NORA 2021 Conference
Educating eye and health care professionals
Project overview
Quick Facts
Concurrent Viewers
291
Avg. Time Spent
13 Hours/User
Platform
Custom Streaming Solution
The challenge
NORA needed a specialized virtual streaming platform that could host a multi-day educational conference, provide ad-free viewing, and support complex custom needs like real-time quizzes, achievements, and accredited certificates, which standard solutions like Twitch or YouTube could not offer.
The solution
We provided a tailored white-label streaming platform with ad-free viewing, single sign-on integration, and custom features for educational courses, real-time tracking, and automated certificate generation for attendees.
The results
The multi-day virtual conference was successfully hosted with minimal issues. The platform performed reliably, and post-event feedback was overwhelmingly positive, confirming that the customized solution met all of the client's educational and technical needs.
1
Project background
Purpose
Virtual Event for Rehabilitative Services
The NORA annual conference (Neuro-Optometric Rehabilitation Association) is an event for eye care and other health care professionals who focus on rehabilitative services for individuals with traumatic brain injury. The multi-day event brings together professionals and key leaders in the medical fields. The event, historically hosted at a venue, was now a virtual event in 2021, and we were approached to provide a streaming solution tailored to their specific needs.
2
A conference with custom needs
Laying the Groundwork
What Was Existing
We had already built our in-house streaming solution for communities, giving us an edge in integration. Standard streaming platforms like YouTube and Twitch have fixed feature lists that are hard to extend. Our white label solution could offer ad-free viewing, single sign-on with XenForo, and the flexibility of having an on-hand development team that could tailor the tool to the client's needs.
Custom Requirements
Educational Adaptations
The NORA conference was education-driven, with attendees participating in courses and being quizzed to receive achievements. Because of these needs, our streaming solution had to be adapted with several features:
Multiple instructors live at once with multiple courses running concurrently- Customize terminology from 'streams' to 'courses'
- Classrooms that are conference lobby rooms and show the stream schedule for that specific track
- Custom achievements per completed course and quizzes
- Attendees receive an auto-generated certificate for each course
3
Building our streaming solution to suit
Optimizing
For a Larger Audience
With much of the framework in place, our product development team focused their efforts on building new features while optimizing the existing solution. Early technical challenges included scaling the platform infrastructure for large numbers of users, ensuring we didn't hit any bottlenecks, and building redundancies for logging data to prevent failure.
Customizing for an Education Conference
Accurate Credit Tracking
As the conference focused on education, a core goal was for attendees to receive credit for what they watched. The credit system relied on transcripts, certificates, and as-you-watch progress. We built three methods of tracking this data to ensure accuracy and redundancy:
Using a socket connect to track second-accurate times for viewing- Backup of slow polling requests from clients with lower resolution
- For when you request data about a stream
Quick look at what we did
4
Going live to the attendees
Field-Tested
To Plan for All Cases
To ensure the conference was a success, we implemented multiple dry runs with our community event managers and the client to stress test the product, held weekly meetings, and created a contingency plan. Our full development team was on hand for the multi-day event to answer questions and troubleshoot any issues.
Multi-Day Event
Comes to an End
Once the event concluded, our team and the client were extremely happy with the results and how minimal the hiccups were. The streaming platform performed reliably, and the general consensus from the lecture speakers and attendees was positive.
5
Post-event response
The Numbers
Total After the Event
The event went extremely smoothly, and we are very proud of what we could deliver. The event demonstrated the platform's ability to host large educational events and confirmed the value of our custom solution. Our close collaboration with their team was a large factor in ensuring the event went smoothly.
streams
days of conference
chat messages
avg time spent per user
Project Background
A word from the client
"It was difficult to find a live streaming solution that fit our specific needs until we partnered with Audentio. As we were preparing for our annual conference, Audentio worked with us every step of the way and were incredibly easy to work with. They delivered on all fronts — a customized streaming solution for our educational conference, a reliable live event with no issues, and wonderful support. We're happy with how the event turned out and are looking forward to continue working with Audentio for our next conference!"
Co-founder, ODWire & CEWire