So many options, lets use 'em all!

My company is working on a push to get various social media type communication tools as well as video conferencing solutions in place.  Now, we are famous within the silicon valley for two things: Using technology for a decade past its prime and using technology so new that its bleeding edge and usually not ready for prime time.  One of the items that has dogged us for years is the ability to have a live video stream of the quarterly company meeting to all of the offices outside of the silicon valley.  Usually this is a failure because they don't want to spend any money while still producing a Hollywood production.  On several occasions I have improvised for a small meeting, usually using WebEx, and someone mentioned this to executives.  So suddenly they are wanting to use the WebEx platform to steam the video of the meeting, not realizing that it has limits to the picture it will show.  The VP wore a brown outfit for the big meeting and really just looked like a brown turd moving back and forth across the video.  The best part was that I recorded the meeting for later playback in the other time zones.  The VP looked at the playback and made that observation of a dancing turd over my shoulder.  I said nothing.

So now I have spent the last two weeks spinning my wheels testing a new video streaming solution for this project.  In order to see if this will work, we are running a test meeting.  So right now I have a speaker standing in front of a camera run by a professional production company.  The camera is running back to to their bank of equipment, which is then feeding a point to point video meeting solution that we have installed as well as a laptop feeding the new video streaming solution.  The audio is going out over the Point to point system and through a conference call bridge.  We are also tying a WebEx into the presentation to make sure that those who just want to see the PowerPoint presentation can follow along with it.  We are also having to make changes to the firewall across the whole infrastructure to allow this solution to work.  Oh, yea, we also had to implement a virtual server, which did not work at all at first.  All in all, I am looking at a production team of 12 in the room, plus at least 6 in outlying offices running the systems in those offices, and this is just for the test.   We will have twice as many production team and twice the equipment for the actual big meeting.  So many points of failure its ridiculous.  After it is complete, we will still have the production company process the recording to put up on our intranet for playback in other time zones.  And somehow, this seems to be the best solution...