Ken Ashby, president of New York City-based Prosody Creative Services, and his business partner Maris Segal didn’t know what to expect when they were charged with executing a live educational webcast honoring America’s 400^th Anniversary.

 

The event, intended to inform students worldwide about the founding of America’s first permanent English settlement in Jamestown, Virg., was one of five events during the 18-month commemoration Prosody was tapped to orchestrate.

 

The partners have production credits for hundreds of live events, including two Super Bowl half-time shows, an Olympic torch relay, a papal visit to the U.S., and White House presidential events. But this event relied on a delivery method neither had used much and both felt a webcast of this size could present a variety of problems – particularly because they were working with thousands of schools.

 

Ashby and Segal resolved to make the “Jamestown Live!” show educational and entertaining and find a webcasting partner who would deliver to their audience seamlessly. Hence, the expert Web production team at Infinite Conferencing was brought on board.

 

“Prosody developed conceptual elements for the one-hour program that ensured valuable historic information was delivered in an engaging, fast-paced format,” Segal explains, in a whitepaper study. “We produced it much in the way a television show is produced, except we used student reporters to interview experts, and we included segments with original musical performances to help tell the Jamestown story. In fact, our client, Jamestown 2007, Inc., secured renowned PBS journalist Gwen Ifill as the show’s host, and the History Channel as the webcast host.”

 

The Web’s inherent interactivity was crucial, Segal says. It was important that students not only see Jamestown, but that they truly experience and connect to it and to the experts they were meeting on their screens, she said.

 

“We built in creative ways to raise awareness of the impact that the intersection of the Europeans, Native Americans and Africans had on Jamestown,” Segal said. “Webcast features like real-time quizzes and the ability to email questions helped kids make the connection between their own lives and this symbol of our country’s earliest development.”

 

Interactive webcast elements connected kids with each other by fostering a cooperative spirit, replicating what helped the original settlement survive. Helping kids “make the connection” through the Web turned out to be an even bigger success than the event’s visionary founders anticipated. It’s currently estimated that just over one million students in 13 countries logged onto the webcast.

 

“We don’t know in every case whether it was one student on one computer, or a link that was being broadcast to a room of hundreds or a school district of thousands,” Ashby says, in the study.

 

Even so, give or take 100,000, the Jamestown Live! webcast rocketed both Prosody and Infinite Conferencing into a realm few event production companies have yet explored. Ashby says Prosody did extensive research before trusting the Web-based event to Infinite Conferencing.

 

“Planning to use this technology on such a huge scale meant our comfort boundaries were stretched on a daily basis,” Ashby says. “But, just as we anticipated, Infinite Conferencing made sure program delivery was seamless. They provided the pre-production support we needed, and answered every connectivity question we received prior to the event from schools around the world to ensure everyone had a good experience.”

 

Ashby says Infinite Conferencing’s ability to deliver a webcast on this scale means educators may see more events on the order of Jamestown Live! in the future. As Ashby says, “The success of this event has shown the technology has become much more viable.” And Segal says: “We expect webcasts that connect students through the familiar medium of the computer will become increasingly popular.”