Capitalizing on streaming media

Early this year, client services and marketing professionals from accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers hit the road with a series of six seminars to drum up business. An average of 70 prequalified attendees filled each event, but now the company uses streaming media Webcasts to reach out to more prospects for less money.

"We discovered that we can generate and work leads just as effectively using 'Webinars' or Web-based seminars for less than 25% the budget per seat," says James Kelly, marketing leader for PWC's Global Risk Management practice. According to Kelly, a seminar series costs roughly $30,000 per city. In contrast, a Webcast only costs about $10,000 per event and can reach people from anywhere on the continent. It's also archivable.

Because streaming media has worked well for PWC's employee training and internal communications, Kelly plans to use it for external communications in the next fiscal year. He intends to try a variety of service providers.

Streaming media, the preparation and delivery of dynamic digital media, such as audio and video across IP networks, is not new to the financial services industry. Financial firms are among streaming media's earliest adopters. Big and small firms alike have proven the value of streaming media for a range of applications.

"Internal applications, including communications among analysts and brokers, CEO Webcasts to employees, salesforce training and compliance-oriented education were among the earliest applications identified as long as four or five years ago," says Paul Ritter, an analyst at The Yankee Group. Still, there were technical obstacles to overcome, and the use of streaming video has grown incrementally within the financial services sector over several years.

Philip Winkel, vice president of marketing at SAFECO Life & Investments, encountered some bandwidth challenges when he tested streaming in 1999. SAFECO's first target audience was advisers in the field who sell the company's funds.

"SAFECO mutual funds are sold by a wide variety of advisers. Some are on low-speed networks, others are on high-bandwidth connections. ... This diversity in capabilities among thousands of offices nationwide was extremely difficult to target for," Winkel says.

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Examples of streaming use:
TrowePrice investment approach videos
Archived CCBN events:
Audio and synchronized slides
Webcast, separate slides

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His IT department wasn't prepared to support the technology, so Winkel outsourced the project to Loudeye Enterprise Communications. The service provider offered a turnkey service, and its proximity to SAFECO made it easier for them to work together.

Loudeye services can encode and host the same content at multiple data rates and in formats that are accessible and appropriate for many connection speeds. Loudeye's servers can automatically detect the connection speed of a user and spawn the file that will produce the best experience.

Winkel wouldn't discuss pricing, although Loudeye's rates are publicly available. Pricing varies depending on audience size and features. For a live Webcast with 5,000 attendees and features such as branded registration pages, synchronized slides, e-mail question and answer, live voting/polling, survey, hyperlinks and indexing, expect to pay about $12,500.

Dick Hubert, president of streaming media content producer VideoWare, says the reasons for the streaming media boom in the financial services sector boil down to one basic ingredient: time. "Whether you're on the buy side, selling stocks or managing assets, you have to be gathering and distributing information continuously," he says.

Some of Hubert's clients, such as Mark Mitchell, marketing manager for third-party distribution at TRowe Price, are reaching streaming media viewers over the Internet.

TRowePrice posts streaming assets on its Web site and adds more each quarter. "With a conversational format like an interview, we can 'humanize' [fund managers] for a much larger number of people than we could ever reach face to face," Mitchell says. "For us it's a question of reaching the maximum number of the right people with information that they can use, when they need it."

Earnings Webcasts are another popular use for streaming media in the finance industry. To comply with the Security and Exchange Commission's Regulation Fair Disclosure, public companies must make their earnings announcements and financial status communications available to investors on a broad, nonexclusionary basis, such as a press release, filing with the SEC, an audioconference call or a Webcast.

Audioconferences with hundreds or thousands of investors are more expensive than using the Internet with streaming audio. For example, a 90-minute financial presentation for 20,000 listeners would cost $486,000 on a toll-free audioconference bridge, according to an analysis by The Yankee Group's Ritter and Web-based investor relations service provider CCBN. A company could reach the same audience for between $1,000 and $3,000 using an audio-only Webcast.

Even smaller companies with only 100 to 150 participants in conference calls can benefit from streaming media. "If you can offload about 50 people from the audioconference call to the Webcast, you've paid the basic costs for the Webcast," says Greg Radner, vice president of marketing at CCBN.

To make sure that their media is available to the public in a timely way and streamed in the best possible conditions, most companies using streaming for investor relations outsource media delivery to specialized service providers such as CCBN, ON24, and Shareholder.com.

Although the lowest cost "audio-only" streaming experience is most popular with companies just starting out with Webcasts of earnings conferences, many move up the value chain to add synchronized slides on a Web page. Then some elect to enhance the interactivity with the audience through online questions and answers.

No matter where one starts, it's difficult to find a financial services company that has not experimented with streaming media. Some have deployed fully but more are making the investment now and leveraging those to their maximum reach in the months and years to come.

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