Broadcast your Presentations

Even before software like MS PowerPoint, presentations did exist, albeit with transparencies or photo-slides. Of course, PowerPoint made presentations far easier to create and present, but for the setup of the presentation–a room with dim lights, a projector or a wide computer monitor, the presenter and an audience to see and hear the presentation. 

The Slide Show menu, with options to set up and schedule online broadcast

What if you could sit in your tenth floor office and make a presentation, with live voice and video, to your colleagues on the first floor and boss on the fifteenth? And, even record the presentations? 

Welcome to presentation broadcasts through PowerPoint 2000. With it, you can broadcast your presentation over an intranet as well as the Internet. 

You can send e-mail to your audience with the link to the network location of your presentation

The Broadcast feature for PowerPoint 2000, comes with Windows Media Encoder that allows a presentation with the audio/video content to be streamed over a network. To broadcast over the Internet, you need the Windows Media Server.

This is packaged with the Windows 2000 server and can also be downloaded for Windows NT 4.0 from

www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/technologies/services.aspx.

The end-user doesn’t need to have PowerPoint installed, but just Windows Media Player and a Web browser to transmit audio and video over the network. The video transmission would require at least a PIII-based machine for proper viewing. For on-demand viewing, the recording is saved as an asf (active streaming format) file. 

This is how you broadcast your presentation. 

Step 



Set up broadcast



Create your presentation as you normally would. Then, go to the Slide Show menu and select Set up and Schedule Online Broadcast from the Online Broadcast sub-option. A scree will appear, select the option to set up and schedule your new broadcast. Next, enter the appropriate details and go to Broadcast Settings, where you can your audio/video broadcast options . Set the server where you will host the presentation by clicking on the Server Options button. 

You can specify a shared location for audiences to view your presentation

Step



Upload presentation



Provide the path for a shared directory on the network where PowerPoint will upload the presentation slides. Your audience will access the presentation from this location. If you’re showing it over the Internet, you’ll need NetShow Server, a third-party product. Next, click on Schedule Broadcast to send e-mail to your audience, with the link to
the network location of your presentation. 

Step



Test equipment



To start broadcasting your presentation, go to the main menu and click on Slide Show. From the Online Broadcast sub-option, select Begin Broadcast… this will take you to the settings menu where your equipment, such as your microphone, will be tested. 

A problem we faced during this process was that Windows Media Encoder (shown as the NetShow encoder in the dialog box) repeatedly showed the error: “Audio capture source requested was not installed”. This problem has been fixed with the Office 2000 Service Release 1 by Microsoft. You’ll find this patch on our March 2003 CD.

The final Broadcast Presentation as shown in a browser window

Step



Begin broadcast



Click on the Start button to begin. Your audience can go to the network location given in your e-mail message and tune into your presentation. 

Two problems we found were: one, it opens each slide in a separate browser window; and two, it opens two browser windows for each slide. 

Within an intranet, the presentation can be viewed by up to 50 people (a restriction of Windows Media Encoder 7). If you choose to host it on the Windows Media Server, you will be able to broadcast over the Internet as well as increase this limit, but you will need a slightly more elaborate setup. 

Shruti Pareek