Navigating the Enterprise Video Workflow

"Our primary focus has always been on the screen [computer image] or slides, not on the presenter," says Lawson. "We also have users in China, Europe, and other locations that use the system by combining audio synced with slides. About a year into our streaming integration, executives decided they wanted to do weekly broadcasts."

Lockheed’s Aquilone notes that, beyond the initial success of the September 2004 event, other leaders in the organization began to use streaming in place of more-expensive audio and videoconferencing equipment. Part of the reason was that videoconferencing was limited in its reach, having only been installed in select locations.

"From January 2004 to September 2004, we were working with IT to stand up multicasting across the entire corporation," Aquilone says. "Integrated systems and solutions [IS&S] was the name of our business area when we began to work with streaming, but now we’re called information systems and global services, including global services around the world, and [we] number about 50,000 employees. Now, the HR organizations, leadership development programs, ethics, benefits, performance management, and even some larger Lockheed Martin corporate entities are using streaming capability across our enterprise."

Aquilone says two other groups began to express interest in streaming.

"Our learning and development folks adopted it for training purposes," he says, "and appreciated the value of rebroadcasts [Lockheed’s term for video on demand] that could be repurposed to new learners. They found that as long as the material presented stayed current, via edits, … the content could be repurposed for months."

What Hasn’t Changed
For all the uptake and the moves to single or multivendor platforms, several of the reps say that there are a few key points that have remained constant over the years.

Fox says Merck still focuses primarily on live events, estimating that 95% of the webcasts are live with an archival copy.

"Our presenters enjoy using a live audience and getting live feedback," Fox says. "Our commitment to live is so strong that sometimes executives will do two versions of a live event: one for one set of time zones and another one later in the day for another set of time zones."

CA has a fiber connection to Ascent Media in New York, which has been kept in place in case the company needs to do a satellite uplink. But Lasher says that the corporate philosophy is to do as much of it as possible across the intranet.

"We wanted to bring it in-house, taking control of the events," Lasher says, "and even taking the blame if something goes wrong. We’re an IT company, so we have the expertise in-house to make it work. The network was set up for multicasting initially, but now that my group falls under IT, we can tweak and do more testing to make it better, continuing to expand multicasting to cover every corporate location across the globe."

Lockheed’s early days in streaming, in order to protect the network, used a combination of live events and rebroadcasts prior to putting a recorded presentation in an on-demand unicast: As soon as the live event was complete, the event would be rebroadcast in a looping multicast. In recent years, network multicasting has become more robust, even as viewers become more comfortable with on-demand viewing.

"We’ve still got a multicast loop test running all the time, even today," says Aquilone, "so that we have an easy way to confirm that the particular site we’re going to is showing the live stream from our Multivision servers and they are multicast enabled."