Convincing Your Boss You Need Streaming Media

BOSS: "Show Me the Money!"

Most decision-makers want some sort of benchmark to determine whether a streaming initiative makes financial sense. What your boss wants to do is compare a familiar way of achieving a result against your new proposal, and wants a return-on-investment in hard numbers. But since the application of streaming is often an enhancement of a communications strategy that has already proven its ROI, it may be best viewed in terms of cost avoidance, and in terms of leveraging investments already made—such as your networking infrastructure.

Does Streaming Make Money?

Unless you are in the "content creation" or "broadcasting" business, streaming media will not make you money…it will help you avoid spending the money you have by providing a better way of doing the things you already do:
1. Improved Communications: Streaming media provides unambiguous, instant delivery of your message to your target audience. Your audience may be employees, students, customers, investors, or the whole world.
2. Training & Education: Employees and customers receive continuous training without the costs, scheduling difficulties, and hassles inherent in classroom sessions.
3. Advertising & Marketing: Nothing communicates a sales pitch better than sight and sound. Complex messages and demonstrations are best delivered using as many of the human senses as possible.
4. Security & Monitoring: Streaming video allows you to monitor important or sensitive areas from virtually anywhere in the world.

Streaming media goes well beyond merely "improving" communications. It fills a basic need to engage multiple senses that were heretofore impossible to truly engage at a reasonable cost.

Overcoming Objections—The Three Cs
Hopefully, when it comes to your boss, seldom is heard a discouraging word, but just in case, you should be prepared to counter some of the myths of streaming. There are three categories of objections that bosses seem most often to have with streaming media: Cost, Complexity, and Content Quality.

Cost
Your boss may believe that streaming media is exotic, expensive, or has "hidden costs." He or she may be right if you are proposing to go down a proprietary path. Proprietary solutions tend to lock the customer into one vendor, leading to "mandatory" and expensive upgrades at the whim of a vendor. On the other hand, if you are proposing a robust, field-proven, virus-proof, standards-based solution, the cost can be quite low. But more importantly, the cost is predictable. Today, a single streaming video appliance can deliver MPEG-2 video to every enterprise desktop and simultaneously deliver MPEG-4 to remote offices and the general public. When you take such an "appliance approach," the cost to deploy streaming media is about the cost of a high-end PC. And a "PC approach" can also be very cost-effective.