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(5/4/05) Earlier this week Macromedia released a new version of Breeze, an application the company characterizes as a rich Web communications system. A few weeks earlier, Kevin Lynch, VP sales and product marketing with Macromedia gave Digital Media Net a sneak preview of this powerful new application, which allows users to communicate with each other via video conference, share presentations with audio and video segments, and even share desktops over the Web. Leveraging Macromedia?s Flash player, which is installed on 98% of the computers around the world, the new version 5 of Breeze shows lots of promise.
In the Web conferencing arena, Macromedia is among four main players and a number of smaller companies going after this relatively new market space. Competing for the Web conferencing dollar are the big four, including WebEx, which was the first to market and dominates the market so far; IBM, which integrates its conferencing application with Lotus; and then Microsoft with its PlaceWare application that it acquired two years ago. The fourth major competitor in this market is Macromedia, whose Breeze application was aquired by the company 18 months ago.
According to Kevin Lynch, VP of Sales and Product Marketing at Macromedia, Breeze has a multi-pronged approach to this market. ?We?ve added a lot of features that have to do with curriculum management and training,? he said. ?The second one is marketing and selling, where Macromedia has a strong heritage in providing high-impact communications. We?ve also added new features like Event Management so you can register, remind, or report on people attending large Web seminars.? Lynch also said that many users want to use Breeze for everyday meetings, so Macromedia has made it IT-friendly and enterprise-ready.
Giving Macromedia (soon to be a part of Adobe, if all goes as planned) an edge in this market space is its Flash platform, a versatile format for delivering video, audio, and presentations that is tightly integrated with Breeze. An example of that tight integration of Flash is the way Breeze uses floating windows called pods, where different information can be contained inside each. Each window is resizable and controlled by the presenter.
Another new feature is called Presenter, which is a plug-in for Microsoft PowerPoint that allows users to add audio and quizzes to their presentations, and then the entire PowerPoint presentation can be synchronized and be converted to the Flash format. Another value-added application is called Training, which now includes curriculum management, allowing users to track individual responses to quizzes and surveys. Another component is called Events, a totally new module for Breeze 5 that is capable of registering users, reminding them of upcoming meetings, and recording their attendance at large meetings, which Macromedia calls ?Webinars.?
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| (Click graphic for enlargement) Breeze is organized in "pods." In this example, a presenter talks in the upper left window, while at the same time, there is chat window, a window for notes, the large window for the presentation, and then a window where all the participants of the meeting are listed. |
In the demo, Lynch showed a simulated meeting which started with a video clip from the CEO. A new feature of Breeze 5 is its ability to show a full-screen video, which looked remarkably sharp and relatively artifact-free, even though it was highly compressed and was seen playing over a broadband connection. Said Lynch, ?The ability to simply go full-screen and draw the audience?s attention is important.?
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