BED members had some questions about the ASEE TV service that is provided during the conference every year, and whether this increases the cost to attend the conference. Here is the ASEE response:
ASEE TV is provided by a company called WebsEdge. ASEE TV is provided at no cost to ASEE (or our attendees) and is in fact a small revenue generator.
The business model is this – WebsEdge comes to the conference and captures content on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday and packages that up into a daily highlights reel that shows on screens that are set up throughout the convention center and on the “dark channels” of the three primary conference hotels. In addition, they take content produced by ASEE HQ and include that in ASEE TV programming. So we get a lot of content provided to conference-goers for free.
How does WebsEdge make money? WebsEdge approaches institutions, typically colleges of engineering, to create videos for them, at a cost of ~$25k. College of engineering X gets a video made AND that video gets included in ASEE TV. I hear from some institutions that they would normally not pay that much money for a video, but having it shown at the ASEE Annual Conference adds enough value to make it worth the cost.
ASEE has a modest profit-share set up with WebsEdge so not only does ASEE TV not cost money, it actually earns money for the Society.
