Dynamic Communications

摘要

Remember what your composition professor taught you in your freshman year of college? The active voice is always preferable to the passive voice. Still, most corporate communication―whether it's a quarterly report to investors or product information for customers, employees or partners―is anything but dynamic. However, streaming-media technology, designed to allow for active discourse rather than passive consumption, makes it possible to broadcast a dynamic message to users. And Virage's VS Webcasting (VSW) offers an effective way to get your message out there―over the corporate LAN or the Internet―without having to hire a professional studio or use a service provider like Yahoo Broadcast or Loudeye. VSW encodes and streams live and on-demand audio and video. It combines the streaming media with applications like Microsoft's PowerPoint to deliver an interactive presentation with live question-and-answer sessions and reader polls. VSM also lets you register, notify and authenticate participants. I tested these capabilities at NETWORK COMPUTING'S Real-World Labs~(~R) at Syracuse University using a Hewlett-Packard Co. Kayak workstation with a Pentium Ⅲ (667-MHz) processor, 384 MB of RAM and all the necessary VSM components, including Virage SmartEncode and a Virage Solution Server (VSS).