Reducing Latency in the Enterprise

It would be hard to argue that enterprise video wasn’t the saving grace of the online video industry when the dot-com bubble crashed. With all the speculation that online video promised for an internet TV revolution back as early as the 1990s, it didn’t take long for corporations to realize they could increase their own bottom line with online video easily, by reducing travel for training staff and customers. 14 years later, we can pretty much say the same thing. While OTT video is still the “Wild West” with sporadic monetary successes, online video has permanently transformed the way business operates and will continue to do so.

Collaboration, communication, and documentation have been the mainstay of use by large organizations, but uses continue to evolve— and quickly. Pervasive use of video throughout an organization is certainly the current affair, and finding the ROI for investing in a strategy that allows everyone to capture, organize, and share the content is being hammered out on boardroom tables across the world. IT departments are thrilled—it’s providing job security. With the moving target of mobile playing such a dominant force in content consumption and even acquisition, getting everything to “play nice” in a technology sandbox, while minding the bottom line, is as challenging as pushing an elephant through a keyhole.

It’s going to get worse before it gets better, too: Storage issues, indexing, searchability, closed captioning, translation, security, and of course the looming “corporate censorship process” are all major ongoing issues.

The good news is that for the most part, the enterprise still sees the greatest value in on-demand video, save those live webcasts and real time meetings, of course. But “latency,” to use the term loosely, is still a big issue. Just how fast can your video workflow be from capture to consumption? That is the challenge, technologically, and administratively. So, how are you going to fine-tune your enterprise video strategy to be on the cutting-edge as the world around you accelerates?

While all these questions are most likely already on your mind—and I’ve probably done more harm to easing your mind than good—the purpose of this Superguide is to give you direct access to significant companies that build enterprise solutions and have proven track records with real customers. There’s enough data out there to show that the enterprise video spend is going to double within 5 years from where it is today, but just read Tim Siglin’s recent “The State of Enterprise Video 2014” at http://go2sm.com/stateofenterprise if you have any doubts. The real question is how are you going to keep up with the Joneses? This is where I’ll leave it to the pros...