To make enterprise video truly scalable, affordable, and effective it needs to be organized as channels rather than as a series of events. It needs to be a daily part of business behavior and it needs to be able to reach stakeholders at any time on any device. It needs to be an integrated part of today’s business applications rather than in an IT sandbox.
Today most people think of the quarterly “CEO all hands meeting” as a significant event. People gather in large meeting rooms, fly to headquarters, or launch a browser-based webcasting application to tune in. It is a broadcast with limited feedback and is often costly to produce. However, being able to simultaneously reach everyone with a message is valuable, especially for companies with tens of thousands of employees that are distributed globally.
For IT it is usually a nightmare. I used to produce these quarterly CEO events and they were always very stressful. Distributing live streaming video and PowerPoint of the CEO to thousands of employees across a global corporate network is a big production. Setting aside the microphone and lighting issues, last-minute changes to the slides, and the curious spectators who trip over your cables, the network usually takes a big hit and IT tends to panic. It is the one, very rare, time that IT is supporting something that is more important than the CEO being able to surf the Internet and fetch email – it is the CEO live on video and every employee is watching!
When they fail (and they often do with the wrong approach) they are usually written off as “a cutting edge experiment by a forward-thinking CEO” who will try it again next year when the technology is more mature. Many of these events are being produced successfully. It is then that IT really starts to panic. The CEO now wants to do these every month and every VP wants to have their own webcast. I recall working with a company that had 200 VPs and each had their own annual webcast event. I know of several companies who now produce hundreds of live webcast events every year. The technology has arrived and a few companies like VBrick have figured out how to make this work.
Still the cost and complexity of webcast events prevent them from being used frequently despite the effectiveness of video as a communication medium. This is why enterprise video needs to be organized as channels rather than events. Channels can be live broadcasts, simulated live re-broadcasts, or even feeds of small on-demand presentations that can be consumed as time permits. The difference is that these need to be “always on” with the assumption that stakeholders will be able to tune in at any time to consume the content.
Rather than producing complicated events or “virtual destinations” (online conference rooms, portal pages, applications, archives, or video URLs) these channels will be a simple way to join content “in progress”. All that IT needs to worry about is changing the source of the video which could be a video conferencing endpoint, studio, or even a web camera. The distribution infrastructure must be provisioned ahead of time (with IP Multicast enabled and reflectors as needed for non-multicast links) and active at all times for each channel. This model allows production to be reduced to self provisioning and ad hoc technical support as needed. The easiest implementation is to have a small corporate studio that allows any one to walk in and switch the video source from a loop of corporate training or HR videos to the camera source. Call this “Company Channel One”. Once you are comfortable with one channel, you can add more for TV distribution over IP and then new categories of corporate content. These “always on” channels will not have a negative impact on the network if they are properly deployed.
The next step is to put these video channels in front of your stakeholders. Again, rather than asking them to leave their workspace to join scheduled events, you should embed these video channels into their everyday business applications. The most popular “always on” application is the instant messaging software (chat application) which is now a standard part of business productivity software for most enterprises. VBrick has released our IBM SameTime Plug-in which allows one-click access to live and stored video from within this application.
Next, we plan to release an integration with the widely popular Microsoft instant messaging client. We announcedour interest in Microsoft’s Unified Communications platform back in October with the addition of Microsoft’s Vice President of Unified Communications, Gurdeep Pall, to our board of advisors. Our vision is to create “VBrick Video Buddies” for Office Communicator. These “bots” will represent VBrick channels providing presence information about what programs are currently available in each channel and allow users to be one-click away from these live channels via the Contact Context Window. This integration promises to go beyond the utility of the SameTime plug-in as Microsoft embeds these presence capabilities into all of their business productivity applications. This means that these VBrick video channels can be in front of your business stakeholders at all times.
These innovations, built upon the industry-leading VBrick infrastructure, will transform enterprise video from a costly IT nightmare to an affordable and effective way to communicate with substantial impact and unlimited reach.
Good stuff Erik, it is important for those producing and distributing corporate content to take a holistic approach and view of the “lifecycle” of key communications. This includes targeted messages to alert the intended audience of the availability of the content, why it is important to that person to view said piece, the ability for employees to share the link with others, and (what I feel is too often missed) is a reminder. The reality is viewership rates are too often low versus the production and distribution effort, often that is a by product of the asynchronous nature of the employee schedules. Have a full strategy for content, simply placing it within a portal typically won’t result in the type of viewership executives expect. Using more integrated tools like Unified Communications is an important step to getting the content in front of the targeted audience.
Would I consider a corporate video production?
The question is can I afford not to!
Its not about staying ahead of your competitors anymore, its about keeping up with them.
I agree, either do it as a solid state resource or do not do it at all! Otherwise it’s a jerry-rigged half baked resource. Good stuff Erik!