Inability to show moderators on camera during the simulive webinars is very restrictive

[clionado]

Hey Zoom team, 

We have started to use Zoom simulive for running regular trainings as part of our scaled customer onboarding programme (All of these were live previously). We always have moderators proactively sharing information in the chat as well as answering questions in the Q&A but we have found that the experience for the user is a lot less personable before given that the moderator cannot be seen on camera also.

Is this something that you are planning to implement for simulive? It's a major blocker for us. I understand that it's possible to do the live Q&A afterwards but without being able to see the moderators during the session there has been some accusations that it is not even real people in the chat and that they are AI bots. We want to make the experience more personable.

Thanks,
Cliona

[Ray_Harwood · Accepted solution]

Hi, again, @clionado.

First of all, I'm not a Zoom employee and can't speak for Zoom.  But I am pretty involved with "people that know" and have a good sense of what we Zoom Events producers should expect.

It's unlikely that you'll see the ability to show a live person while a Simulive is in progress.  This kind of goes against the whole idea of a Simulive.

I like that your moderator interacts with attendees via Chat and Q&A. There are several ways to accomplish your goal of being more engaged with the moderator:

1. Include a brief statement in the Simulive video that says something like, "One of our moderators may be available during your session to answer your questions and respond to your chat comments."  Maybe include a couple of pictures with names.  This would allow your Simulive to run on schedule without any moderator present, but let them know that a "real human" is working behind the scenes. ("Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!" -- my favorite quote from the original Wizard of Oz)
2. Don't run a Simulive, run a regular webinar or "lite" session, and at the very beginning, simply "play" the simulive content from Share Screen -> Advanced -> Video, pick the video, click Share, and Viola! your video is playing.  At that point your moderator can spotlight themselves if they want to be seen, and unspotlight them when they don't.  Alternatively, your moderator could come on for a brief introduction to engage the attendees, then play the video with or without being onscreen as seems appropriate. This approach will, unfortunately, minimize the video in the attendee windows, but sounds like you're accustomed to doing that already, so might not be a big deal.  This does have the disadvantage that the video must be on the moderator's device in order to play it.
3. Since you have a Zoom Events or Webinar Plus (the new name for Zoom Sessions!) license, you could easily create a set of Production Studio scenes, and utilize the recently-announced "Video Media" scenes to play out the video while also showing the moderator.  (There is also a scene that only shows the video; you can't really switch conveniently back and forth at this time without having some timing issues... but my understanding is that this is probably in the works.)  This would be the best approach, in my opinion, since the video is uploaded to (and played from) the Cloud, so that multiple moderators would not have to download the video.
4. It's good having options. A combination of the first three could be documented and rehearsed, and change as the situation requires!  You could schedule a session with one of the approaches, start to get registrations, and simply change the type (from Simulive to Live, or the other way around) if the need arises.  With Production Studio you can create a Scene Template that is easily duplicatable to newly scheduled sessions.

Hope that helps!