a weblet.

We could call it webcast, but a short webcast, something

that there's a legal update.

A lawyer wants to come in and sit down and talk for five, 10

minutes, tops, to just give a legal update.

And then be able to use a rich media experience to be able to

add PowerPoint materials, add articles and different things

that they've written about and links to different places so

that they can really have a rich media experience and send

that out and touch their clients all at one time.

And it's something that we do more and more each day.

To our conference rooms. These are just some equipment shots.

We have an audio-visual vendor called AVI Systems, who does

all our integration.

And we work hand-in-hand with those folks to make sure that

we're running all the time.

It's constant equipment upgrades, updating each thing

to make sure that lamps are changed our projectors, make

sure that the integrated audio systems are always working.

So we, luckily, use the equipment a lot, so things

don't tend to get in disrepair.

But we work hand-in-hand with our integrators and our

audio-visual people to keep the ship running.

But does this is some still shots of some of the equipment

that we have. It's standard conference rooms equipment.

In our room we call the Century Room, which I

primarily work in, it is a multipurpose space that can

hold up 150 people in a classroom setting--

more people than that with just chairs.

But it's a multipurpose space that we can

use for client meetings--

clients can use for their meetings.

We provide a full range of services

around the Century Room.

It's a Crestron control for a control system.

We have a wireless lavalieres and microphones.

We have hard wired ones as well.

We are in the process a microphone upgrade, as we

speak, to allow to negate Blackberry interference, which

has become a problem in those rooms when everybody in there

has their Blackberry and their laptops out.

We tend to have audio interference.

So we're lucky technology has come around for that.

Anyone who has done webcasting or any types of recordings is

very familiar with the beeping nature of how that works.

Hopefully, we're getting past that technology standpoint.

But here's some photos.

We have a movable podium--

several different locations that we can set things up as

to facilitate meetings.

And here's the hardest working person in the law firm.

I recognize that guy.

I don't know who this guy is, but he works all the time.

Always has a smile on his face too, I hope.

He hopes.

Right.

This is the control room that they devised.

Place I spend a lot of time watching meetings and

recording, capturing.

There's our Mediasite.

That's the RL, right?

That's the RL.

It's a classic.

Used all the time, more and more, for a myriad of uses

that I just explained.

But there's this guy working.

He's always there, so if you have any questions.

I see he has two phones.

Anyway.

Here's the conference space and one of our typical

conferences.

This was a franchising meeting that we were holding.

A bunch of clients come in.

We give them legal advice.

Anyway, that's what we do there.

That's a picture of our space.

And here is the building.

My favorite building.

And how many floors in the building do you have?

11 or 12.

12.

12 floors.

Lots of people.

Lots of legal things going.

That's great.

That's your prepared remarks.

I have a bunch of questions coming in.

You ready to get--

I don't know.

Ready to step into the batting cage?

I'm pretty nervous, but okay.

They're gentle.

This audience is gentle, but they have

a lot of good questions.

First of all, thank you very much for taking us inside

Faegre & Benson.

The reason I started--

because a lot of questions have to do with

infrastructure--

so that's the Minneapolis headquarters on the screen, of

which there's many, many floors and one of the tallest

and most beautiful office buildings in Minneapolis,

where I happen to live as well.

One of the decisions that you made right away was that you

do not use your own IT infrastructure, but you use

Sonic Foundry's ASP staff service--

our hosting service--

as you said, for the back end.

Couple of questions asked about security.

You're a law firm, so can you walk people through how you

made that decision to use Sonic Foundry and be

comfortable with the security, even in a law firm?

Initially, we had to get out of our network.

We had to come up with a way to do that.

We approached the networks division of the firm.

Get out of your firewall to viewers who were outside.

Yes.

Originally, the product was set up that we could

potentially do that internally.

We decided, mostly for security reasons, that we

would go with the streaming service to

touch people outside.

So everything that goes to a faegre.com address--

different recordings that are made available after

seminars are done--

we decided to do that because it's simpler for us.

We didn't have to go into the network division and try and

transverse that firewall and constantly trying

to figure that out.

So Sonic Foundry works very seamlessly with what we do.

It's a simple question.

Is this to be broadcast internally or externally?

And that's the only decision I have to make.

Someone says, well, I need my clients to be able to see

that, if I want to do a quick

five-minute speech or something.

It's all external.

And that's going to reside and live and be accumulated into a

dot-com address.

Totally makes sense.

