Adobe Success Story

Crowe Chizek and Company LLC provides innovative business solutions in the areas of assurance, consulting, risk management, tax and technology. Celebrating more than 60 years of "Building Value with Values," Crowe Chizek is one of the top 10 public accounting and consulting firms in the United States, serving clients worldwide as a leading member of the Horwath International network of public accounting and consulting firms.

Challenge

Crowe Chizek set out to broadcast the CEO's annual State of the Firm address live to the entire company -- to all 1,200 staff members in 17 geographically dispersed offices in five states. Presenters' slides needed to be synchronized with live video and audio, plus the entire event needed to be recorded and made available for re-broadcast.

Solution

Flash Communication Server MX 1.5
Flash MX Professional 2004

Benefits

• CEO had to present the "State of the Firm" address just once, rather than the typical dozens of repeat performances, keeping energy high and content totally consistent

• Reduced costs by 80% over previous years State of the Firm presentations

• Bolstered corporate unity and internal P.R. by delivering a branded live webcast firm wide, without a hitch

• Using Flash Communication Server for the address opened new business opportunities for the company

Project Details

When the CEO of Crowe Chizek, the eighth largest public accounting firm in the U.S., delivers the annual State of the Firm address, he typically takes the show on the road. This year, the road trip wasn’t necessary.

When tasked with helping the CEO deliver his address, the technology specialists at Crowe found a cost effective new approach, reaching all 1,200 employees in 17 cities in one fell swoop -- without the presenters ever leaving headquarters.

Traditionally, the CEO and CFO would repeat the same presentation a dozen or so times in ten cities over a period of several months in order to reach the geographically dispersed staff. Presentation tours are not inexpensive, as every company well knows. Figure scheduling, renting facilities and a/v equipment, setting up each location, travel expenses, plus staff time and headaches required to produce every show. Subtract the drain of billable hours and downtime of 1,200 employees traveling off-site to an auditorium; add the cost of food.

A more technologically advanced method was definitely in order – something that would allow Crowe to not only reach all of their employees in a cost effective manner, but also enable them to customize the webcast with the features they needed and with their branding, look & feel. The best solution? A Flash Communication Server-based custom Webcast application that delivered the CEO's live presentation just once to the entire firm, replete with slides synchronized to live video and audio. The benefits compounded. Everybody got the same fresh impression simultaneously, real-time interoffice Q & A was fueled, and costs were cut by at 80% over previous year’s presentations. Wear and tear on presenters was nil. The takeaway was tremendous -- a one-hour and forty-five minute high-impact live webcast that in addition to being presented live, was captured and archived for rebroadcast anytime, anywhere.

Risk Reward
Innovation is not for the faint of heart. Knowing that change can be risky business, the Crowe web team searched for a solution that would assure them they still had jobs "the morning after". They knew they wanted to do some type of webcast -- and started looking for a cost effective, digital solution that could synch slides to live video and audio, fit on their network, and reach all 17 offices.

Joe Johnston, Crowe web specialist, lead the research charge:
"We looked at the whole range of technologies that might fulfill our wish list, and eliminated them one by one. Then we saw a demo of Macromedia Flash Communication Server at the MAX Conference and knew there was hope. We started testing early versions of Flash Com Server. Then we tried streaming just a little data over our network, and that's when the project began."

What fell off the short list? The first idea to go was a Real Player based solution, even though Crowe already owned the Real Media Server and all its parts. It was too slow, the audio and video quality was sub-par, and it didn't perform well on Crowe's network. The biggest deal-breaker was the difficulty in trying to synchronize slides to audio and video with Real.

Second to drop off the list was Crowe's existing internal video conferencing application. It was only located in a few of their locations in which the rooms were too small.

Joe Johnston explains why video conferencing was not an option:
"We would have had to retrofit almost our whole internal network and buy lots of expensive video conferencing equipment and cameras to augment what we already had. The technology was way too difficult and expensive to reach our sheer volume of people -- accessing the phone lines, the expense of the phone calls for so much data and video. Hands down, the streaming media option over the Internet with Flash Communication Server was the solution."

Lights, Camera, Action
The broadcast originated from the training room in Crowe's headquarters in South Bend, IN. It was shot with a Canon XL1s digital video camera that had already been purchased for instances just like this. Ryan Roxbury, Sr. Web Manager, describes the workflow: "We used a Starlogic Platinum capture card inside a laptop with firewire going directly from the camera to the computer. That laptop hooked to the Flash Communication Server right in the same room.”

