This is a series of three blog posts talking about our new service Vivoh Metalink.

(These posts document in writing Vivoh's three part "three minute" video series about Vivoh Metalink. If you would rather watch the three minute video explanations, head to that site.)

Vivoh Metalink: a powerful way to follow Microsoft’s lead

As we wrote about earlier in this blog, Vivoh follows the Microsoft recommendation of having a custom URL to your webinar. So much so that we built a new service to make it easy to manage custom webinar URLs.

The four major benefits of Vivoh Metalink.

1. One link for an easily editable final URL
2. One link for the pre-event URL, live event URL and archived webinar URL
3. One link to segment webinar participants by internal and external firewall IP addresses
4. One link to use multiple webinar service providers no matter the license

The problem with sending the direct webinar link

A direct webinar link looks like this: https://zoom.us/j/12345678. Many people will send that link out directly to their participants in a calendar invite or email invitation. At Vivoh, we think that is an approach that makes things more complicated for the presenter and more complicated for the participants.

If you send the direct webinar link to your participants you are losing control over the experience before and after the event. The following diagram shows the problem.

If you send the user the direct Zoom link (this is the same with any live webinar provider: Google, WebEx or MSTeams) and they click on the link before the event is started, they will be told to wait. You generally have almost no control over the messaging or, more importantly, the experience. You could send out two links, one for the pre-event experience and the live link, but then in your invite you need to provide instructions on when each link is safe to click on.

It’s worse with the archive event. Generally archive events are unknown at the time of the live event. You often cannot provide that in the invitation. So, once the post-processing is completed, and then once the video is posted, you need to update the calendar invite, or send another email to the participants, indicating the archive event link.

Vivoh Metalink removes all this complexity. You create one metalink link with the pre-event URL. If anyone clicks on the metalink, they get the pre-event experience. When the event goes live, you edit the metalink so it points to the live event. Your users use the same metalink as they did for the pre-event URL. When your archive URL is ready, you can again edit the metalink and any user clicking on the link will see the archive event.

With Vivoh Metalink, it is always the same link, now and in the future. Why not give it a try today and reduce the communication overhead for your participants.

We would love to help you with your enterprise video journey. Please contact us at sales@vivoh.com