Did you know that Video Conferencing is really useful for making audio Business Podcasts?   Let me explain …

Podcasting is a wonderful way to share information widely, and the majority of Business Podcasts consist mainly of conversations.  Now obviously no-one would think of travelling across the globe to meet up face-to-face to record such conversations, so we’ve been using Voice Over IP (that’s Skype to you and me!) because it’s free, better than the telephone, and to many people’s amazement it works brilliantly (provided you use good microphones).  If we can get people into a studio then we can use inter-studio ISDN audio links – but that’s pretty unusual.

But many global organisations who use Business Podcasting also have a Video Conferencing network, and that’s a great way to talk across the world, and it provides good sound quality.  Our client AstraZeneca is no exception in having a huge VC network providing contact with all of their sites.  So when we started to produce Business Podcasts for them the first thing to work out was how we would connect – and someone said ‘How about Video Conferencing!’  Sounded crazy, but once we’d all thought about it and tried it – it works a treat!

So now we’ve tweaked our VC system, and we record and edit interviews  over the VC system into our SADiE audio workstation and produce great conversations for podcast – using the medium of VC.  Thanks to some clever people at Direct Visual, we’re getting great audio quality out of the Tandberg VC system.  And because everyone can see each other, the conversations flow beautifully too!

So let me thank one of the very nice people at AstraZeneca for coming up with this bright idea, and say ‘Thanks Amanda!’ (You know who you are!)

But why didn’t I think of it!