Infomercial Conferences Should Always Be Streamed Live

I’ve written before about “live” at conferences and why I prefer that speakers, panelists and attendees focus on the room and the learnings rather than spending time posting on social networks during a session.

There is one type of conference that should always be streamed live…the infomercial conference. This type of conference includes DEMO and Techcrunch50. What I mean by “infomercial conference” is that the event is setup for startups to present their products and services in an infomercial format.

Last year (and in previous years) both DEMO and Techcrunch50 were streamed live. I believe TC used Ustream and DEMO used Bitgravity for the streaming. If I remember, both streams worked very well and both acted as great promotions for the streaming providers.  Yet this year at DEMO, there is no live streaming of the presentations. The presentations are available the following day — i.e. yesterday’s presentations are available now.

Why do I think this is a bad idea? First, the companies at DEMO are paying $20k for their infomercials and should expect that people worldwide can watch the demos while the team is on stage. Second, with the chatter on Twitter, Facebook and other social networks from people at DEMO, it causes for odd interactions. The people at home can’t jump into the live stream to watch presentations that those chatting find interesting.  Lastly, no live stream means that buzz will be lowered overall because it requires that you load the DEMO website the next day (or later) to watch the demos. The key with an infomercial conference is to keep the buzz high for the entire event and get potential customers excited about the products and services.

If the videos were delayed because they had to be edited (e.g. add more material, background tracks, etc.) it would be a different story. From what I can tell watching yesterday’s presentations this morning, it appears the videos are just the exact presentation with no editing.

There is a livestream available for press and I was granted access last night. I plan to watch the presentations from our NYC office today. Here’s hoping DEMO will reconsider their no-stream policy for the fall DEMO event later this year.