Simplifying Rich Media Communications

In today’s global business environment, the need to improve corporate communications and effectively train a distributed work force while containing costs have forced both business and IT decision makers to search for new, yet reliable, cost-effective solutions.

Streaming audio and video can offer enterprises the ability to help dramatically increase the efficiency and effectiveness of their corporate communications efforts – from rich media corporate portal content, to live webcast presentations, to distance education for employees, and more. While these efforts were largely considered "science projects" just a few years ago, the maturation of enterprise IT infrastructure, streaming and content management technologies, now mean that digital media publishing can help meet the needs of large organizations with an efficient cost model.

However, implementing a complete digital media publishing solution requires the integration of many technologies, especially in large organizations with many distributed small- or medium- sized locations. Even though these organizations are most likely to significantly benefit from digital media publishing, addressing the challenges associated with the introduction of rich media publishing has seemed cost prohibitive.

Furthermore, in organizations where digital media implementations are currently used, these solutions frequently introduce additional complexities for IT organizations. As a result, many of these corporations have limited the expansion of streaming media, despite acknowledging its value as a compelling way to improve communications throughout the enterprise.

Requirements Defined
PEREY Research & Consulting, Inc. recently performed a rich media publishing study that identified those business requirements that would provide the promised customer benefits along with a solid return on investment:
-Automated distribution: Create content delivery groupings and business rules so that content could be automatically populated to the desired office or group of offices, ideally with "embargo" and "kill" options.
-Flexible recording and delivery options: Ability to remotely control multiple encoders, providing content at multiple bitrates, during a live broadcast/multicast.
-Easy multimedia content creation: Ability to easily synchronize presentation content, such as graphics, slides and pre-recorded video files prior to or during a live presentation.
-Simple, flexible control over content presentation and viewing: Ability to make "look and feel" changes without IT intervention.
-Sophisticated search capabilities: Allow users to find content via keyword or pertinent metadata (e.g., date, time, speaker) through a standard web browser.
-Asset management tools: Ability to allow digital media content (including word processing, spreadsheets, PDF, graphics, audio, video) to be easily uploaded and stored.
-Reporting tools: Ability to provide information on viewership by media type viewed, length of view, popularity of content and custom statistics.