The Internet Is Now The Videonet

As we head into September, the
International Broadcast Conference (IBC)
is just around the corner. But it’s not just for broadcasters anymore. With
content creation now a crucial element of every company’s growth strategy,
there’s been a huge increase in the number of enterprise clients attending
IBC in recent years. All Fortune 2000 companies are becoming broadcasters on
the videonet.

This year the global media, entertainment and
technology event will delve into topics such as industry trends in video
production, advances in technology (including AI), augmented reality, and
media asset management.

One of the key reasons
that IBC is a must-attend event is that video is projected to make up as
much as 82% of all internet traffic by 2020 (source:
Cisco</a >). The internet has become the videonet. Video is no longer just the domain
of media and entertainment companies. In fact, enterprises are now creating
more video in one day than Hollywood creates in a year (source: Frost &
Sullivan). The good news is that is now easier, faster and cheaper than ever
before to create, collaborate on, manage, publish and distribute video. This
means the barriers to entry are significantly lower than ever before.

Why Use Enterprise Video?

So how can your business use video to generate leads, stimulate growth and
reduce overheads? Enterprise video can include live broadcasting as well as
pre-recorded video which viewers can watch at a time that suits them. It
offers greater benefits than video conferencing, in particular in terms of
scalability. While video conferencing requires special equipment and
broadcasts to a set number of people, enterprise video provides the
opportunity to reach a much greater number of viewers — millions, in
fact.

Another tremendous benefit is that you can reach people all over the world
through enterprise video. There’s huge scope for companies to use it
effectively for both internal corporate communication and for external
marketing campaigns.

Increasing demand for interactivity among internet users has been a trend
for many years: enterprise video fulfils this demand through the facility
for viewers to submit questions to a presenter and to comment socially on
the video stream they are watching.

The Business Case For Enterprise Video

It’s a lot of fun creating video content but what’s the business case for
enterprise video? Well, it can help you to increase revenue and reduce costs
in a number of areas, starting with employee engagement. Video is an
efficient way to ensure that all of your employees are on message, which
leads to greater agility. It can also provide information effectively to
internal teams and external clients, and is especially useful for employee
training.

65% of people are visual learners (source: Social Science Research Network).
Therefore employees who learn or train with the aid of video process
information faster and retain more of what they have learned. In many areas
of your business, using video can reduce costs on employee work time,
product roll out, trade shows and travel.

Another very productive application of video is in sales and marketing. A
study by EyeView Digital shows that embedding video in landing pages can
increase conversion by 80%. You can use video to live-launch a new product,
to make viewers feel connected to you, to influence potential customers
through client testimonials. Or to give people a sneak preview of an
upcoming innovation (consumers love behind the scenes peeks!)

Digital Asset Management

However, there’s little point in using video to save money if your media
asset management is inefficient and costly. Enterprise video solutions
provide the capability to seamlessly create, manage, publish, and distribute
video. Since content needs to be delivered on multiple platforms,  </span >the best option is cloud-based software which provides easy conversion to
the ideal formats and frame rates that each social media platform requires.

Chris Witmayer, Director Of Broadcast, Post Production & New Media
Technology, NASCAR Media Group said that,“Although we have an entire archive that goes back to the 1930s, we
can’t actually find anything efficiently. If you can’t find anything,
you can’t sell it, and you can’t make money. So this [AI] is big for
us.”</i >
Fortunately for Chris — and for the rest of us — this problem is a thing of
the past. Digital asset management platforms are using artificial
intelligence to automate manual tasks such as metadata tagging, image
recognition, captioning and speech-to-text transcription.

Scaling Up

Once you experience first-hand the benefits of video to your business, you
may desire to scale up your video production while maintaining quality and
lowering costs. It’s time to get those disks and drives out from underneath
the desks in your office and embrace the age of cloud-based digital asset
management! We explore this further
in our next post</a >.

Contact him on
philippe@overcasthq.com or
@PhilippeBrodeur on Twitter to arrange to meet up.