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How to Make Hybrid Events Work

While there is a wide familiarity with what constitutes in-person events compared to virtual events, it is not as well understood just how to orchestrate a successful hybrid event and how to keep all virtual and in-person attendees fully engaged.

Monte Evans, SVP of Video Technology, Cadmium, highlights the ways that hybrid events are still evolving throughout the industry. “Most people think that a hybrid event just means that you have remote attendees,” Evans says. “But a hybrid event truly means that you could have remote attendees, in-person attendees, remote presenters, and in-person presenters. And when you have a remote presenter, there are things you have to think about, such as how do you bring them into the session? How do you make sure that they feel like they're a part of the interactive panel or discussion?” These are just a few of the unpredictable variables that Evans mentions can enter into the scenario with hybrid events.

"You nailed it on the head with the 'four pillars of hybrid,'" says Donald Guzauckas Jr., Vice President, HB Live. "The other part that I will add to it is the audience engagement. Being intentional engaging both the in-person audience and the remote audience in as similar a manner as you possibly can, whether you're using an engagement application if it's in your platform third party application, or inviting that in-person audience to the microphone or the online audience to be on video and audio as well.”

Simon Ball, VP, Product Management, Notified, has a somewhat droll take on the matter. “So actually, I'm looking forward to the time we stop calling it ‘hybrid,’” he says. “It seems odd -- events are events, and they have a physical component often and a virtual component often…I think it becomes de facto that all events will have some sort of virtual component.” The flexibility of using virtual events in both real-time and before and after the event’s live streaming period is also beneficial. These virtues give hybrid events “more interesting and better ways of people engaging with one another and of getting content into your target audiences,” he says.

Learn more about Hybrid Events at Streaming Media West 2022.

Watch full-session videos from Streaming Media East 2022.

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