As we head into September, the International Broadcast Conference (IBC) is just around the corner. But it’s not just for broadcasters anymore. With content creation now a crucial element of every company’s growth strategy, there’s been a huge increase in the number of enterprise clients attending IBC in recent years. All Fortune 2000 companies are becoming broadcasters on the videonet.

This year the global media, entertainment and technology event will delve into topics such as industry trends in video production, advances in technology (including AI), augmented reality, and media asset management. 

One of the key reasons that IBC is a must-attend event is that video is projected to make up as much as 82% of all internet traffic by 2020 (source: Cisco). The internet has become the videonet. Video is no longer just the domain of media and entertainment companies. In fact, enterprises are now creating more video in one day than Hollywood creates in a year (source: Frost & Sullivan). The good news is that is now easier, faster and cheaper than ever before to create, collaborate on, manage, publish and distribute video. This means the barriers to entry are significantly lower than ever before.

Why Use Enterprise Video?

So how can your business use video to generate leads, stimulate growth and reduce overheads? Enterprise video can include live broadcasting as well as pre-recorded video which viewers can watch at a time that suits them. It offers greater benefits than video conferencing, in particular in terms of scalability. While video conferencing requires special equipment and broadcasts to a set number of people, enterprise video provides the opportunity to reach a much greater number of viewers — millions, in fact. 

Another tremendous benefit is that you can reach people all over the world through enterprise video. There’s huge scope for companies to use it effectively for both internal corporate communication and for external marketing campaigns. 

Increasing demand for interactivity among internet users has been a trend for many years: enterprise video fulfils this demand through the facility for viewers to submit questions to a presenter and to comment socially on the video stream they are watching. 

The Business Case For Enterprise Video

It’s a lot of fun creating video content but what’s the business case for enterprise video? Well, it can help you to increase revenue and reduce costs in a number of areas, starting with employee engagement. Video is an efficient way to ensure that all of your employees are on message, which leads to greater agility. It can also provide information effectively to internal teams and external clients, and is especially useful for employee training. 

65% of people are visual learners (source: Social Science Research Network). Therefore employees who learn or train with the aid of video process information faster and retain more of what they have learned. In many areas of your business, using video can reduce costs on employee work time, product roll out, trade shows and travel.

Another very productive application of video is in sales and marketing. A study by EyeView Digital shows that embedding video in landing pages can increase conversion by 80%. You can use video to live-launch a new product, to make viewers feel connected to you, to influence potential customers through client testimonials. Or to give people a sneak preview of an upcoming innovation (consumers love behind the scenes peeks!)

Digital Asset Management

However, there’s little point in using video to save money if your media asset management is inefficient and costly. Enterprise video solutions provide the capability to seamlessly create, manage, publish, and distribute video. Since content needs to be delivered on multiple platforms,  the best option is cloud-based software which provides easy conversion to the ideal formats and frame rates that each social media platform requires.

Chris Witmayer, Director Of Broadcast, Post Production & New Media Technology, NASCAR Media Group said that,“Although we have an entire archive that goes back to the 1930s, we can’t actually find anything efficiently. If you can’t find anything, you can’t sell it, and you can’t make money. So this [AI] is big for us.” Fortunately for Chris — and for the rest of us — this problem is a thing of the past. Digital asset management platforms are using artificial intelligence to automate manual tasks such as metadata tagging, image recognition, captioning and speech-to-text transcription.

Once you experience first-hand the benefits of video to your business, you may desire to scale up your video production while maintaining quality and lowering costs. It’s time to get those disks and drives out from underneath the desks in your office and embrace the age of cloud-based digital asset management! We explore this further in our next post.

Contact him on philippe@overcasthq.com or @PhilippeBrodeur on Twitter to arrange to meet up.