Video Seminar Live has the potential to be a very useful internet presentation tool. It has impressive audio/video features and is capable of engaging an audience. However, there are some glitches in the program that prevent it from ranking higher. Nonetheless, Video Seminar Live is one of our top ten webinar services.

This service, like some other webinar services, is browser-based, so it doesn't require any downloads to attend or create a webinar. However, Java needs to be enabled for everything to work properly. In addition, you have to download a small plug-in if you want to share your screen. Many webinars use real-time screen sharing, so the host will probably need to download the plug-in, but no one else will.

The chat feature has a number of interesting attributes. If there is something brought up during your internet presentation that you want to address after you are done presenting, you can add the chat to the Q/A section and save it for later. Private chat is supported, and the host can enable and disable private chat among the participants. There is also a profanity filter, to ensure that all the language during the session is kept professional.

The screen share option is a bit tricky to use. If you want to switch tabs and check out your slides or the polls, the application immediately stops screen sharing. The host also has the ability to give control to one of the participants. When we attempted to pass control back and forth it didn't always work and we had to try a couple times to get it right. The annotation features were also tricky to find, but they were there and would allow a presenter to highlight specific areas of their presentation.

Video Seminar Live allows the participants to set their statuses to give immediate feedback to the presenter. The participant's icon will change when they alter their status. The host can then click on the "Audience Status" to see who has a question or who wants the presenter to slow down. This is a helpful tool, but it was a little clumsy to use and with multiple attendees it would be hard to discover who needed something.

The webinar sessions can be password protected to prevent unregistered guests from attending. They can also be integrated with PayPal so that guests have to pay before they can attend a live session or a pre-recorded presentation. However, the sessions are not encrypted, which may worry some users.

On the Video Seminar Live site you will find email support and telephone support options. We were unable to find any live chat options or even a FAQs page. The company does offer tutorials, but some of them were not functioning when we performed our tests. The company does not offer any remote IT support during your webinar.