Company Profile: FocusVision Empowers Market Research with Streaming Media

That’s not to say that videoconferencing has nothing to offer in terms of advantages over streaming, it’s just that many of those advantages aren’t as important to this mode of video communication. "Since this is for all intents and purposes a one-way viewing experience, a lot of the benefits of videoconferencing don’t apply, such as two-way video. Certainly doing a debriefing via video chat has its benefits, but it’s not been enough to drive people to videoconferencing," says Kunar. "And the fact that it’s transmitted onto a large-screen viewing experience also hasn’t seemed to override the benefits of video streaming."

The biggest of these benefits stems from the ability to deliver live video without the need for special dedicated equipment on the viewer’s end. "The biggest driver of video streaming is its flexibility. A lot of times the core market researchers are ordering a video stream so that their internal clients who commissioned the research internally can join in easily, such as marketers, brand managers and so on," says Houlahan.

"Getting people to go down to a conference room and sit there for a long period of time when they’re not core market researchers wasn’t nearly as appealing as being able to pull a stream up on their computers at work or even at home, especially if there’s west coast research and east coast clients," Houlahan continues. "So we think the adoption of streaming has been driven by non-market researchers."

Continued Growth for the Future
FocusVision sees numerous additional applications for its services. "We’re currently sitting on an infrastructure that can be applied to many different verticals, such as streaming legal depositions, education, human resources, corporate training, financial announcements and other things like that," says Kunar. "But our focus is definitely on market research. The transmission of qualitative research via streaming or videoconferencing is the industry that we created and we want to keep our eye on that."

And the different ways in which their reach may be extended include a whole host of applications, especially those that can help locate market research closer to the places where consumers actually live their lives rather than keeping it centered around market research facilities. "We have written proposals for mobile units for some large corporations. There’s a definite interest there, for things like a kiosk in a mall, or having consumers walk into the 2007 model of a car and look at the dashboard," says Kunar. "Eventually we’re going to be streaming from stores, from someone’s mobile phone. We’re experimenting with things like that, and trying to be as far out on the edge of delivering streaming media as our clients ask us to be."

"It’s kind of unknown where this is all headed at this point. We’re trying to step out and lead the charge on it," says Houlahan. "And there’s still a lot of room for growth in this market research vertical, both for new applications of our technology and simply for customers who are new to market research in general or streaming media in particular."