CommCon 2023 Returns

CommCon is returning to being an in-person conference this June after running virtually in 2020 and 2021. I'm extremely excited to be able to share our plans with you. CommCon will be held at the Mercure Blackburn Dunkenhalgh Hotel & Spa in Blackburn UK between the 19 and 23 June. So make sure to mark your diaries now.

If you've attended CommCon before; you can expect much of the same experience we had pre-pandemic. If you've not attended CommCon in the past you can expect a truly immersive, community-driven event with the best speakers in the industry. As far as we're aware, CommCon is the only residential conference in Europe dedicated to WebRTC and Open Media.

What is CommCon?

A three-day conference with time at the beginning to settle in and time at the end to decompress afterwards. No hidden extra travel days, we’ve factored them in to your stay. Check in on the Monday, check out on the Friday, simples!

Your conference ticket includes your accommodation and meals at Dunkenhalgh as well as all activities during the event. All you have to pay for while at the conference is your bar bill and any room service. The conference is completely designed around enabling everyone to interact with one another; not just during the conference sessions; but throughout your three and-a-bit days at the venue.

I've talked about activities in the evenings but haven't really given you much detail, we’re working on confirming lots of great stuff at the moment. To give you a flavour: in previous years, we've had archery, duck herding, segways, games night as well as getting local historians in to give us a better idea of the history of the venue we were staying in. We are looking forward to sharing the activities with you soon!

What's new?

New for this year is our inclusion of ‘Open Media’ into the conference sessions. The pandemic has changed how we all treat media - the Real Time Media industry that provides telecoms and conferencing services is looking to give better all-round value and so is starting to look at other technologies for streaming to thousands of viewers. And on the other side of things, the more ‘traditional’ broadcast and video on-demand industry is looking at getting more ‘real time’ to enable better interactivity. We're all dealing with media; be it video, audio or both so why not house all these topics under one roof and enable knowledge sharing between everyone? So that's what we're doing. We're accepting talks whether they're about WebRTC, Private 5G, VoIP calling or Video Delivery using HLS. We're all in the same boat when it comes to delivering media - let's learn from one another.

Something else that's new this year: even though we talk about one ticket price that includes your accommodation, meals, sessions and evening activities (it's a bargain at £1200 for earlybird) we'll be splitting it into two payments; one to us for the ‘conference’ and another to the hotel for your accommodation, breakfasts and dinners. It means that the conference is now easier to explain to your bosses and your finance teams - one price for your ’learning and development’ budget and another price for your ‘travel and accommodation’ budget. One total price; split in two to make things easier for everyone. Tickets are on sale right now - head over to the CommCon website - earlybird tickets are only £1200 with that rising to £1600 on the 1st of May (prices quoted include UK VAT).

Speakers and Sponsors

We've already got a few sponsors lined up for this year's event - we'll announce them soon.. There’s still plenty of room to become a sponsor. If you're interested in sponsoring then please email us at [email protected]

Our CFP is open over at https://cfp.commcon.xyz/commcon-2023/cfp with the CFP closing midnight UK time on the 7th of April; however we'll be looking at speaker submissions before this date so get your talk in early for a possible early acceptance! If you've got any suggestions for speakers or keynote speakers you'd love to hear from then get in touch at [email protected].

The Team

This year our team has grown and now includes 4 of us managing the event in different forms - over the coming weeks I'm sure you'll meet the other members of the team. It’s an exciting time for us as we're able to give CommCon the attention it deserves and make the event better than it’s ever been.

And that's it - we're live and in the middle of planning another fantastic event - will we see you there? We hope so!