So we were able to work with them in the beginning and they

had a very rigorous security review to make sure that

hosting with us externally was as secure as them doing it

themselves.

And we passed that test. From a presentation services--

people who facilitate meetings--

I don't want that as an objection, some headache or

hassle that I have to go through each time we want to

do something.

We want to try and make Mediasite and this experience

as transparent as possible.

Somebody can walk into the office, we can stream to as

many people as need to know externally.

And we can just get over that hurdle and

start working on content.

I'm going to coalesce a couple of questions here because they

come from the same place.

What organization is

spearheading the use of Mediasite?

Is it the communications department?

Is it HR?

It is certain partners?

Is it IT?

Who owns the webcasting project?

Webcasting is currently provided through our IT

department, but as anybody who uses this product or is

getting into this product needs to understand,

organizational buy in is a big part of Mediasite.

You need someone graphics who can make beautiful graphics.

You need somebody in networks and security to be able to

work the active directory sides of things.

You need to be able to have the users who are going to

provide content--

so the lawyers and the HR staff.

So it's a collaborative effort of multiple departments.

And it's something that originally was to go into our

IT department, but realize that to do an effective

Mediasite presentation, it's going to touch many more

people than just the IT.

Sure, the boxes are housed in the IT department.

The IT department uses it in their meetings.

But it's an institutional piece of equipment.

Everybody needs to have a part in it.

I hit record and I import and manage all the files when

they're done and all the recordings.

But in order to do it well, you need to use as many people

who have skills in different as possible.

And we try to design Mediasite to be easy enough so that the

different departments can manage Mediasite much like

they would with other applications

that they have going.

Security is similar for the IT people to other

things they're doing.

Security for the web design elements are similar.

Ease of use is an incredible part of the what Mediasite

does for us.

I want to be able to make speakers comfortable.

I want to be able to have my department give message.

The message is the most important thing.

If we're worried about the technology pieces being too

difficult to run or too difficult to manage, that

can't really be what my goal is.

I want to be in the message business.

We want to be able to tell people what we do.

And if were caught up in technology that is cumbersome

or too difficult to use, that's a huge impediment to

making that work.

Mediasite is an easy platform to be able to quickly and

easily get your message out.

Another question that fits in right there.

A person asked, did you design all of your conference rooms

at the same time or did you retrofit?

In other words, was it new construction or was it

retrofitting or did it happen over time?

if you designed at the same time, what were some of the

tech choices or specification lists you standardized on.

That's typical of some of the questions that are coming in.

We are constantly evolving in adding conference rooms. We

used to do it--

For five years, right?

Over several years.

Every time it's identified that we need a conference

space, we'll add on.

There are some standard elements.

We try to get the video conference part of that--

the bread and butter of a conference room-- make sure we

have video conference and capabilities that way.

Some rooms will have touch panels and some rooms won't.

So yes, we're constantly evolving in that, but we have

specific needs in each room that happen in every room, so

we try and standardize it as much we can.

But you're constantly working on new construction projects

in different offices.

And, how do we bring everybody up to a competent standard so

that all of us can talk seamlessly.

All right.

That's what you've got to keep in the back of your mind.

There's a couple of questions that are related to this.

This one says it best. Do the lawyers webcast themselves

without tech staff assistants?

Is it something they have to have running on their laptops?

And how do you train them?

No.

The quick answer to that is no.

I'm there or one of our staff is there.

We have a small group of people who run

the Mediasite platform.

But it's not a lawyer walking into the

conference room, hit record.

It happens in the background.

It all has to happen in background because it allows

us a couple of things.

It allows us standardization.

It allows us to provide a service to them-- something

they don't need to get versed in.

We need these people working on legal matters, not worrying

about how Mediasite is recorded.

Can you throw up your control room slide with that handsome

guy in it or whatever the heck was going on.

Whoever that guy was?

Whoever that ne'er-do-well was, because a couple of

questions are specific about that.

Really?

How handsome he is?

About that?

None of them, that.

They want to know how video conferencing works.

And I'm just jumping in here.

The way you and [? Rand Olson ?]

designed this to be--

Not necessarily me-- our team.

Your team.

You, from that room, can pull in any conference room that

has a video conferencing codec.

Describe how video conferencing and Mediasite

work together, because there's a lot of questions like that.

Sure.

Within our organization, we have built-in video

conferencing setups.

We use all Polycoms. We have roll-about units that can go

to individual conference rooms in offices that don't

have it built in.

