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I kind of hate the word “webinar.”

I’m not alone, either. You can find it in several lists of the English language’s biggest travesties. It’s a holdover from the heyday of lame Web 2.0 portmanteaus, alongside “webisode,” “netizen,” and “listicle.”

However you feel about the word, the webinar itself is anything but dated. The more work moves online, the more vital webinars become for drawing new clients (and keeping the old ones).

Despite this, it sometimes seems like no one’s fully figured out how to properly support webinars. Some software is inaccessible, some is unreliable. 

Can Demio, a browser-based webinar tool by Banzai, finally bring the best of both worlds? Let’s take a look.

What is Demio?

Founded back in 2014, Demio promises a solution to the user-unfriendly world of webinar tech. There are definitely new developments in the webinar world, especially after the pandemic. Still, some of the features Demio intends to fight, like requiring guests to download software to join, are still par for the course.

Demio’s solution: host webinars straight from your browser. In the age of SaaS dominance, you don’t need an app taking up space on your computer to access the software tools you need. Demio offers webinar tools built for the SaaS marketplace, but with convenience and quality that anyone can appreciate.

Getting started with Demio: Free trial and pricing

Since Demio is a SaaS company, getting started is as simple as heading to their site. Not sure if it’s right for you? They offer a 14-day free trial to get acquainted with Demio before you go all in.

Beyond that, they offer three tiers: Starter, Growth, and Premium. 

• The Starter tier is recommended for people and businesses just getting started with webinars. It allows for only one host and has a 3-hour, 50-attendee limit on sessions. $34/mo billed annually or $49/mo billed monthly.
• The Growth tier caters to mid-sized and growing companies. On top of the Starter features, it allows for custom branding, automated events, and lets you keep track of registrations. You can have up to 5 hosts on your account, 150 attendees, and 8-hour sessions. $69/mo billed annually or $99/mo billed monthly.
• Premium options for large companies and enterprises can be custom-built for your team’s needs. They allow for unlimited hosts and sessions of up to 10 hours with as many as 1,000 participants.

Demio’s free trial requires no commitment or credit card details. Just sign up, fill out a brief survey on how you plan to use the app, and you’re golden.

Demio features

Dashboard

When you sign in to Demio, you’re greeted with a friendly dashboard, complete with a list of all your scheduled sessions.

First nitpick: the dashboard has two tabs, Schedule and Events. I appreciate the ability to see a scroll of upcoming events right away, but you have to tab over to Events to create a new session. Can’t these just exist in one tab?

Events

You can create three types of events: Standard, Series, and Automated. 

Standard events are what you probably picture doing when you use a webinar service. You create a standalone webinar or series that people can sign up for and attend at a scheduled time.

Series events differ from Standard in that people are auto-registered for every session. With Standard events, people can choose which ones they’d like to attend. Series creates an ongoing list, making it perfect for internal conferences.

Automated events work the same way as standard events, with one key difference: sessions are pre-recorded and available on demand. This is one of Demio’s more unique features. Uploading pre-recorded content and having it play passively is a great way to get more engagement.

Webinars

Before you get started, you can check out the Customize tab in your event editor to change details. 

One of Demio’s big advantages over tools like Zoom is the ability to customize your event in advance. You can add pre-made presentation materials and polls, as well as customize the registration process.

Once you’re ready to get started, you can join your session in the Schedule tab. The layout is familiar, with speakers’ video taking up the left and center while the chat tab takes up the right side.

Only one person can be “on stage” at a time, but you can also add and access materials like slides and videos with the middle button on the bottom toolbar. Meanwhile, the + icon next to the chat box lets users access polls, links, and handouts.

Reports

After you close your session, you’re taken back to the event’s settings. Tab over to Activity to view an attendance report for your session. The stats are fairly simple, but they give you an idea of how many people registered, how many attended, and how long they stuck around.

You can also view a list of participants along with their emails, including who registered, who showed up, and who missed it. Download the lists as CSV files and you can follow up with your audience.

Integrations

I’d honestly like to see a little more variety from Demio’s integrations. On the one hand, their tilt towards martech integrations makes sense. Webinars are generally used for marketing, and being able to connect with Keap, Mailchimp, or your CRM of choice has obvious benefits.

Still, I think there’s a lot more potential to be had with connecting different software to a video conferencing tool. Translators, editing tools, OBS… the sky’s the limit. 

