Webcast audio: Avoiding Murphy's Law

A few months ago, after a particularly rough webcasting week, I sent an email to one of the leading bloggers who covers the webcast field, Ken Molay. Ken writes in a couple webinar blogs, here and here.

Here's the original email I sent to Ken, asking for his opinion on a nagging problem that has affected every webcast production veteran at least once or twice:

My group produces about 60 webcasts each year. No matter how many redundancies we build into our processes, there’s always the fear in the back of my mind that a phone line will get dropped. I’m always afraid that we’ll lose either one of the presenters’ lines (bad enough, especially if they’re speaking when the line is dropped) or the audio streaming line, in which case the audience loses audio to everyone.

A year ago, after two major snafus and several other minor ones with a certain large teleconferencing vendor who I won’t name, we fired them and switched to a different company. The new company has been rock solid…until yesterday. They dropped the streaming line yesterday, so our audience had their audio interrupted for about 5 minutes until we could get the webcast vendor reconnected.

One of my colleagues in a different division of our company had a similar thing happen to him earlier this week. Different telecon provider, same end result.

After a problem occurs, there’s usually little or no resolution. The audio vendor often says "It wasn’t within our control because the failure occurred outside our phone network." Of course there’s no way for us to easily prove otherwise. Even if we could prove otherwise, fault isn’t the issue, it’s reliability. It seems like dropped audio can happen to anyone, regardless of the telecon vendor. I have yet to see or hear about a company that never drops calls.

I’d love to hear any suggestions you have (or your blog readers have) for error-proofing webinar audio. How do you prevent dropped audio?

You can read Ken's response here, where he also brings in Christopher Dean to weigh in on the topic.

Since then, I haven't had a teleconference provider drop a call, but I've seen a couple other interesting and unpleasant situations:

• Last week, the teleconference provider messed up all of our dial-in numbers and passcodes. It took one of my team members a good hour to straighten everything out at the last minute, right before everyone was about to dial in.
  
  
• About three weeks ago, we suddenly lost audio during the last minute of a webcast. It dropped at about 2:59pm Eastern, just as we were wrapping up. But this time it wasn't the teleconference provider, and really it wasn't the webcast vendor's fault either. From what I understand, a utility crew was doing some digging on the street, reasonably close to the webcast vendor's building. The crew cut a trunk line, the major phone line connecting a large number of buildings in their area.
  

So even if your teleconference provider and your webcast vendor are rock solid, Murphy can still get you.