When you are trying to decide on the best method for your next business seminar or presentation it comes down to two choices either a webcast such as with Ustream or a full participation webinar such as GVO Conference offers.

Webast / Webinar, Whats the difference?

Before the advent of online web conferencing there were only one choice for remote online presentations and seminars, the webcast. Basically a webcast is a live, and sometimes pre-recorded, video streamed out out to a preregistered group of attendees.

For all intense and purposes this served the business comunity at large quite well. A company could have a guest speaker could share a powerpoint presentation, play videos or even demo products or services with minimal costs and time investment involved.

However there is one big drawback to webcasts – attendee interaction. Webcasts are meant to be viewed and do not offer any interaction from the attendees. In contrast webinars do allow interaction from the viewing participants. With webinars you can have live chat, file sharing, microphone and webcam switching, voting and polling, all of which can bring more valueable information to the webinar attendees.

Webcasts for the most part do not require the business to buy expensive equipment or software. However while there are sites on the Internet that offer free webcast services they do have their limitaions. Most often being the number of attendess allowed or even time limits of the webcasts.

Webinars however do require software to perform the various features they boast. In some instances this is software that will need to be installed on both the webinar host computer and participating client computer. Having to install software does raise other problems and considerations a business should be aware of. Primarily operating system and computer hardware requirements are the two main things to consider.

Today though we have available to us webinar solutions that do not require any software installion and are completely web based. This type of webinar solution is much more preferred because it eliminates the need for a specific computer operating system and or version.

Basically if the webinar host or client can use a web browser they can participate in the webinar. Although one would note that while even an older computer may be able to use the web browser the speed and memory of the older computer could still be a limiting factor.

Fortunately the cost of computers is tremendously cheaper than in years past, so most Internet web surfers these days have machines that are plenty powerful enough.

The final consideration in the decision between a webcast or webinar is the costs involved. As mentioned earlier you could in fact do webcasts for free. But to get the most out of a webcast’s capabilities it is recommended to go with a professional paid service.

Webinars can also be done for free as well, but are far more limiting than even the free webcast services are. Also in most cases free webinar solutions are extremely feature limited and unreliable connections. Trust me you don’t want to gamble you seminar or presentations to an unreliable connection that could go out at any time during your webinar.

In either case you can expect to invest a little money into both online web conferencing solutions. Luckily the investments are small and very affordable to even the small businesses.

Author Bio: Interested in find out more about online web conferencing through webinars? GVO Conference just launched a brand new software solution that we review in detail on our website. Visit http://daelectronics.com/gvo-conference-review for our complete no-hype GVO Conference Review

Category: Computers and Technology
Keywords: GVO Conference,Online Webinar,GVO Conference Review,Webinar Software,Webcast Software