Cost Savings and Pitfalls in Enterprise Streaming
Streaming video internally can save companies money on travel and reduce meeting times, but there are pitfalls to consider before leaping ahead. As Jake Ward, business development director for Groovy Gecko, told the audience at the recent Streaming Media Europe conference in London, do it wrong and it might be years before a second chance occurs.
"It's like a fragile package: if you get this wrong and you're delivering to the audience, you get one chance at this to get it right. If you get it wrong it can go disastrously wrong, and this will not be done for several years within an organization because the nervousness around it is simply too great. So, you have to [look at]... what structure you have, what network you have, how you solve those inherent problems that are in every customer location," says Ward.
There are several obstacles to internal video, and -- as many know -- one of the biggest is often a company's IT department.
"There's also that other big unspoken issue that people don't want to talk about, and that's their own IT department. Your own IT department will get in the way of very good communications -- I can already see people nodding -- because they need to protect the network, and particularly when the network is absolutely critical, things like financial services, they will constantly protect the network first, and communications comes somewhere down a long list of needs," explains Ward.
What marketing and communications teams need to do is find solutions that are easy for IT to buy into.
Companies streaming video to employees also need to understand that sites like YouTube are their real competition -- not because they're a distraction at work, but because they create a level of expectation about what streaming video should look like.
"You've got to understand what you're up against in the way of content. If you look in this country, the big content provider is the iPlayer and the BBC. So, to be honest, if I'm going to watch video online, that's my common language," says Ward.
Provide just as good an experience as YouTube and the BBC, because that's what people are used to.
For the full discussion, watch the video below:
Cost Savings from Enterprise Streaming: How the Conversation has Changed
Chris Frampton, Director Business Development, EMEA, Northern Europe and Ireland, Octoshape
Ashley Gibbons, Director EMEA, On24
Jake Ward, Business Development Director, Groovy Gecko
Years of conclusive statistics show that streaming can offset travel costs, outsourced services and production costs, and the opportunity costs of removing employees from the office for meetings. But once you've proved the ROI on paper and have your programme going, the question becomes, "How does the enterprise deliver on the promise?" This session features first-hand examples from Times 100 Companies that are using streaming to support core communications, training, and educational programs and employing metrics to prove cost savings and employee engagement.