Item: Lifesize Video Conferencing
Rating: 8
Author: Andrey Lanier

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are a local radio station that covers high school sports in our area, predominantly football. We use Lifesize Video Conferencing for player interviews and meetings while one group is at one game and another group is covering a different game. With player interviews, it helps us record dialogue and easily pull a quote to post to our social media page. Though we use it on a small scale, Lifesize Video Conferencing helps collaborate our work together; this is essential when you have a representative at 17 different high school football games each Friday night.

Pros and Cons

Encrypted Communications: Competing against other newspapers and stations is tough. Lifesize Video Conferencing helps us keep our content original and encrypted.
Multiple Screen Sharing: Before, our preferred method of contact was a text message or a FaceTime call. This program allows us to share the same video chat with multiple sources. We've streamed interviews across 4 different games and given live in-game updates - that's something our competitors can never touch us with.
Sharable Content: Our meetings and interviews can be recorded and shared amongst our other team members or with the public through social media.

IT Support: Set up and customer service wasn't the easiest to deal with. After finally getting through the initial setup, everything else was smooth sailing.
Marketing Approach: It's not meant for everyone. We were simply sold a piece of hardware which was a risk but ultimately it met our business needs. Make sure that it fits your brand for what you're attempting to accomplish.

Return on Investment

Our return investment is displayed in our weekly exposure. We started our company around 4 years ago, and only now because of this product are we getting the maximum amount of exposure that we assume we can achieve for our small area. Before hand, we were only able to do full coverage of one game, and then brief other games the day after. Lifesize allowed us to collect interviews, athlete and school promotions, and complete coverage of every football game in our area.

Implementation Rating

Great for companies that need to accomplish multiple things at once while at different places. From our experience, broadcasting news is most favorable considering the level of excellence you get with the product plus the affordability. It can be used both privately amongst employees, or shared publicly through covering events.

Alternatives Considered

Zoom and Workplace by Facebook

We have looked at other video conferencing systems such as: Zoom, Cisco, Workplace (via Facebook), etc. Lifesize provided us the best quality for an affordable rate. The audio quality is consistent and the requirements to produce content is minimal. Some of our employees use it via a desktop/laptop, and others use it through the app.

Likelihood to Recommend

We had a game of the week that we were covering, along with other major area matchups. We were able to collaborate our games altogether and provide a stream that kept us up to date with what else was happening across our area, and how it affected our game of the week as far as standings.

Our initial setup was difficult, and we had to work around other workers who are technologically impaired, per se. The support team provided to us was mostly unresponsive, but we managed in spite of it.

Affordable, Great Startup Software

Overall Satisfaction with Lifesize Video Conferencing