Recently, hybrid events have become a necessity for organizations across the world. They are a great way to keep people connected and well-informed, even when they can’t all be in the same place at the same time. Hybrid events allow you to expand your reach to a broader audience and deliver impactful content. Using professional video equipment and technology services, you can create a hybrid or a virtual event from the comfort of your classroom that is creative and engaging for your students who are joining in from their homes.

Hybrid events increase your audience reach because they allow people who are not able to attend an event in person to participate virtually. You may even reach a whole new audience that you may not have had if your event or activity were only in-person. In the content industry, reaching a wider audience is key.

Another great benefit of a hybrid event is receiving higher engagement from your audience. This is because a virtual audience is actively participating from their phones. You may also have your live audience attending in-person interact with your virtual audience, so that everyone attending can share and discuss their ideas.

Other great benefits of a hybrid event include reducing cost and environmental impact because of a lower need to travel and smaller venue requirements. Hybrid events are cost-effective and environmentally friendly. Another great benefit is you can continually reshare the content that you’ve streamed at your hybrid event. The attendees will have access to the content months after the event to refresh their memory of what they learned.

So, how do we create hybrid events? In this chapter, we’ll go into a couple of different ways we can incorporate a virtual audience and guests into the news shows we produce. In the past 13 chapters, we have learned to operate and use the production equipment, how to structure an interview, how to write a news script, and how to produce a morning announcement news show using chroma key and lower third graphics. We've become masters at live video production. Now, we’ll look into how to bring in a call from Zoom or Microsoft Teams if our guest is not with us in the studio or classroom. We will also look at how to share our news show with a video conferencing program like Zoom or Teams for a hybrid learning environment.