Perhaps the most useful integration is with Zapier. Their micro-integrations let you connect to PayPal, Gmail, Slack, and more.

Conclusion: Is Demio worth it?

If you’re seeking a platform to create engaging webinars, Demio is a great place to look. It’s as intuitive as they come, with a number of unique features that set it apart from the competition. Even among browser-based video tools, the fact that it works on any browser puts it ahead.

As of now, Demio is completely focused on webinars. It’s a leader in that market, so they’re clearly doing something right. Where it disappoints, however, is where it feels too laser-guided towards marketing. By just slightly expanding a few features (integrations, reports, in-call elements), I think Demio’s potential could be that much greater.

PROS

• Quick, easy setup
• Works in any browser
• Custom branding options
• Interactive elements
• Unlimited sessions
• Automated events
• Good customer service

CONS

• Few integrations
• Limited reports
• Lack of different event types

Overall rating: 8.9/10 🥳

Ready to give Demio a try? Sign up here.

The Jurassic World trilogy makes little effort to hide the fact that it follows the blueprint of the Star Wars sequels. 

Sure, Jurassic World preceded The Force Awakens by a few months, but the bones are all there. Start with a reintroduction that rehashes the original story, go left with a new director on the sequel, then bring it all home with a big legacy finale.

There’s just three problems:

1. While I appreciate Jurassic World’s cynical subtext, it’s no The Force Awakens.
2. Interesting foray into small-scale horror aside, Fallen Kingdom doesn’t come close to The Last Jedi as a piece of cinema.
3. As irreparably bad as The Rise of Skywalker is, it’s no Jurassic World Dominion.

It could definitely be said that Dominion takes notes from the sort of roller coaster filmmaking attempted by Rise of Skywalker and fine-tuned by Spider-Man: No Way Home. Story beats come and go, with instant emotional gratification at the forefront. References to the classic movies supersede plot, characters, even action.

But as many head-scratching decisions as there are in Rise of Skywalker, they generally become clear once you apply this framework. Jurassic World Dominion, on the other hand, undermines its very premise almost instantly. This sets up a carnival of disappointment where literal dinosaurs are a light seasoning and metaphorical dinosaurs roam the Earth.

This popular tweet opines that the Jurassic Park franchise has consistently bungled an inherently winning premise. Before seeing the new film, I was ready to argue that “dinosaur chomp chomp human” is actually not much of a movie once the novelty of dinosaurs wears off.

Whether or not you feel the same, it’s hard not to argue that Dominion is wasteful on the dinosaur front. Fallen Kingdom ended with the promise of dinosaurs set loose on human society. This movie’s opening newsreel lets us know that the problem is now 80% under control. The animals wreaking havoc in this film are not lifesize dinosaurs, but squirrel-sized locusts.

Truly, only the mind behind The Book of Henry could bring you a Jurassic Park movie where the primary enemy is locusts. Director Colin Trevorrow teased the new Giganotosaurus character as the dinosaur equivalent of the Joker. As insane as that already sounds, the truth is even more absurd: the Giga appears in all of two scenes before her climactic showdown with the T-rex.

This is the film’s main issue: in a film meant to deliver on the promise of a Jurassic world, the dinosaurs are never more than set dressing. Instead, we follow the anemic adventures of Jurassic World’s new protagonists alongside Jurassic Park’s iconic trio. The latter have somehow all turned into Mr. Bean since we last saw them.

Goldblum gives Goldblum, Dern gives Dern, but you’d swear that Sam Neill hasn’t acted since 1993. The only person who looks less happy to be here is Chris Pratt. He’s gotten so miserably bored of being the biggest star in the world that he’s now exclusively interested in voice work and streaming shows that don’t exist.

It’s almost not worth talking about Bryce Dallas Howard, who’s played a completely different character in each of these movies. The movie gets a bit of juice out of Campbell Scott, who replaces disgraced actor Cameron Thor as the weaselly Dr. Dodgson.

If it seems like there’s too many cooks in the kitchen, you don’t know the half of it. I haven’t even gotten to the cloned child from the previous movie (now a jaded teen played by Isabella Sermon) or the helpful rogue agent of BioSyn (Mamoudou Athie). There’s a sliding scale of importance, but Dominion certainly has no fewer than six protagonists.

There are fleeting moments of joy in this movie, but nothing to write home about. All told, this Jurassic World trilogy has amounted to a multi-billion-dollar wash. Part of it is the lack of a Spielberg at the helm. Part of it is the groundbreaking visual effects of the original, which no follow-up could ever match.

