About 2,500 people viewed a Forbes conference session live via the Internet in the first Web casting event produced out of the recently gelled deal between broadcast.com and Medialink.
The Dec. 10 webcast is one of about a dozen planned by Forbes in the next year to promote its multi-day business conferences which can cost as much as $3,000 to attend.
The initial Forbes webcast, promoted for only about a week in advance, was designed to provide a prototype for other similar undertakings. In addition to the several thousand who watched the event, about 1,500 people have since accessed the webcast at http://www.forbes.com/asap/roundtable.
Live or downloaded webcasting - possible for PCs which can support large files and are connected to the Net on highspeed T1 lines - may be the wave of the future for press conferences, shareholder and analyst meetings, internal corporate announcements and workshops.
But for Medialink, the webcasting partnership provides another means to disseminate news on behalf of its more than 1,500 clients without having to build the costly infrastructure webcasting requires. "Broadcast.com is the preeminent portal for video and audio today - they're getting north of 700,000 hits a day," says Medialink President and Chairman Larry Moskowitz. "We consider this [deal] as strong a foundation as our global alliances with AP and ABC Radio."
Broadcast.com was heralded as one of the most successful initial public offerings of last summer. One of its other key deals provides for relaying over the Web quarterly earnings conference calls for companies that trade on Nasdaq.
Although Forbes ASAP and Forbes Digital Tool aren't resting their techno-laurels on the event hosted by Forbes Digital Media at the New School in New York City, experts agree it provides a window into what's coming in the digital age.
Author Kurt Vennegut and communications diva Peggy Noonan were among the featured speakers at the event which focused on the shortage of time as a personal and business asset.
(Medialink, 212/682-8300; Forbes, Nathan Washburn, 212/367-4108)