So we have some versatility that way.

The video conference backbone will do 768

stream using a bridge.

768k stream?

OK.

Yeah.

High-quality call.

Yeah.

And then bring it back to the control room, merge it all

together using a bridge, and so anyone can talk and we can

switch to any office.

I can run cameras in different offices, all from this room.

With that joystick.

I do lots of things from there.

But that is--

So you are actually controlling the camera in the

target room.

So you're aiming a camera in London, zooming in, all that,

because they don't want to do it there.

Because they don't need to do it there.

It allows us a couple of different things.

One, it allows us to competently ask the question,

what are you going to do in this meeting?

So, give me an agenda.

Try and let me understand that you're going to jump around

from different offices.

We're going to have input from Denver for one section in a

PowerPoint and we're going to have someone from London

speaking next and then we're going to go back to

Minneapolis, then back to Shanghai.

So we use the Crestron controller and we use a thing

called RoomView within Crestron, which allows me to

go to each one of our rooms and change different cameras,

select different things, zoom in, zoom out, to a certain

extent that doesn't alleviate the need to have someone

technical on the other ends.

But oftentimes, the nature of our meetings are sensitive

enough that they don't want a whole lot of technical people

hanging around the room.

And so they give me this ability to, within reason, do

some zooming and panning to different people who are

talking in different conference rooms.

So translating in English and summarizing

for the laymen here.

So what you're telling me is--

Please do that, yeah.

--on the IP backbone, on the network for Faegre & Benson

with all those offices, when you build a conference room,

ideally, it has a video conferencing codec in it.

So one application is, you can have a real two-way

interactive meeting-- independent Mediasite.

The second thing is, the master control room that

you're in is now tied into all those rooms. And with

Mediasite, you can archive and stream it and share it so that

live and on demand, you can be anywhere with a browser and

watch it live.

Yes, absolutely.

That's the key.

So the video conferencing is really what's bringing the VGA

and the camera and audio to the Mediasite in Minneapolis,

even if the meeting's originating in Singapore or

England or Denver.

Am I saying it right?

Shanghai, yes.

Okay, Shanghai.

Sorry.

Anywhere.

Anywhere.

Anywhere.

Yeah, and that's exactly it.

That's the beauty of our system is that we can present

from anywhere in our offices.

We can even bring in people on an ISDN call and add those

people in there.

So if someone's at a Kinko's somewhere in Los Angeles and

wants to be able to talk to the lawyers at Faegre & Benson

and then stream to clients.

We can even turn that around, which we do.

OK.

Now, so alternating between slow pitches and fast pitches.

There's people who have technical questions stacked

up, and then there's people who have policy questions.

There's some policy questions.

Both incredibly important.

I assumed you'd like that.

What is the reaction, then, of any of the

lawyers to being on camera?

Are they good presenters?

Are they comfortable with webcasting?

Do they enjoy having the things archived or do the want

them destroyed?

That's a mouthful.

The fact is, is that different legal practice areas do better

on camera than others.

Now, it's incredibly important--

where I sit-- that I make a speaker as

comfortable as possible.

The litigators, for instance, who are in courtrooms all the

time-- they love it.

And as a matter of fact, they fill up the screen.

They'll use different camera angles to make

sure that it's moving.

We have to put on extra server storage.

Yeah, maybe.

So they do much better than someone who is not as versed

in doing that.

But it's a process.

It's a the thing that we try and make easy for a

presentation site.

The last thing I want to happen is to have a presenter

worried about the technology aspect of it.

You need to tell me what your expertise is and that is where

I try to get you.

We're on a continuum of that because you have some people

who are better at it than others.

And you have time constraints, policy constraints, and all

types of editorial things.

But in general, we just try and make the speaker as

comfortable as possible to tell us what they know.

Has the use of Mediasite been more popular internally for

webcasting or externally for webcasting?

Primarily, our recordings are going external.

The internal folks who need to catch up on meetings, who need

to see an address from the managing directors--

those types of things, internally, are vital and

vital to the sale of this product, in terms of people

need to understand that.

But where the bang is, is where you're able to get out

to all of your clients.

Outreach.

And that was the original mission of webcasting.

The idea was how to expand and reach and touch customers more

than unite the employees.

Most definitely.

We're in an age where we have to figure out how we can touch

our clients as much as possible, how we can put the

right face on the law firm to our clients.

How can we provide value to our clients?

And webcasting does that for us.

