Virtual Event Platforms: Intrado Studio & INXPO
For conference and meeting planners, if you have not started studying up on digital tools, our team here at eGuide would advise that any training for web design, app development, or user experience would be invaluable in the next 12 - 24 months.
As larger conferences are navigating what to do for impending decision deadlines for 2021, we are all coming to terms with the fact that 2021 will be a year of hybrid events at best. Companies are itching to return to live events, and are looking for ways to create a curated, high-touch, experience for their attendees similar to what could be done in person. For that, we are happy to review INXPO.
In 2018, INXPO was acquired by Intrado, a company focused on digital media solutions. Now, as we live through this pandemic, INXPO is positioned to be one of the leaders in large scale virtual conferences.
It’s important to understand that Intrado has a few “solutions within a solution”. For supported live streaming that would support multi-casting and stream to well over 200,000 viewers they have Intrado studio. This can work in conjunction with INXPO to create a seamless virtual conference, with seamless streaming.
INXPO also comes in a variety of formats, with the simplest rendering as a website, and the most complex as an immersive environment. We want to capture a bit of the user and planning experience in our ratings below:
How We Would Rate the Platform
Ease Of Use - 7/10
As an enterprise-level platform, our team was impressed with the customization of the user experience. From custom booths, seamless transitions, and varied layouts INXPO feels polished and custom. Since the majority of system support comes from the INXPO development team, we were not able to gain too much access to the back end but got the feeling that your designated team would help you coordinate the layout and design seamlessly.
Customization - 10/10
From a turn-key essentials event that is a fully integrated website-style layout to a full-blown custom virtual environment, INXPO is able to fully brand and develop a layout that matches your needs.
Security - 6/10
While INXPO is able to report on analytics to the granularity of identifying what users are experiencing bandwidth issues, all of that information does cause us a moment of concern. By clicking “ok” on a non-intrusive popup, users may be allowing access to much more information than they bargained for. Great for the management side, but also something that may cause concerns for your users.
Integrations - 7/10
From streaming integrations to chat integrations the user-facing side of the platform seem fairly robust. What we were not able to uncover is if INXPO has any integrations to other registration platforms. We would expect that the development team would be able to code and develop a working solution but it may come at a cost.
Price - 6/10
While this is by far one of the most expensive solutions available on the market, we do think that this is a robust solution that would make for a meaningful transfer from in-person to virtual conferences. If you are reallocating the budget of the in-person event, INXPO can be considered a cost savings. Here is the range of the prices to consider:
Essentials: 2 - 3 hours of content - 500 people - 25K
Virtual Expert Event: 6 - 8 hours of content - 1000+ attendees - 50K
Larger Scaled Expert Events: Upwards to 250K - 500K.
Overall Rating - 8/10
All-in-all our team was impressed with the virtual event renderings and functionality of the platform. While we thought that the essentials (more website approach) was fairly basic and something you could develop for a much lower cost, I think having the sense of security and support you would receive from the INXPO team would still make the solution worth considering.
Who would use vFairs?
For those who are in a position to move an entire multi-million dollar conference to a virtual environment, or are tasked with thinking about how to create a hybrid event next year with a small audience that follows CDC guidelines and a larger contingency digital, INXPO is the right solution. We are talking pharmaceutical product launches, tech company sales kickoffs, accreditation conferences, and large scale trade shows -- events that would take up significant square footage in a convention center.
When comparing the hard costs of a live event to the costs of INXPO it’s easy to show a cost savings. What you would be spending on hotel room blocks, food and beverage minimums, space rentals, production crews, fabrication, and streaming can be significantly reduced and converted to a completely customized virtual environment.
Similarly, as we discussed in our review of vFairs, with this conversion you are in a position to relinquish a fair amount of control to the INXPO team, but as the old saying goes “you get what you pay for” and we feel that since INXPO is backed by the media powerhouse Intrado, you are in good hands.
User Experience
INXPO definitely has the largest range of capabilities, both design and integration wise, out of any of the platforms that we have reviewed thus far.
Similar to vFairs, INXPO offers the ability for organizers to create virtual booths like you would have at an in-person career fair. Booths can be designed by the event organizer to incorporate relevant branding or the INXPO team can assist to polish off any more advanced final touches.
INXPO also offers the ability to stream events not just to the standard YouTube and Twitch, but also to Roku and Apple TV devices.
In addition to a range of design capabilities, INXPO also has a more developed analytics side to their platform which allows event admins to track attendees behaviors throughout the streams including what booths they visited, whether or not they engaged with other attendees and even how fast their internet was working at the time they attended.
Technical Assessment
INXPO is probably the most robust platform we have reviewed so far. While the user interface might be similar to vFairs, INXPO has done an amazing job allowing users to self build resources like booths, presentation transitions, and pre-recorded content in an easy and efficient way.
Their Studio software allows users the ability to stream content from different sources like webcams, screen share, presentations, or even professional recording equipment and combine those sources into multiple layouts with easy transitions and even multiple presenters. All of this without needing professional production crews or extensive training.
Their panel-based interface building allows for a very wide range of integrations including chats, LinkedIn, Yammer, Facebook, Twitter amongst others and if your preferred platform is not part of the pre-made list, HTML code can be used to add any other panel.
INXPO offers very robust analytics and reporting platform including event engagement insights, location, and even technical inside on the user experience, while we recognize that some of this information is very useful and can be a great tool for marketing and sales. The amount of information collected from users that attend the events, creates a privacy and security concern, especially when this information is shared with event hosts and sponsors.
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