It is not you, it is virtual conferences. Really! 

When you’re in a mood to watch Netflix you click on a button, hear badum-m-m and are faced with a “continue watching” button and a carousel of alternative content tailored to your tastes and moods.

That is it. Zero overhead from an intent to watch something to you enjoying the content. Even reading this sentence brings you good emotions.

Now your experience at a virtual conference.

Shall we invest our time to put down a long and frustrating bullet list of actions you, me, we have to take to watch a talk at a virtual conference? 

No, we should not, we both get embarrassed just by thinking about it.

Watching Netflix delivers satisfaction. Watching a virtual conference delivers annoyance. 

What do we choose as human beings tired of 2020?

We choose to not go to virtual conferences, virtual events and we ditch all possible Zoom meeting.

Because “can you see my screen“.

Did we both get shivers now?

• denial.

• anger.

• Bargaining. ← You are here now 

• depression.

• acceptance.

You’re a sensible human being, as a virtual talks consumer, you shift around the five stages of grief and never settle on acceptance. 

I am a virtual talks producer, that’s my job within developer relations or developer marketing. I have to accept the rules to be able to give a talk.

But after I’ve given my talk I convert into yourself, a sensible human who tries to enjoy a good talk, learn something, meet fun new people.

I poke around the virtual conference, get frustrated and lapse. Then I get emails from the conference about so many great things happening there. I stare at the email. I want to believe, but I’ve been there, I remember my experience.

I delete the email.

• Denial. ← I am here now

• anger.

• bargaining. 

• depression.

• acceptance.

As a presenter I attach my microphone, a cam, share a screen with slides and here I am - a small matchbox somewhere in the corner, with a huge slide taking the whole screen and the video is heavily compressed to 720p.

Recognize?

Seven-tenty-pee...Urghhh. Ew...puke. Everything in the previous paragraph is about me hating 2020 and H264 delivering a matrix of blurred squares at 720p 2000 kbps.

You and me, everyone is just Fourier series in 2020

It doesn’t have to suck. Denial. Denial!

I reset to the denial phase of the five stages of grief. 

I cannot make your virtual conference experience better, but I can do my talk a better experience for you.

• I pre-record my talk in 1080p so it looks and feels good ← worst solution in many ways

• I publish my talk at Devrel.Events youtube if the conference would not publish it instantly

• I connect to the conference via OBS Virtual Cam or via an RTMP stream to have controls of how it all looks and feels

I understand, conferences barely survive these days and they have to lock-in the content. But I root for you, the user, I care for your experience first and foremost. It takes a bigger dialogue of how to make peace with a conference about un-paywalling my talk. We should have it at some point. But currently I either battle for my content to be instantly published on the conference’s YouTube or I livestream and publish it on Devrel.Events youtube along the conference. 

Devrel Asia and DevGAMM were fine with this concept last week, and yesterday we agreed with Games Gathering that it makes sense. So perhaps it is a doable model.

For DevGAMM we recorded everything in Discord and delivered the videostream live to the conference and their YouTube. We’ve agreed to do the same with Games Gathering and are talking to more conferences.

DevGAMM wanted to put their and their sponsors' branding on top, but we had a clean high res, high quality video on YouTube. Everyone was and is happy.  

Here is a clean sample about “homebrewed AAA games“:

As an epilogue I could tell how we’re talking to virtual event platforms and how the future is rosy, how everything gonna shift into hybrid events and everyone would be happy.

Truth is, it depends on where you are located on this planet. It may or it may not get better soon.

My mad childhood school raves band Scooter is back with a fck 2020 song. It is a terrible-terrible song, goes well with this year.

I am not listening to it. I am listening to a Hail Spirit Noir album that opens with a song titled "I mean you harm". Somehow it resonates with my Saturday.

I reviewed the Scooter’s song poorly and the "I mean you harm" song well, yet we both know which one want to listen to in a moment…

Perhaps you also want to figure out my dad joke?

This line about “You and me, everyone is just Fourier series in 2020“, few paragraphs above.

Basically you probably have studied the simplest version of this in high school, but did not care. I did not. And now blah-blah Discrete Cosine Transform, H264… This piece of math I hated at school (you too, probably) is a core part of how live video happens today. So indeed everyone is just Fourier series in 2020.

Badum-m-m.

See? I feel sooooo smart…

Take care and see me in your inbox in two weeks.

Olle