A global engineering and technology company partnered with Stagedge to support a full-scale hybrid conference spanning two venues, seven breakout tracks, and a global virtual audience.
After pivoting to a virtual format during the pandemic, the conference returned in person in 2023 and has been held across the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center and Omni Boston Hotel at the Seaport each year since. This year’s event welcomed approximately 2,500 in-person attendees and a global virtual audience joining through a dedicated broadcast production. Stagedge served as the full-service production partner across every environment.
The conference was a coordinated program running simultaneously across multiple venues and formats: a main general session stage, seven breakout rooms running concurrent daily tracks, technical workshops, paper sessions, an expo and demo environment, and a full live broadcast for virtual attendees.
Each environment had its own technical requirements, its own audience, and its own operational demands. The challenge was not executing any one of them well in isolation. It was making all of them work together at scale.
Stagedge approached the event as a single integrated production from the start. A full discovery, design, and development phase preceded the event, with regular production and creative strategy meetings and a shared project management system tracking milestones and ownership across every workstream.
On the ground, dedicated technical leadership roles covered the main stage and breakout floors independently, so neither competed for resources or attention. Each of the seven breakout rooms was equipped with standardized projection, audio, and presenter support, along with PTZ cameras, confidence monitors, cueing systems, and backup playback systems in place for every session.
The virtual component was built as a broadcast, not a feed. Stagedge also ran a dedicated daily live production with multi-camera switching, live editing, and real-time content delivery. Keynote sessions included AI captioning. All general session and breakout content was livestreamed and integrated with Brightcove and SharePoint for distribution, with full recordings prepared for on-demand access post-event.
Keynote session
The conference reached approximately 2,500 in-person attendees across venues, alongside a global virtual audience spanning 35 countries. General sessions, concurrent breakout tracks, technical workshops, and the daily broadcast all ran on schedule across both days. Online engagement remained active throughout the event, with the general session attracting 1,162 unique viewers and each breakout session pulling in over 300 viewers.
The program demonstrated what large-scale hybrid production looks like when it’s planned and governed as a single event: consistent execution across every environment, a virtual experience built to the same standard as the in-person one, and a production team that absorbed complexity before it reached the stage.