Hybrid events, which have yet to take the industry by storm but are slowly becoming more common as in-person gatherings resume, present new challenges for everyone involved, including virtual platforms. Up until now, most events were either fully in-person — thus requiring onsite production or AV teams — or fully remote, powered by one of the many webinar or virtual event tools now on the market.
However, the hybrid model requires both types of production support, sometimes blurring the lines between onsite and virtual teams. This is made more complex by the fact that virtual platforms vary greatly in terms of the support they offer. For example, some platforms offer a more self-serve, hands-off approach, while others, such as Evia, can provide robust production support including speaker training and creative design.
Eric Amram, CEO of Evenium — which provides strategic and production support to event organizers — shares that platforms offering this kind of support needed to take on much of the role that AV teams would have previously handled.
“When we transitioned to virtual, some planners thought that AV companies were not needed anymore,” he explains. “But they do a lot of work that we had to essentially take over. That was a specific job — taking care of all the speakers, all the presentations, switching all the streams, etc.”
Now, with hybrid events, virtual platforms and onsite production companies are coming together to execute all of the technological and logistical aspects associated with such an experience. Evenium, for example, has partnerships with certain AV companies for hybrid event production, but they also work with clients’ preferred companies if needed.
While executing hybrid events can be technologically complex — for instance, if certain panels include both in-person and remote speakers — Amram notes that it is completely doable, but it requires collaboration between teams. “It’s just a matter of coordination,” he says. “Typically, we have a person from our team either onsite or remote who is completely dedicated to managing the event.”
Working with virtual and hybrid event technology still presents a learning curve for many AV and production companies, but it’s something that the industry as a whole is continuously improving on. “They know they need to move towards that, so they’re making a huge effort,” Amram says of production companies. “Everything isn’t perfectly sleek and smooth right now, but we’re getting there.”
The process still requires some practice, but just as virtual events have come a long way in a very short time, there is no doubt that virtual platforms and onsite AV crews will continue to develop hybrid strategies and deliver impressive experiences moving forward.