Still, there’s more to it than that. Story, character, dialogue, pacing, every element of this series seems out of whack. On a level, Jurassic World was a cynical commentary on reboot culture. But they always knew they’d have to try to bring it all home with this finale. The premise is flawed, but the ideas are truly rotten.

Will a torrent of bad reviews have an effect on this movie’s numbers? Maybe, maybe not. The last two made a billion each, and our current choked-out film market leaves it with less competition.

One can’t help but wonder if new streaming releases like Fire Island and Hustle could’ve eaten away at Jurassic’s returns with a wide theatrical release. Instead, its only competition are indie releases like Neptune Frost (an Afrofuturist musical that’s much more worth your time).

Jurassic World Dominion is poorly-written, poorly-acted, and even poorly-lit. But above all, it’s poorly-conceived, a perfunctory sequel to a franchise of obligation. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom made a billion dollars four years ago, and most of us would be hard-pressed to even remember the title. The two kids who were the main characters of Jurassic World don’t even appear in this one!

Even fans of Jurassic World and its iconic characters like Owen Grady, Claire Dearing, and Maisie Lockwood (100 points if you can remember who that is) will struggle to enjoy Dominion. Worst movie of 2022? Maybe, but definitely the least worth your money. F

Jurassic World Dominion is now playing in theaters.

When we last saw David Cronenberg some eight years ago, he was polarizing critics with a string of oddball dramas. The king of body horror made a hard prestige pivot after the tremendous success of 2005’s A History of Violence, alienating some fans—and friends—in the process.

With Crimes of the Future, Cronenberg completes his hero’s journey. He returns to body horror with over two decades of lessons learned, and the result may be his most effective work since A History of Violence.

Crimes of the Future is a pulpy movie (in more ways than one). It may be misleading to call it “horror;” it’s a neo-noir in a body horror shell, sometimes literally. Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) and Caprice (Léa Seydoux) are a pair of performance artists in a future obsessed with surgery and biohacking. They become wrapped up in an underground conspiracy while flirting with their most daring performance yet.

At the same time, his time spent away from sci-fi has clearly given Cronenberg a renewed sense of focus. Set in Greece, the film’s futurism feels tied to the entire history of European art, which it employs for both tone and satire. Tone is another element that here feels drawn from Cronenberg’s recent experiments.

Believe it or not, Crimes of the Future is a chill, almost comforting film. While there’s plenty of shock value, it takes place in a world desensitized to surgery, wounds, and new flesh. As the story fades into something of a hardboiled detective drama, you start to share the characters’ indifference to these carnal reformations.

As Kristen Stewart’s Timlin insists, “surgery is the new sex.” Stewart’s role was smaller than I anticipated, but she absolutely brings the house down. Her mousy demeanor and barely-restrained horniness turn the iconic tics of her Twilight performance on their head. It’s a stellar, transformative performance, and also an immensely funny one.

Crimes of the Future isn’t the funniest movie of the year, but it’s definitely up there. Despite opening on a brutal scene of filicide, it otherwise finds ample humor in its bleak, awkward characters and the desensitized world they occupy. We see a dancer covered in ears, his eyes and mouth sewn shut… and then immediately hear characters trash-talking him as a hack.

Like all great satires, it also flirts with some profound philosophy. Questions of pain and human nature are just an appetizer for the film’s primary focus: a group of rebels who’ve hacked their bodies to digest plastic and other synthetic materials.

Despite turning organs into art, Saul is nihilistic about these advancements. The government agents he encounters on his journey are concerned with preventing humans from being overtaken by a new species. These conflicts intertwine with a series of suspicious killings and shady characters, all convening around an autopsy Saul is asked to perform live on camera.

The closest movie I can think of to compare Crimes of the Future to is Blade Runner. It’s a funny, moody, grimy future-noir anchored by a stellar cast and world-class direction. It’s also, crucially, a through-and-through Cronenberg movie. His unmistakable techno-gore is never too far away, nor are all his favorite subjects of personal turmoil and ethical confusion.

It’s a fun thought exercise to find the intersection between Cronenberg’s two worlds. You might get more out of Eastern Promises knowing that it’s by the director of eXistenZ. But Crimes of the Future is the film that truly brings it all together. It’s a great crime movie, balancing a tangled web of motives without a single beat out of place. A

Crimes of the Future is now in theaters.