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We all love to travel, but travelling can be expensive, between attendee flights and accommodations often event owners may have to reduce the number of invitees due to costs constraints.

Incorporating a virtual component as part of your project can add great savings. In this article we will share all the advantages of including a webinar element and how you could easily turn your live event into a hybrid event using AMI Virtual Platform.

Learn how by adding a webinar component to your live event you can save on travel costs while increasing your audience reach:

 

Increase Audience Reach

Traveling can be inconvenient for both attendees and colleagues. A lot of time is spent at the airport, between flights, checking in and out of hotels, waiting for taxis…..not to mention the time that is required for travel preparation, packing and so on.

By webcasting your live event, you could recapture the audience that might have travel restrictions, or do not have time to travel to an event outside their city.  This audience could join from the convenience of their office or home, allowing your event to have a regional, national or event global impact.

With the AMI Virtual Platform, you have 1,000 remote attendees included in the standard package and larger audiences are easily supported, indeed the platform supports up to 100,000 remote viewers.

 

Audiovisual       

Now let’s discuss Audiovisual setup. The good news is most of a standard live event setup can be re-purposed for the live webinar stream. More and more companies are now broadcasting their live speaker events as such audiovisual vendors are becoming proficient in providing this service and the additional equipment required.

This equipment includes a professional video camera, an encoder, slide control and monitoring of the webcast transmission. By requesting these from the event AV company directly, they will often bundle them with the other required equipment at lower cost.

Most event AV company’s equipment will be compatible to stream live to the AMI Virtual Platform. Our platform is encoder agnostic which means it supports both hardware and software encoders. To verify compatibility simply contact BD@americanmeetings.com and have your existing AV vendor on-boarded into the AMI Virtual Platform.

 

Save on Travel Costs

It is not uncommon for companies to restrict travel costs, in a bid to cut budgets. An average national ticket can cost around, 500 USD per attendee, that is before you factor in the additional costs of ground transport, accommodations and food & beverage, etc.

The cost of the equipment and labor needed to broadcast your live event equates to approx. the same cost of just 10 attendees. Not only could these 10 attendees still join the event remotely, but you could invite as many as 100,000 attendees to watch remotely by increasing your audiovisual overall cost by a small percentage.

 

Detailed Analytics and User Feedback

Client feedback is invaluable, but getting and audience to fill out and return feedback forms is not always easy. Capturing questions submitted from live audiences can be challenging.

 

Translations

On the topic of translations…Live simultaneous translations can add huge expense to your live events, requiring additional equipment, tables and head counts to distribute the translations head sets to attendees. When streaming your event these translations can be broadcast for a translated live stream, reaching not just a few international attendees at the venue but an entire market.

Alternatively, if at the live event all attendees listen to the presentations in one language only, incorporating a remote translation solution will not only save you money it means you can still reach multiple markets.

 

Support Team

AMI has a team of dedicated project managers that can guide you to turn your live event into a hybrid event leveraging all the benefits of the AMI Virtual Platform. Just email BD@AmericanMeetings.com to request a Webcast component for your events schedule a qualifying call with a dedicated project manager.

For these and many more reasons AMI Virtual Platform is a great complement to your events. With a fraction of the investment you could add 1000 attendees or more to your next live event.