Have you all ever thought of videotaping the conference seminars? I bet you could bring in a decent bit of revenue by selling access to a real time video feed for people who aren’t able to attend in person. You could also sell downloadable videos afterwards.
If they were priced decently, I’d probably purchase a few.
A number of options for archiving and distributing the seminars has been discussed. I’m glad we’ve gotten as far as doing audio recording and I hope it goes even further.
In 2012 we plan to record the audio from each seminar. Then, they’ll be available on HomebrewersAssociation.org after the conference. The files will remain locked for members-only, just the like the ones from this year.
this is very likely well beyond your budget, but if you used a lecture-capture product such as Tegrity or Mediasite, you would have video, audio, and synced presentations in an automatically-generated, searchable online catalog. these are products targeted at higher Ed, but there are likely more products in the business sector. the key term here is “automatically.”