This question's been asked many ways, but this person

asks it best. How often are you bringing together your

entire workforce in a live webcast--

I guess she means internally.

So how often are you bringing together your entire workforce

in a live webcast?

Or with time zones, is it a portion is live and then most

people go back to watch on demand?

So people want to know how you handle all company meetings

with multiple time zones, globally.

We capture our annual meeting once a year that is available

to everybody.

To manage that time shift-- the 11, 12 hours to Shanghai

is a problem for us.

They get the presentation loaded to their local server

and they watch it in Shanghai.

We don't ever have an all-hands meeting.

It's not to say that we don't--

that we couldn't, because we could easily.

We do have partners meetings monthly where the partnership

gets together--

about a third of our lawyers are partners.

They come together monthly, so that's a five, six-way video

conference.

And you archive it-- share it with Mediasite.

Oh yeah, the whole deal.

Do you share it live?

No, because all that is done on the video conference.

And so that's purely for people who couldn't make it

and archive purposes.

Totally makes sense.

And it's sensitive information, so it isn't

something that is going to be--

They want to know who's in the room.

Right.

Totally makes sense.

That always is in the back of our minds.

And that everybody got the information the exact time.

You've seen legal movies, and they're all true.

The legal movies are all true, including The Firm.

They are.

Now we're back to the hard-- the technical questions.

Okay.

Here we go.

What video conferencing bridge are using and does it allow

external ISDN and external IP connectivity?

So what conference bridge are you using, and can you take

both ISDN and IP externally?

We use a Codian bridge.

It's a couple years old.

How many ports?

20?

I believe it's 20.

20 ports.

[UNINTELLIGIBLE]

It's been deemed that's as many as we would ever need.

Now, we've expanded some since.

I would suppose we could get up higher than that.

And no, we don't use an ISDN addition to that.

If we have an ISDN call that can hit a specific codec, we

do that and then integrate that into a conference.

So you can call my codec on ISDN directly and we can

integrate that into our conference.

Got it.

Another person asked, what do you do with

the recorded files?

So obviously, you're hosting with us and they're living on

our server securely and backed up and everything that we have

going on here at headquarters.

But I think her question is, is there a procedure where you

delete them after a certain amount of time?

Are there any rules?

What do you do with the recorded files?

It's becoming more and more of an issue.

We've been archiving and recording using the Mediasite

for a little over five years.

I believe we're somewhere around 1,500 recordings.

Each individual presenter or practice area or group needs

to identify--

and probably do a better job of identifying--

how long the life of these things are.

It's an easy enough product for me to use right now that

if that is deemed necessary--

that an end-of-life date is necessary--

I'll put it on an Outlook calendar that I need to take

something down.

As a matter of fact, I think I should have some Outlook

reminders right now saying take something down.

So that's how I manage that.

So it's a case-by-case basis.

You work, clearly, closely with the content author,

saying, it's your meeting that I'm capturing today.

How long do you want this to live?

Right, and meetings that we've taken down that are two,

three, four, five years old, someone always wants.

Someone always comes back to me as soon as I take it down,

now they want to watch it again.

So it depends.

It's on a case-by-case basis.

If it is a program that is repeated, like an annual

meeting of some sort, they want to refer back to it to

watch what other people did the year before.

So taking things down is necessary, but we really

haven't had to have that as a major area of focus.

A few more functional questions.

Editing.

Can you edit with Mediasite?

Are there lots of requests to edit?

Yes.

With 5.0 upgrade in the last--

we upgraded a little bit late.

But with a 5.0 editor-- we're up to 5.3 or something now--

but you can edit.

And yes, there are a lot of requests to edit.

The good part that I see, from a technical standpoint, is in

the versions previous to 5.0, you couldn't edit.

So there was the onus to do your take and do it well and

correctly the first time, which allowed a lot of

different editorial commentary on that.

I'm never asked to take out one word.

I suppose I could.

I think that's what they're getting at.

People think that-- because we have tons of people watching

and they aren't all from law firms, which is great.

And I think people wonder, how much are you asked to take out

one word or a sneeze or a cough.

We do that.

We tighten it up.

When I say that, we take the head and the

tail off of a recording.

So in a conference room scenario, where there's a 150

people sitting in the conference room and the

speaker starts whenever everybody comes together--

we don't always know when that is, but we don't want to miss

that introduction.

And so we'll hit record beforehand when everybody's

gathering in the room, and then we'll go back and we'll

chop the very beginning of that off-- the dead spot at

the beginning.

