Case Study: Jyske Bank Serves Espresso, Enterprise Video
Beyond Digital Signage
Jensen says that the desire to run digital signage within the bank branches was a big part of the original impetus behind the enterprise video installation. "We wanted digital signage, of course—everyone does that nowadays—but we also wanted to use video to help explain things to people," he says. "We have brochures, but some people just don’t read brochures. But video helps a lot to explain our products. Video is a very effective communications tool. Of course, we wanted digital signage because it looks good and it’s easy to manage. And you don’t have to run around changing posters and stuff like that. But we wanted more than that."
If you’re going to have a lot of monitors in public areas, it makes a lot of sense to use them for digital signage, says Pattison. "You don’t want that expensive plasma screen just sitting there dark," he says. In other words, if you have the monitors, you may as well use them as often as possible (in the case of digital signage, continuously) to get your messages out. He explains that when a customer takes control via mouse, bar code, or touch screen, the system will do an auto-interrupt to remove the signage stream and replace it with the new requested stream.
"Jyske is using its digital signage mostly for bank messaging, which is good," says Pattison. "In the early days of digital signage, people were doing stuff like rolling CNN, which really doesn’t help the company get its message out. Fortunately, Jyske has enough of their own branded video content that they can run video messages constantly. They don’t need much filler."
On the Inside
Jensen reports that since the completion of the Jyske enterprise video system last September, the bank has been using it internally more and more. It has become an important communication system for the bank’s 4,000 geographically scattered employees.
"They are using video at Jyske Banks to reach their customers with this very targeted digital signage-based solution," says Pattison, "but they are also using video to inform and educate people internally, using webcasting out of a world-class studio. And they are doing webcasting across branches as well as capturing those communications for later video-on-demand playback." This sort of internal education is important, says Pattison, "because in financial services there is a lot of information and lot of events in the market related to products that knowledge workers need to be made aware of on a day to day basis."
Jyske Bank has "its own corporate network with a very thick pipe out to the branches," says Pattison. Indeed, those pipes are "20-megabit lines and next year they’ll be 40," says Jensen. "We have a large fiber network, so we have no problem with bandwidth," he adds. Jyske is using these big pipes to do "live webcasts, corporate communications, executive addresses, quarterly updates, and so on," says Pattison. "And they are now doing a Friday morning analyst update for all the branches. And all the bank employees have their own desktops, so they’ll webcast to the desktops. Those viewers will either see the corporate event through live webcasting or they’ll find it on demand through the portal."
Who’s Providing What?
Without a scorecard, it’s difficult to tell who has contributed what to the enterprise video system that Jyske Bank is now using, but Media Publisher’s Pattison summarizes the credits:
"There are three flavors of hardware in play here—encoding appliances from Envivio, caching boxes from Stratacache, and the digital signage endpoints. And to make that work, you need software, and that’s what we do. We bring that all together. Our Video Control Center is the platform agent that talks to the encoder, the streaming servers, and the network."
Ian Locke, VP of strategic alliances for Envivio Inc., describes his company’s contribution to the system:
"Jyske has eight of our encoders and over 120 of our video servers, which they use both as a repository for the video as well as to do all the unicast and multicast requesting that needs to take place within an enterprise network." He says that there is at least one Envivio video server in each of the 119 Jyske branches, and multiple servers at the bank headquarters.
Locke believes Jyske chose his company’s equipment because Envivio specializes in MPEG-4/H.264. "The thing they like about our technology is they can play it back on set-top boxes, they can play it back on PCs, and in the future, they can go mobile with their content," says Locke. "I think they are interested in maintaining open standards and high standards, but they’ve also bought into our convergence message about being able to get out to all platforms and being able to offer multiple services."
"We see one of the key advantages of H.264 as being able to move it across networks, across any kind of network, out to any kind of client device. We see that as our big strength, especially when compared to other broadcast or enterprise technologies," says Locke. "MPEG-4 is made for real-time applications like this. H.264 can get from one end of the network to the other with less than a two-second latency. That kind of live video has traditionally been a huge obstacle or problem for many enterprise video technologies, especially Windows Media."