With Mediasite, you're not limited to PowerPoint slides. You can use other presentation software, such as Open Office or Apple's Keynote, or a series of images on a Web site. Best of all, you can record offline presentations.
An administrator or the presenter can do staging, using the Windows application or the Web GUI. The speaker can select encoding bit rate, skin, presentation features and date and time of webcast. You also can create and assign categories to organize all your presentations. You could, for example, assign multiple speakers and categories to a presentation.
Although a director can log into the management Web site to push out interactive content, Mediasite doesn't provide many postproduction features. An event's titles and descriptions can be changed, as can the skin or speaker information. However, you can't trim the video or change the slides. If you're adventurous, you can edit the Windows Media file manually, but you must shift the hotpoints, or markers in the video file that signify a slide change or event, as well. The presentation is then uploaded to an IIS and Windows Media Services server for on-demand playback.
Mediasite's client interface works well. Users can view a list of presentations, grouped by category or speaker, read a short description and play any one on demand. While the presentation is playing, users can preview all the slides, jump to any slide's spot in the presentation or view a slide in full-size mode in a new window. Users cannot participate in polls during an on-demand playback, but they can see the results.
We had two big concerns about this product. First, there's the $25,000 price, which is for just one appliance. Second, we wanted some form of presentation access control. With the current setup, anyone could connect.
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