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December 22, 2009

Guest Blogger: The Coming Tidal Wave of Video - Dan Jacobson

With the popularity of YouTube and the ability to watch video on mobile devices, video phones are no longer something from science fiction. The video phone concept was actually introduced five years before the Internet, by AT&T at the 1964 World’s Fair. We’ve come a long way since that visionary day when the Picturephone was unveiled. When visiting with my friends at Sprint we talked about video applications for social media and the enterprise. Dan Jacobson, one of the seamlessenterprise.com bloggers took time to blog about what we discussed. 
 

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The Coming Tidal Wave of Video 

By Dan Jacobson 

Driven by a video generation soon to be entering the workforce, along with the increasing power of video in all types of social media, it’s fair to say that enterprises will be dealing with much more video within the next several years. 

For most companies, video has been limited to a few training videos on the company intranet, or the occasional videoconference. But judging from the consumer side – and to an increasing extent the business-to-consumer side – video will no doubt be the Next Big Thing. 
Look at the growing number of companies that plug their products and services with video, either on their own website or on sites such as YouTube. That’s only going to grow. There’s nothing better than a funny or poignant video that catches fire, generates millions of views, and presents a positive view of your company or positions you as a creative, “cool” organization. There’s also the consideration of dealing with consumer-generated videos – hopefully positive in showing ways to use your product, but potentially negative, like the couple who sang about how the airline broke their guitar earlier this year. A company has to be ready to respond with its own videos, if needed, in such situations. 

For an enterprise, video is one aspect of collaboration and working together on a common project. It is actually one area that I believe will grow the fastest. In this instance, I’m talking more about two-way video sharing, not just pushing out a video to employees or consumers or business associates. This is something that Unified Communications – by enabling connectivity anywhere and anytime, in order for users to drive business value – can make possible.  
For example, let’s say employees are in a video meeting, but one of them has to leave to travel to an appointment. That employee, en route to her car, could remain part of the meeting via her mobile device. This requires integration of the mobile and corporate networks, but this integration is something that more and more companies are embracing. 

Video not only needs mobile integration to work effectively, but also networks that are robust enough for employees to get the bandwidth they need wherever they are. Video does chew up bandwidth pretty quickly, so enterprises have to be sure that their corporate networks have the capacity for them, and that they are taking advantage of wireless networks – such as 4G – that can deliver the needed bandwidth. 

As Jeff Pulver has pointed out, for the millennials, the generation that is just now entering the workforce, video is intuitive. It’s the standard way of doing things. Their arrival in the workforce, coupled with the growing power of video in marketing and promotion, is creating a Perfect Storm if you will, launching a tidal wave of video washing over business as we know it. 

Dan Jacobson is guest blogging on behalf of Sprint’s Seamless Enterprise blog (seamlessenterprise.com), which focuses on unified communications, convergence and related enterprise issues.  
 
 

Posted by jeff on December 22, 2009 09:10 AM | Permalink

Additional resources: #140conf events | Watch the Jeff Pulver Show | Jeff's Qik Videos