And then we will also probably do that at the end so that

we're not missing anything.

We can also go into the middle of it and

take out breaks, pauses.

Sometimes there's sensitive material in the middle of the

recording that they just want out, that doesn't--

And you might do that.

Yeah, and we can do that.

Another question is--

and I can answer this question, but

you can chime in--

a person asked, if you're hosting with Sonic Foundry,

how do you limit access so to that only the viewers you want

are able to see the webcast?

And like Peter said earlier, hosting with us, you have all

of the features.

It's exactly the same as if you were running it yourself.

We support Active Directory.

We support LDAP.

So basically--

Oh, you lost me there.

You can secure at the password level down to the individual

presentation and control who can watch and who can't watch.

And I've seen you do that.

What we do a lot of for specific client meetings is we

will get a list of people who are going to view it.

Because inevitably, the question always becomes, well,

who watched it and how long did they watch it and what

message did they get?

And so we'll ask for a list from a client of who they need

to have watch this.

We'll input each individual as a user and give them a role so

that they have a specific login and then

we can track that.

That's how we manage that.

Did I lose you?

Not at all.

Time for just a couple more questions.

I'm trying to pick.

Does this guy need to be on the screen?

No, you can get yourself off the screen.

Who?

A friend of mine from out east--

another large corporation--

writes, love all the different techniques you're using to

connect the business.

What do you see as the biggest technical challenge?

In general, do the lawyers like using this or do they

find it a necessary evil?

I think certain lawyers or certain users are going to

migrate to this.

I think it depends what your message is.

I think people want to get out rule changes, legal matters

that come out that they need to address their clients in

any one of our practice areas.

What I see as the biggest challenge is, from a

technology standpoint, portability is going to be an

issue, sooner or later.

People are going to want to move around with these things,

and that's important.

And the external services is key to that.

But my friend Tom said necessary evil.

I don't want to speak for you, but you seem, even in your

award presentations--

because this company and Peter have won an Impact Award-- a

Rich Media Impact Award in the past. It seems like it's been

a positive response.

No doubt about it.

They enjoy it, especially the litigators.

Some of them, yeah.

Some of them really light up when--

You can't get them off the thing.

No, I'm just kidding.

No, that's all right.

That's OK.

We want to shape that message, though.

Particularly when you go outside of the firm, it has to

be marketed.

It has to be tight.

It has to be what we want our clients to see.

It's no excuse to be sloppy.

Oh yeah.

In the messages.

You've got to orchestrate that message.

Now, there was a learning curve.

We had audio-visual issues and we had things we had to work

out as we went along.

We have come to this after a certain amount of use and

years of doing it.

So we're more savvy at it having done that.

But it isn't because the technology was hard.

It was how we were going to stack it up within our

organization that needs to have time to develop.

And that is how we are getting good at this.

Well, that's great.

But I don't see any necessary evil.

No.

This building is filled with people who

want to tell you something.

And so, yes and no.

Some people will shy away from it because that's their

personality.

But if I have something that I need to tell you, this is a

wonderful way to do that because it is--

well, it's hip--

but people can get a complicated message out

relatively simply.

And that's, from a presentation side, what we're

trying to accomplish.

Well, that's fantastic.

I took you a little over to answer some of these last

questions--

Oh, we're over already?

This is a tough question to answer, but a lot of the final

questions people want to know is really

a very candid question.

Which is, you're streaming to people around the world.

A lot of people worry, can I do it on my network?

Is it realistic to have an internet-based, important

communication streaming from the United States to very far

away through the public internet.

And what bandwidth are you choosing to do it?

So just comment on, is the internet ready for this?

I believe it is.

Expansion of DSL services, we don't have to worry too much

about the 56k stream that used to be a regular phone line.

It's your audience.

You must ask who your audience is.

There is--

and I don't want to use the--

we try and minimize the stream because we might have somebody

who's way out on a limb somewhere who has very limited

access to the internet.

We generally do not worry too much about that.

But generally, when we go external, we're running about

a 125k stream.

Fantastic.

125k stream.

You saw the quality in the image that Peter shared.

It's pretty darn good.

I want to thank you very much--

Is that it?

--for the prepared comments and for taking

such a robust Q&A.

I want to thank Sonic Foundry event services for producing

another wonderful webcast. Thanks for working hard behind

the camera.

And I'd like to thank all of you for your great questions,

your participation, and your

continued interest in Mediasite.

We'll see you the next time.