STREAMING VIDEO
Large corporations, small-to-medium businesses, colleges & universities, hospitals and law firms and more continue to invest in video communications because of the enormous promise it holds for improving the flow of information through an organization. Gone are the days when video communications meant videoconferencing—the opportunity to avoid the cost of an expensive airline ticket by adding video to a conference call. Video communications today is about better, more effective and faster communication at all levels of an organization—not just the executive office. In fact, the transforming power of video communications is most apparent when in the hands of knowledge workers whose everyday activities define the difference between success and failure for a business.

The power of video communications can be found in…
• a product manager highlighting key selling points to a sales team in an 8-minute video segment that will be viewed by 4,000 people in 14 countries and 6 time zones, all in time for the product launch;
• an HR administrator recording a new employee orientation walk-thru regarding benefits, policies and company culture, allowing her to manage her time during a steep ramp in hiring;
• an IT technician creating a tutorial on how to install and run the new VPN application to help 500 home-based employees get up and running quickly without overwhelming limited phone support resources;
• a large financial services company training 5,000 new retail branch employees on Sarbanes-Oxley compliance after acquiring a smaller regional bank;
• a school district in rural Mississippi improving standardized test scores by supplementing classroom learning with recorded segments from best-in-class teachers at neighboring school districts.

The power of video as a communications tool that can change how we work and transform businesses is well-documented, in case study after case study in vertical markets as diverse as education, healthcare, financial services, government, etc. However, just as well-documented are the challenges facing organizations that strive to integrate video communications into the way they do business.

Over the years, countless companies, products, applications and services have emerged on the video communications landscape. Organizations face difficult decisions on which technologies and applications are right for them, and how to make it all work. Videoconferencing, video streaming, webcasting, satellite, IPTV, cable TV are just some of the technologies and applications that companies have integrated in the hope of harnessing the power of video. In the end, many of these companies find that they have implemented disparate systems, from multiple vendors, that don’t interoperate, are redundant, expensive to own, and perhaps most disappointing—still don’t reach everyone in the organization. As a result, the transforming power of video communications is still not realized, and the organizations are left to wonder what failed in their strategy, and what the remedy is.