A hybrid event takes place on site and online at the same time: part of the audience sits in the hall, the rest follows the same conference live in the stream – and both can take part.
What sets it apart from an in-person event with a camera is the ambition: at a genuine hybrid event, sound, lighting, vision mixing and slides are made for the stream as well, and online attendees send their questions to the moderator via chat. Putting a single camera in the hall gives you a stream – but not a hybrid event, because the audience at home only watches instead of being part of it.
In practice that means two events in one. Room technology, cameras, control room, streaming and remote speakers have to work together – ideally from a single provider, so that nobody has to mediate between three suppliers on the day. For associations, universities and companies the format pays off because it reaches more people without everyone having to travel, and because the recording lives on in a video library afterwards.
Latency is the delay between what happens in the hall and the moment it reaches the viewer's screen. In a live stream this is usually a few seconds up to half a minute.
The delay arises because picture and sound are encoded, cut into small segments, delivered through a distribution network and buffered on the viewer's device. With standard HLS streaming, latency is typically 10 to 30 seconds; low-latency methods get it down to a few seconds. Only a video call gets close to zero delay – at the expense of picture quality and stability.
For a conference, latency is not a problem as long as you plan for it: questions from the chat refer to something that happened in the hall half a minute ago, so the moderator is better off taking them in batches rather than reacting on the spot. Polls and quizzes need a little lead time before voting opens. The stream must never be played in the hall, or the audience hears everything twice. And remote speakers join the control room via a video call, not via the stream – so they can talk to the hall without any noticeable delay.
A live stream broadcasts an event to the internet in real time: viewers watch picture and sound in their browser without sending anything themselves. Unlike a video call, a few people broadcast and any number can watch.
In a video call, every participant is a broadcaster too – with camera, microphone and their own tile. That works for meetings, but reaches its limits at a hundred participants or more: picture and sound get worse for everyone, and a single open microphone disrupts the whole group. In a live stream only the control room broadcasts, and the signal is delivered through a distribution network – so it hardly matters whether twenty or two thousand people are watching. The price is a delay of a few seconds (see latency).
Viewers can still take part: questions reach the moderator through a chat next to the stream, and remote speakers join the control room via a video call and go into the stream from there. For a professional conference, what counts in the end is the broadcast, not the platform – name captions, slides, clean sound and a connection that holds. That is why we stream over at least three independent connections, and attendees watch in their browser with no app and nothing to install.
A lower third is the caption in the bottom third of the picture that shows the name and role of the person speaking – at conferences usually together with the title of the talk.
In the stream and in the recording, the lower third is the viewer's most important point of orientation: anyone who tunes in late knows straight away who is speaking and what about. At a conference with many speakers that means preparing every caption in advance, checking spellings and titles against the programme and showing it at the right moment – shortly after the talk begins and not permanently, so that it doesn't cover the slides.
It is designed to match the event, with the organiser's fonts, colours and logo. At online and hybrid events the control room sets the lower thirds live, together with slide changes and the moderator view. And because it stays in the recording, every talk in the video library carries the speaker's name and topic in the picture.
A video library is a dedicated page where an event's talks are available on demand after the conference – each talk on its own, ready to play at any time. Video on demand (VOD) is the technical term, as opposed to a live stream.
While the live stream only runs during the event, the library lives on for weeks and months: anyone who missed it or wants to watch a talk again finds it there with title, speaker and description. For that, the recording is cut into individual talks – an uninterrupted eight-hour recording is not a library but an archive nobody watches.
Access is what matters: open to everyone, password-protected, for registered attendees only or as paid access after the event – turning the recording into a member benefit or a second source of income. For associations, chambers and universities it also matters where the videos are kept: a library under your own name comes without third-party ads and recommendations, and NextKon VOD stores the videos in a data centre in Frankfurt.
A virtual exhibition is a conference's industry or sponsor exhibition in the browser: each exhibitor has a digital booth with logo, videos and documents, and visitors get in touch directly.
At an in-person conference, attendees walk past the booths during the coffee break – online, that route disappears. Without a virtual exhibition, sponsors are left with their logo in the closing credits, and the return on their commitment shrinks. A virtual trade fair brings the tour back: foyer, hall, booths in different sizes to match the sponsorship packages, and one click takes visitors to the right contact.
To be visited, it has to sit where the audience already is – right next to the live stream, one click from the lecture hall, and announced by the moderator during the breaks. Effort matters to organisers as well: with NextKon Expo every exhibitor maintains their own booth through a personal login and receives a report after the event showing how often the booth was visited – proof that sponsors like to see.
Date, location, rough number of attendees – that's all we need for a first quote. We'll get back to you personally, in English or German, without a sales runaround.
