Constellation ShortList™ Virtual Events: Webcasts and Meetings

About This Constellation ShortList™

The modern webinar and video streaming platform has turned the “mass broadcast” and “presentation” platforms of old into highly interactive, scalable, dynamic multimedia experiences that allow audiences to engage with speakers and with each other. These broadcast tools are delivering event experiences that continue to push the boundaries of what a “meeting” means to a business and audience.

Webinars have evolved, shifting in length, interactivity and channel. Central to sales, support and marketing initiatives, virtual events are now critical to internal education, service-driven knowledge exchange and customer collaboration, not to mention HR on-boarding. For any team looking to engage directly with an audience, webinars are core to basic engagement.

Users are looking for secure, flexible, scalable and customizable interfaces and consoles that deliver connection and interaction between speakers and audience while maintaining focus on speakers and their content. Increasingly the capacity for live interaction via messaging, innovative networking with “break out” environments, and robust multi-channel knowledge libraries for resources are high on the buyer wishlist. Buyers are also looking for connectors and integrations that better connect webinar demand generation and engagement activities with larger, more holistic data, personalization and journey orchestration strategies. Demand generation capabilities will need to evolve as generativeAI capabilities push expectations for data cleansing, appending and enhancement to drive more complete and actionable lead generation in B2B environments.

While there are a plethora of digital meeting platforms that now serve as a backbone to unifed communications platforms (eg UCaaS platforms), Constellation Research has limited this ShortList consideration list to those platforms that offer more holistic and specific event experiences.

Threshold Criteria

Constellation considers the following criteria for these solutions:

• Capacity to host live audio (audio and slide/content), play video and prerecorded sessions
• Registration with flexible form fields for lead capture, including organizing an event series
• Customized branding and console configuration
• Quick, stable, reliable connectivity with toll-free, international calling and access
• Multihost, scalable speaker and producer interface
• Pre- and post-event communications, alerts, calendar invitations and reminders
• Multibrowser responsive user experience, installed app for Mac and Windows, native mobile apps
• Live audience engagement tools, polls, voting, chat, comments, screen mark-up, Q&A
• Integration into key engagement systems including social, mobile messaging and marketing automation
• Integration into customer and employee data repositories including CDP, CRM and HCM tools
• Recording and rapid on-demand availability, commerce-ready gateways and monetization
• Integration with digital asset management solutions for rapid video aggregation and editing capabilities
• Security, role-based access and authorization, customer viewer controls
• Analytics and robust reporting, viewers (live vs. on-demand), attention, downloads
• Support, training and community for customers
• Accessibility features, including real-time voice transcription and translation
• AI tools for audience and for organizers including capacity to translate, summarize and generate unique, personalized content experiences based on audience engagement and questions