As streaming becomes more technologically advanced and complicated, it’s easy to forget that the most basic streaming video-related need for many organizations is to synchronize a video of a speaker with his or her PowerPoint slides. Though Accordent does many more things than this, they offer two of the best products I’ve seen for streaming PowerPoint with video.

The Accordent Capture Station is a computer/appliance you can take with you on site to stream the presentation live, and/or capture it for later streaming. You connect the presenter’s computer to the appliance via a VGA connector to capture the PowerPoint slides, and plug the video feed into an Osprey card. The Accordent software captures and synchronizes the stream, captures it to disk, and can push it out to a remote streaming server.

You can choose from a number of customizable templates to get the desired look and branding, and Accordent has CDN partners who can help with the live webcast. And, you can post the presentation to your own web site for later on-demand viewing. With technology like this, it makes sense to record every training, marketing, product or other presentation for later on-demand viewing, even if you don’t plan to stream it live.

The other product, Accordent PresenterPRO, also merges PowerPoint slides and video, but enables user authentication, interactive surveys, polling and moderated Q&A. Both products output Windows Media, Real and audio-only MP3 files and can be monitored via Accordent’s Media Management System, which provides user statistics and other data to assess the effectiveness and reach of your online presentations.