Webinars dominate the current mode of relaying information over an online platform. Learn about the evolution of webinars and how they’ve changed.
The Evolution and Revolution of the Webinar
These days, almost everyone knows what a webinar is without ever having to look up the definition themselves. This is because they have been around for much longer than most people think, despite only truly exploding into popularity over the last 5-10 years.
Webinars have now become an integral part of everyday life, with schools, businesses, and even some families utilizing them to relay information and have conferences from different places on the planet.
During the COVID pandemic, webinars and applications like Zoom, Skype, and Microsoft Teams really picked up in popularity, and the webinar concept truly exploded into mainstream popularity. Learn about the evolution of webinars below.
Webinars: Where It All Began
The idea of web conferencing can be traced back to the year 1990, when software was developed that allowed different parties to hold conferences and communicate over an online medium. This real-time interaction between people in different places on the planet was always destined to succeed due to its utility in person-to-person connectivity.
The first webinar occurred around the early 90s when the software was developed into a working medium. The first-ever webinar allowed users to give a presentation that could be viewed by participants worldwide from different locations. This webinar presented the first ever multimedia, interactive online platform.
From here, webinars just continued to evolve along with various platforms and applications that made the whole process more streamlined and useful. Applications like Microsoft PowerPoint and Skype meant that the process of hosting a webinar became seamless and easy and as more and more people gained access to strong internet connections, the more popular the concept of the webinar became.
What Does The Future Hold For Webinars?
As the world continues to move more and more into the digital era, it cannot be said that the webinar will be disappearing any time soon. In fact, just over the past 3 years, we have truly seen the importance and utility that the webinar provides.
The number of people working from home in the current era is far more than ever before, and businesses realize that having in-person working stations and places is perhaps not as important as once thought. This means that companies are now gearing up their operations to have online conferencing and team calls as opposed to hosting conferences in person. Of course, the networking aspect of an in-person conference is somewhat lost during a webinar, but the ease at which people can work from home might outweigh this side effect. The future of webinars looks bright.
Where To Next?
As technology continues to grow and evolve beyond what we could have ever imagined, it is difficult to truly predict what a webinar might look like in the future.
The advent of the Metaverse also poses interesting questions as we could do everything from attend webinars to play at ZAR Casino South Africa in a virtual space. VR and artificial intelligence could allow us to host and attend webinars while still having that networking option that we thought we might have lost. No one can predict what the future of this technology holds.