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Show HN: Host scalable virtual conferences on Google Hangouts

crowdcast.io

17 pointssaidur6 comments

I was frustrated with how much of a pain it is to organize coding conferences online. The webinar software out there simply sucks for the host and the attendee. I figured out a way to seamlessly use Google Hangouts to organize large-scale highly interactive virtual conferences, and I call it Crowdcast.

Here are some coding conferences that have used it so far: Hacksummit (30k attendees, http://ccst.io/e/hacksummit-2014), Genesis Camp (http://ccst.io/e/genesiscamp1), ANZCoders (http://ccst.io/e/anzcoders2015), Wordsesh (http://ccst.io/e/wordsesh)

You can set up multiple sessions with different panels and talks across multiple days. The architecture is built to scale. It's a client-side angular app primarily talking to Firebase. With this model I've been able to hold the world's largest virtual conference (http://hacksummit.org). We had everyone from DHH (creator of rails) to Hakon Le (inventor of css) speak.

To take it one-step further I added analytics around your event and Crowdcast keeps track of when you answer your audience's questions so that they can jump straight to the video answers once the event is over. Finally, your event is automatically recorded and instantly shareable.

Would love to see how the HN community uses this to organize their own conferences

We were trying to build webinars on our platform, and used hangouts on air once, but it somehow felt odd to use and we weren't entirely sure what goes on (for example, one of the speakers disappeared and we couldn't see him, only this generic avatar).

Would crowdcast solve these problems by providing a better interface for the presenter(s)? or is it still relying on the existing hangouts interface?

Yeah the hangout interface is pretty bad. We've been able to get our viewers to completely avoid the hangout interface and use Crowdcast for all interactions. Right now only the speakers have to deal with the hangout interface. The host invites them directly to the hangout.

Although it works fine 90% of the time, we were able to run the largest virtual conf in history, every once in a while hangouts does still do strange things. Luckily for that reason we made Crowdcast decoupled from the video service, you can use it with Livestream, Ustream, or anything with an embed code.

Thanks! We might give it a try then for one of the next webinars. It looks promising.

i remember first seeing crowdcast present at the launch festival, it's great to see how much they've progressed. The design looks fantastic.

Thanks egusa, its been a lot of work :)

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