So much video, so little time.
This lament is being shared by executives at more and more companies as broader adoption of online video technologies translates into a proliferation in the archives of content available for on-demand replay.
Nearly nine out of 10 organizations that use online video are adding content to their archives on at least a monthly basis, according to results of a Wainhouse Research survey of 1,007 corporate executives conducted in the fourth quarter of 2013. Forty-three percent of these companies using online video report that they are piling 10 or more hours of video content into their archives monthly.
So, if you happen to feel like you’re drowning in a sea of archived, replayable online video content, you can be quite sure that you are not alone. Plenty of business users are wrestling with the implications of increasingly commonplace video creation in the enterprise. Here are five best practices that organizations with extensive online video experience are applying in an effort to make better use of their bulging online video content archives.
• Extend Your Video Workflow: Many professional videographers have access to technology solutions that aid in the content creation process. Ample software and services are available to take video captured from a camera and then transcode it for on-demand distribution. Not everybody thinks, however, about the technology that is needed once that video is in the can. Today’s marketplace offers a range of hosted and on-premise software solutions that manage video so that executives can more readily lay their hands on the right piece of video at the right time. Content management platforms can automate the process of creating customized portals that showcase the videos of most relevance to executives based on their role within the organization and their stated topic priorities. Depending on the solution selected, content management offerings also simplify the collection of metatag information that helps users when searching for specific videos of interest. Simply put, a video workflow without content management features is not a video workflow suitable for the enterprise.
• Recognize that Information is Power: When evaluating content management solutions, carefully review the specific manner in which the system generates metatag information. The better the metatags, the more effectively end users can find what they’re looking for when conducting a search. In some cases, content management systems only accept metatag information entered manually by the content creator. Others try to apply automated speech-to-text conversion technologies to create more detailed searchable transcripts. The accuracy of these automated approaches, however, can be suspect. Compare the capabilities of each solution under consideration to determine which one is best-suited to address the needs of your organization.
• See Corporate Directories as a Linchpin: Content management solutions work best when they can leverage known information on the audiences likely to be tapping into video archives. With this in mind, look for content management solutions that are able to exchange information with the corporate directories already used in your organization’s computing system. Such directories hold a storehouse of information on employees, such as their job title, functional role and the department in which they work. This corporate demographic information can be vital in identifying the specific groups of employees who would benefit most from seeing a specific piece of content.
• Track Viewership: Analytics tools are a key piece of any content management solution. By tracking the types of videos that are being watched on a corporate network—and who is doing the watching—executives can develop a more informed understanding of what types of videos work within their organization. If nobody is watching a specific type of video, that’s a clear sign for individuals to stop making that content. Similarly, high levels of consumption of video on a specific topic can help identify the video presentations that have the most impact on an organization’s success.
• Keep the Doors Locked: Finally, content management solutions play a key role in addressing the primary concern of any IT executive: security. Whether it’s protecting video from being watched by unauthorized viewers or providing the safeguards to ensure that video usage does not compromise the security of a corporate network, content management platforms can help minimize the risks some IT executives associate with implementing online video. If you are a video producer seeking to encourage adoption of more advanced video solutions within your organization, recognize that security is a deal-breaker for your colleagues from the information technology department. Before spending time looking at the fun bells and whistles of any content management solution, first make sure the vendor can tell a compelling story on security. There’s no use falling in love with a platform that lacks rock-solid security. The folks in the IT department will never let you deploy it.
Steve Vonder Haar is a senior analyst with Wainhouse Research and can be reached at svonder@wainhouse.com.
The Last Frontier: Internal Video Searching
Industry analysts predict that by 2016 we’ll all spend 45 minutes every day watching video at work, according to the video platform provider Panopto. The enterprise video platform market is $11 billion today and is predicted to grow to $35 billion in by 2018. However, standard, YouTube-style video search — which searches only for titles, tags, and comments — has so far limited video’s effectiveness. Panopto and Qumu are both offering internal video search improvements, delivering new ways to search inside video content.
The new version of the Panopto video platform lets customers search the actual content of their videos, including: any word ever spoken in a video, by any speaker (with new automatic speech recognition); any word that ever appears in a video, even in screen captures or recorded whiteboards (with new optical character recognition); any word included in presentation slides, even speakers notes; any word used in a video’s public notes or comments; In every recording across their entire video library, new or old, and whether or not that video was recorded with Panopto. It can automatically fast forward right to the exact moment the keyword is used.
Nexidia, developer of dialogue and audio analysis products and technologies for optimizing audio and video media, stated recently that the Qumu enterprise video platform will now offer Video Speech Search.
Visit www.panopto.com and www.nexidia.com for more information.