At the outset of the project, the biggest hurdle was figuring out how to integrate the presenters' slides with the audio and video. In fact, with the Flash Communication Server application, that turned out to be easy. "We worked off the sample broadcast application that came packaged with the Flash Com Server," said Joe Johnston. "We deconstructed it a little bit and modified it to increase the amount of bandwidth we could use in our network. Our biggest mountain turned into a molehill."

Chain Gang
Without purchasing any new hardware, the Crowe team figured an ingenious way to use their Flash Communication server and a handful of high-end laptops already in inventory to reduce bandwidth bottlenecks and increase the quality of the video. Using some rudimentary server-side action script, they sent the audio and video streams from the main broadcast machine running Flash Communication Server out to laptops that were located on the LANs of the local Crowe offices. These laptops, also running the Flash Communication Server, subscribed to the main streams and republished them for the clients located in the local offices. "We bounced our proxy servers (laptops) from one to another, so the whole presentation wasn't coming from one server," said Johnston. "We used five laptops, one in South Bend and then chained the other four (in different cities) together based on the number of rooms each office was using for audiences. We reduced the WAN connections from 55 to 32, and greatly increased performance by relying on our local area networks. The IT staff did a tremendous job directing network traffic during tests and during the actual broadcast."

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Crowe Chizek employees gather to watch the State of the Firm webcast

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The presentation was broadcast over the Internet, using Crowe's standard browser, Internet Explorer. Each location had a separate URL, even though they were all seeing the same thing at the same time. "Because the servers were chained together, we could limit the number of connections per server to speed up the broadcast right through IE. We did several tests before show time and had no problems -- everything was so standard, and we knew we could rely on the Flash Player." said Johnston.

Custom Fit
Crowe recently underwent a corporate re-branding effort, so it was really important for the web team to incorporate the new design standards into the year's most important presentation. "It was our job as a marketing group to focus on branding. Because we were able to develop this application in Flash, we not only had great control over the audio and video feeds, but also could really customize the UI and were able to incorporate the new Crowe look and feel," said Ryan Roxbury. "Everybody wanted to see that this was truly a Crowe presentation, not just something out of a box. It went off without a hitch."

More than a few pleasant surprises popped up during the Q&A portion of the program -- interesting interactions that could never have happened otherwise. Each presentation room had a moderator who fielded questions from the local attendees and emailed the questions to the broadcast room. The questions were handed to the presenter, who identified the "asker" and their office location. The result was that people in different offices fueled the Q&A session -- a company-wide, real-time bonding that had never happened before.

"From an internal public relations perspective, we provided a superior user experience, mitigated the silo syndrome, and helped unify the company. I think most people's expectations were exceeded. For us, the rewards far outweighed the risks we took tackling new technology," states Ryan Roxbury.

As anticipated, some people were unable to attend the live broadcast -- and the web team was tasked with rebroadcasting the entire event. No problem, thanks to the new Media Components in Flash MX Professional 2004. "We used the media component and connected directly to a Flash Communication Server internally," explains Johnston. "The actual rebroadcast file is about 800 megabytes of video, which would freeze up viewers' laptops. So we decided to do a real time stream directly from the Flash Communication Server to play the whole movie continuously. We're using the media component in Flash MX Professional 2004 to track the Flash Communication Server; we're not just using the normal progressive stream."

Exciting Business Development Opportunities
Now that the Crowe team has invented a new wheel for themselves, they can sell it to their clients. Ryan Roxbury sees Crowe expanding its technology services to include things like web launches, corporate collaborations, training, chats, forums, instant messaging, and video broadcasts. "We really opened up some new business opportunities for ourselves. I can see us making a positive impact on a wide variety of industries. We invested in the Flash Communication Server and proved its effectiveness. We're very excited about that and have quite a bit of interest from our client base. We can bring a project to market very quickly, which is a key selling point," says Roxbury.

Site Summary
Industry:
Professional Services

Macromedia products used:
Flash Communication Server MX 1.5
Flash MX Professional 2004

Third party prodcuts used:
Digital Video Camera -Canon XL1s with 16x zoom Lens XL 5.5-88mm f/1.6 - 2.6
Capture Card - IEEE1394 CardBus by Starlogic Platinum

Development time:
2 months total time to market

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