Web Conferencing started out as something you did on your company’s network and only if you and the person you wanted to web conference with had the same software installed on their machine. The internet was still coming of age so many of the things we now take for granted did not exist. In fact, I remember in 1995 taking some of the available software, buying a card for a computer that allowed multiple network connections and building a web conference bridge you could dial into so that up to 5 people could get on the same web conference. As long as the 5 people had a good connection to the internet.
When I think about that now I laugh. In the past 10 years the technology has come a long way. Today you can easily hold a web conference with up to 100 people and you don’t even have to download any software. High speed internet connections are taken for granted and conference calls are completed integrated into the experience to add voice and visual communications on a conference call.
With the advent of web conferencing, you can easily add a visual element to your conference calls. This makes your confernece call more compelling, encourages audience participation and helps with retention. The applications are wide spread and more and more people are utilizing web conferencing services to help sell, train and inform to internal and external clients throughout the world.
I don’ t know if anyone has attempted to calculate the savings in hours of productivity, travel costs and fossil fuels, but it must be enormous. The amount spent on web conferencing in 2007 was over $700,000,000 in the US alone and even as the service continues to be more affordable, it is expected that the amount spent in five years will be almost double what it is today. That is because web conferencing services make sense to such a wide range of industries and applications. Just like conference call volume has seen a tremendous amount of growth in the past 15 years, web conferencing is now enjoying that same growth. That is because it is truly easy to use and affordable to everyone.
So the next time you register for that online “webinar” think about how what you would have to do to get that same seminar without web conferencing. because web confernecing changes everything.