eventPower Pivots to Virtual Events in Days With Cloudinary

eventPower, an online conference management software provider, chose Cloudinary to make its services more efficient for meeting professionals. Because of the unique range of video and image assets required to support in-person and virtual events, eventPower chose Cloudinary to tap into its robust process automation capabilities. The Cloudinary platform supports video asset management and makes it possible for eventPower to create live, simu-live, and on-demand sessions, without burdening teams already working to produce a memorable event.

ABOUT

Transforming Event Experiences

eventPower serves the meeting and convention industry by providing conference management software that makes meeting-planning professionals’ workflows more efficient. The company’s cloud-based software ensures a customer’s event is executed flawlessly and that their vision for the event is realized. With 25 years of conference management experience, the eventPower team is committed and engaged throughout the conference production cycle. From à la carte service support to a full conference platform, eventPower serves as an extension of a company’s conference-planning team.

THE CHALLENGE

Fast and Flawless Live Stream Video Support

Managing images and video content is vital to eventPower’s software and services. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, eventPower had to urgently shift priorities from in-person to fully virtual events. eventPower looked to build its own virtual platform where attendees could attend conferences and interact online. Knowing the company had to pivot quickly and support a massive amount of video content, eventPower began its search for a video streaming platform.

THE CLOUDINARY SOLUTION

Live Stream Virtual Events Concurrently Without Sacrificing Quality

eventPower supports tens of thousands of image assets per year and, with the expanded focus on virtual events, continues to collect a rapidly growing number of video assets. The Cloudinary platform makes it possible for eventPower to seamlessly manage every asset.

“We were impressed with both the on-demand adaptive and streaming capabilities of Cloudinary,” says McCarthy. “Because we had such good results from the image processing side of Cloudinary’s services, we quickly jumped into live streaming capabilities as well. Obviously, with COVID and everything happening on the virtual side, it simply wouldn’t have been possible to continue our business without video. We’re a fairly small operation with a development team of five people. We needed a solution that was quick and easy to implement, and Cloudinary provided that.”

As an example of the range of capabilities eventPower now has through Cloudinary, it’s capable of supporting massive virtual events like one recently hosted with 250 live sessions across four days, including 12 to 15 concurrent sessions within the same time slot. With Cloudinary, eventPower was able to stream those sessions live and record them at the same time, and repurpose the videos for on-demand content.

THE RESULTS

Outstanding Live Stream Capabilities and Easy Asset Management

“Cloudinary is a tool that makes it very easy to manage images and videos and other content, and it takes the workload off of the platform or the developer to make it all happen,” says McCarthy. “We used to manage all the image hosting and processing ourselves. While it worked, it was consistently time-consuming and often problematic. Most people think it’s just uploading and serving images, but you quickly realize that it’s much more complicated when you start resizing, cropping, and optimizing images — and run into oddities with odd file type and color space issues that are never anticipated. We were able to offload that technical complexity to Cloudinary and get 100 times the capabilities of what our homegrown image management system could have ever provided.”

Not only was eventPower able to host live streamed events efficiently and with impressive quality, but they were also able to host simu-live events, allowing the event to use portions of pre-recorded content while also actively doing live streaming sessions. From there, eventPower used the recorded footage from the event and repurposed the video into on-demand content for its customers.

Virtual event production can be even more elaborate than in-person events, but with Cloudinary’s end-to-end live video streaming solution, eventPower is able to provide impressive virtual events for its client base. The Cloudinary platform enables eventPower users to manage content easily, while also shortening the behind-the-scenes developmental process time. Cloudinary’s team also gave eventPower “superpowers,” providing the ability to host simu-live streams.