Case Study: The Tax Show for the Tax Pro

Certified public accountants make up the largest percentage of Tax Talk Today viewers, with enrolled agents close behind. Other viewers include tax attorneys, payroll professionals, financial professionals, return preparers, and IRS employees (who make up approximately 20,000 viewers but aren’t counted in viewing statistics).

Ironically, the only people who can't view a Tax Talk Today program live are IRS staffers themselves. The IRS has a security policy that allows no streaming through the firewall. Therefore, the IRS office must get the program from a TV downlink system and then distribute it around the IRS internal TV system, says Murphy. This results in a 24-hour delay.

A typical Tax Talk Today program consists of a panel discussion among IRS experts and practitioners from groups such as the American Bar Association or the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA). The shows last from an hour to 100 minutes and are done live in a studio. The IRS serves as content experts only. Everything else is handled by the production company that won the original government contract back in 2001, L&M Production Design Group of Alexandria, Virginia.

L&M provides marketing and advertising of the program series, Web site development, production, and sponsorship of continuing education credits. Tax Talk Today is a "powerful information-sharing vehicle," says L&M President Lisbeth Bagnold. "The interactivity of the show opens a two-way communications pipeline between the IRS and the font-line tax experts who appear on the shows and the tax-professionals in the community at large."

It was L&M that decided which streaming service to employ for this project. They chose BT Media and Broadcast (BTM&B). BT Media and Broadcast is the digital media and broadcast services arm of British Telecommunications. The company offers a "mixture of capabilities and hybrid solutions" for video distribution, according to Bill McNamara, general manager of BT Media and Broadcast, the Americas. Tax Talk Today, for example, is distributed via Webcast, satellite broadcast, and videoconference.

"We don't write scripts or provide cameras," says McNamara, "We facilitate transport. We bring the video into our Los Angeles Media Center, where we repurpose it into Windows and Real and then hand it off to our partner Akamai. We provide the platform and the pipeline," he says.

McNamara says his company offers true end-to-end streaming services. "A lot of people say they can provide a complete platform for end-to-end streaming, but not many really do," he says. "With our infrastructure and experience, we can." The company offers services in several "tiers." At Tier 1, for example, customers get a live event Webcast of up to 3 hours sent out to up to 500 concurrent users. The video is stored for on-demand access for 30 days. Other tiers offer more options, but at a higher price, of course.

One of the capabilities of the BTM&B platform that Ellen Murphy particularly appreciates is its ability to automatically check users' systems to see if they have sufficient RAM, browsers, players, and connections. BTM&B offers streaming in both Windows Media and RealPlayer formats at bitrates of 56K, 300K, and 1MB, according to McNamara.

Tax Talk Today premiered in January 2001with a program entitled "Working With the IRS—Who to Call for What." Since then Ellen Murphy and IRS have been working diligently to track and evaluate the success of the show. They have used the usual metrics — number of views, number of hits on the Web site, etc. But they have also used a lot of direct user surveys. Thanks to these surveys, they have been able to pinpoint problems and barriers that they are currently addressing.

"One of our main problems is lack of awareness of the show," says Murphy. "We need to increase the number of practitioners we reach." She estimates that the show is reaching only about 20 to 30 percent of total potential viewers.

One major barrier to increased viewership is age-related reluctance, according to Murphy. While those that embrace the Web tend to be younger people, the IRS' target audience for Tax Talk Today is a bit older (40-50). "We know the demographics of our target audience. They're not the sort that is willing to readily change to this kind of communications. They would prefer print or seminars."

Murphy doesn't want to revert to the bad old days, when seminars were her primary method for reaching her audience. In the days before Tax Talk Today, each IRS field office had to send out many speakers to many small groups. Not only was this inefficient and expensive, but it resulted in "a lack of consistency of message," says Murphy. With a Web site, there is one central source and therefore one consistent message.

"Our future plans are to further limit the use of live seminars and to drive our audience towards this [streaming video]," says Murphy. "The potential cost savings are just too attractive to sacrifice. It's too late to go back." She is confident that she can get more tax professionals to buy in—despite age-related reluctance. It's for their own good, she says, and those that relent and embrace streaming are always glad they did. "Once we get them over the technical problems involved with streaming video at their desktops, they really love it," she says.

And so streaming video is turning tax professionals into happy campers. Now, if the IRS could only do something to help us taxpayers who'd rather have our teeth pulled than tackle our 1040s.