iBEAM and CCBN Team for Corporate Webcasts
iBEAM (www.ibeam.com) announced a deal with financial webcaster CCBN (
www.ccbn.com) to stream conference calls and other presentations online.
As part of the deal, iBEAM said it acquired CCBN's "TalkPoint" technology assets, a web-based self-publishing presentation tool to help users broadcast presentations online. The application includes slideshows with streaming audio or connected to phone bridges. The acquisition will be included with iBEAM's existing corporate webcasting solution called Activecast. iBEAM's Activecast solutions already include support for presentations, but also include interactive elements like a live Q&A, audience polling, chat, links and e-commerce items.
iBEAM will now offer companies and financial institutions the ability to distribute their webcast events on CCBN's StreetEvents service (www.streetevents.com) and on other investment portals with which CCBN has relationships, including America Online.
The deal falls in line with fulfilling the SEC mandate, Regulation FD, which obligates companies to release earnings and conference call to the public in a timely fashion.
"Our relationship with CCBN underscores iBEAM's commitment to provide cost effective streaming communications services to all enterprise sectors," said iBEAM chairman, president and CEO, Peter Desnoes. "The TalkPoint product expands iBEAM's full range of Activecast interactive webcasting solutions and further substantiates our position as the leading provider of streaming communications solutions."
As part of the deal, CCBN will use iBEAM as its primary webcast provider for all its corporate investor relations clients.
"Streaming audio and video over the Internet is top of mind with our corporate clients and CCBN is committed to bringing them the best technology available," said Roland Beaulieu, executive vice president and chief operating officer of CCBN. "Our new relationship with iBEAM will clearly help us provide our clients with a broader selection of some of the most advanced communication tools on the market today."
CCBN was co-founded in 1997 by Jeffrey P. Parker, creator of First Call, and Robert Adler. CCBN builds, manages and hosts the investor relations sections of Web sites for more than 2,500 public companies and also hosts live and archived conference calls for more than 3,000 corporations each quarter. CCBN estimates that it currently produces more than two-thirds of all investment related webcasts.