Webcast Expands Boundaries for Prosody Creative Services, Infinite Conferencing and One Million Students Worldwide
By Stephanie Molnar
Ken Ashby, president of New York City-based Prosody Creative Services, says neither he nor business partner and co-executive producer Maris Segal knew quite what to expect in terms of audience members when they were charged with executing a live educational webcast honoring America’s 400th Anniversary. This event, intended to inform students worldwide about the founding of America’s first permanent English settlement in Jamestown, Virginia, was one of five signature events during the 18-month-long commemoration Prosody was tapped to orchestrate.
It’s not that they lacked the experience to create the high-profile event. Between them, Ashby and Segal have production credits for hundreds of live events across the US and the globe, including two Super Bowl half-time shows; an Olympic torch relay; a papal visit to the U.S.; several national and government-sponsored consumer education campaigns; White House presidential events and numerous events for international corporate luminaries, including American Express, IBM and Kraft Foods.
This event, however, relied on a delivery method neither had used extensively. And both instinctively felt a webcast with the potential to be as large as the one Jamestown Live! executive producers were anticipating could present a variety of technological black holes waiting to suck them in—particularly because they were working with thousands of schools with varied Web technology systems and bandwidth: Even the best-produced show would be wasted if no one could log on to see it.
Ashby and Segal resolved not only to make sure the Jamestown Live! show was engaging, educational and entertaining, but also to find a webcasting partner who would deliver to their audience seamlessly. The expert Web production team at Infinite Conferencing was brought on board.
Connecting Students to History
Segal explains, “Prosody developed conceptual elements for the one-hour program that ensured valuable historic information was delivered in an engaging, fast-paced format. We produced it much in the way a television show is produced, except we used student reporters to interview experts, and we included segments with original musical performances to help tell the Jamestown story. In fact, our client, Jamestown 2007, Inc., secured renowned PBS journalist Gwen Ifill as the show’s host, and the History Channel as the webcast host.”
So why not simply show the final product on the History Channel’s education service? “The Web’s inherent interactivity was crucial,” says Segal. “It was important that students not only see Jamestown, but that they truly experience and connect to it and to the experts they were meeting on their screens.”
“We built in creative ways to raise awareness of the impact that the intersection of the Europeans, Native Americans and Africans had on Jamestown,” Segal continues. “Webcast features like real-time quizzes and the ability to email questions helped kids make the connection between their own lives and this symbol of our country’s earliest development.”
Interactive webcast elements also connected kids with each other by fostering a cooperative spirit, replicating to a certain extent the very thing that helped the original settlement survive.
A Bright Future for Educational Webcasting
Helping kids “make the connection” through the Web turned out to be an even bigger success than the event’s visionary founders originally anticipated. While exact participant numbers are difficult to determine, it is currently estimated that just over one million students in thirteen countries logged onto the webcast.
“We don’t know in every case whether it was one student on one computer, or a link that was being broadcast to a room of hundreds or a school district of thousands,” says Ashby. Even so, give or take 100,000, the Jamestown Live! webcast rocketed both Prosody and Infinite Conferencing into a realm few event production companies have yet explored.
Ashby says Prosody did extensive research before trusting the Web-based event to Infinite Conferencing.
“Planning to use this technology on such a huge scale meant our comfort boundaries were stretched on a daily basis,” says Ashby. “But, just as we anticipated, Infinite Conferencing made sure program delivery was seamless. They provided the pre-production support we needed, and answered every connectivity question we received prior to the event from schools around the world to ensure everyone had a good experience.
“We’ve heard few complaints post-production,” Ashby notes. “As far as we can tell, everyone who wanted to be on the webcast was there.”
Ashby says Infinite Conferencing’s ability to deliver a webcast on this scale means educators may see more events on the order of Jamestown Live! in the future. As Ashby says, “The success of this event has shown the technology has become much more viable.” And Segal says: “We expect webcasts that connect students through the familiar medium of the computer will become increasingly popular.”
And creating connections between students around the world using a common educational experience? That’s as worthy an outcome as an event production company--working in Jamestown, or anywhere else--could hope for.
