6/29/2015 5:15 PM Eastern
Live webcasting is rapidly growing as a primary communications tool for organizations to reach their stakeholders. With workforce today spread across the country and all over the world, there is an ever-growing need for tools like live webcasting, videoconferencing and other remote communications technologies. These tools are necessary for global businesses, organizations and governments to reach their stakeholders and increase transparency, expand the reach of content and reduce costs associated with travel for conferences and meetings. A lesser known benefit to embracing streaming media is its ability to reduce an organization’s carbon footprint.
Business travel to connect with others and build relationships is critical to all organizations—but business travel is also a drain on company resources. Not only is it a cost to an organization’s fiscal bottom line, it also comes at a cost to the environment. Emissions from cars, aircraft and other modes of transportation include carbon dioxide (CO2), sulfate, soot and other substances. Climate scientists have demonstrated that these emissions are harmful to the environment because they trigger a series of atmospheric reactions that have a warming effect on our atmosphere.
Most people are unaware of the impact air travel has on CO2 emissions. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that aviation accounts for nearly 4 percent of total climate change impact. Any measures that organizations can take to reduce travel go a long way toward protecting the environment.
This is where technology can be a huge driver of change. Live webcasting of meetings, conferences and other events that people can access from anywhere is a critical step forward when it comes to reducing a company’s carbon footprint. Sure, companies save money in travel and logistics, but taking into account sustainability and social responsibility for their own carbon footprint is the greatest advantage in the long-term.
Live webcasting is being leveraged by government agencies and organizations that have sustainability targets such as reducing waste and energy use. Reducing unnecessary travel is one of the most effective ways to reduce CO2 emissions. Integrating live streaming as a key component for your organization reduces the need to travel while improving the bottom line.
In an effort to enable companies to calculate the carbon cost of travel, OVS Media has launched the Go-Green Module webcast reporting platform, which incorporates basic data such as the number and location of viewers. The module quantifies a company’s carbon reduction efforts in real time. Combining the number of live webcast viewers with the Google Earth API, this tool is able to display information such as:
- Miles not driven: How much gasoline was not used?
- Miles not flown: How much jet fuel was not used?
- How many pounds of CO2 emissions were prevented?
The Go-Green Module has enormous benefits for the government marketplace. President Obama has signed an Executive Order that calls on mandating targets for federal agencies’ carbon reduction efforts. Live streaming events and meetings and being able to calculate and measure the carbon footprint is an essential step toward achieving the goals under this executive order.
It is only a matter of a couple of years before most events and conferences will have some programming broadcast live on the Internet. I also believe that most organizations will integrate carbon reduction into their business operations, both for monetary reasons (such as carbon offsets) and because of an increasing awareness of global warming by their stakeholders. By integrating these two long-term business objectives, organizations will start to raise the bar for their own stakeholders and have a true double bottom line: reducing costs and protecting the environment.
Tim Treanor is chairman and CEO of OVS Media. Tim co-founded and has led OVS Media since its inception in 2000. Under his leadership, OVS Media has grown to become an industry leader in live webcasting. Tim received a B.A. in political science from American University.
>> Read Full Article at VideoEdge.Net
Stakeholder Broadcasting Platform Features:
- Captioning
- Analytics
- Video search
- Social media integration
- Toll-free number support
- Multiple languages
- Archiving
Benefits:
- Extend events to audiences anywhere
- Receive real-time analytics data on who’s watching and where
- Reduce travel costs and work interruptions
- Reach more key stakeholders, more often
Not everyone can afford to come to the conference. We have found it really valuable to webcast live on the Internet because that reaches people at their homes. The webcast allows us to capture those videos and make them available on our archives so people in the room can watch them again and people that missed them the first time can watch them from wherever they are in the world.