I felt the need to rant a bit about our teleconferencing service that we are most likely going to changing soon. We currently use Premiere Global Services for all of our conference calls with each other and our clients. We utilize the pay-per-use service which has worked out perfectly for us thus far. But we are now wanting to take it a step farther by allowing our teleconferences to be recorded and used for podcasting via this blog or on ITunes.
So as I was researching the capabilities, I was happy to see that Premiere does allow their users to record the calls but we, of course, want the file to be able to manipulate in our own way for syndication. So it was my surprise that they do not allow you to download the file at all. You can listen to it off their user-restricted site (and will charge you per minute for listening to it) but can’t download it. You can, however, buy a CD of the call for $16.00 plus shipping? $16.00 dollars?!? Are you kidding me? Who is going to pay that kind of money.
It is sad that they don’t understand the benefits of giving that file to their users for their reproduction. They don’t understand that they could create another revenue stream allowing customers to download the song, at a nominal fee, and allow the users to use it how they please. We would even be willing to pay a buck or two to download it (a la ITunes) but they don’t allow that. So we are going to look around for someone who does.