Ask the average business leader about the role video plays in the corporate environment and the answer will invariably involve videoconferencing and collaboration. While this is probably the case, albeit only within a small pool of companies, a number of factors have opened up the field to new and innovative applications.
"There are twin drivers behind this," says Brett St Clair, Google's head of new products for sub-Saharan Africa. "There's the growth in the amount of devices, with Internet penetration rates of around 12 million desktop users in SA, and then the price of Internet access, which has plummeted.
"People are becoming more comfortable with consuming online content, and we've just started. It's going to accelerate, and the more bandwidth you have, the richer content you consume."
Research conducted by US-based online video technology and services provider Ooyala shows that online video consumption is rocketing, particularly in the mobile device space. Its most recent Global Video Index reported a 41% increase in mobile phone viewing in the first six months of 2013, while tablet viewing outweighs this audience by 4:1.
This shift has not impeded desktop computer viewing, with the research showing that users watch an average of 41 minutes of video per viewing.
While the research is conducted in 130 countries, there are no insights on viewing patterns in Africa or South Africa.
The business case
St Clair suggests the trends may be similar, but the volume of local online video consumers is much smaller, with only about 4.1 million South Africans currently registered with YouTube.
The business case for including video in the business communication and marketing mix is strong. St Clair says companies use YouTube to build their communities through relevant and engaging content, or to advertise on the platform through Google's ad serving platform.
It isn't necessarily cheap to put together these types of videos, so you have to make sure you evoke a fair reaction to make it worthwhile.
Dominic Richardson, marketing manager, DaxData
Dominic Richardson, marketing manager for Adobe distributor, DaxData, supports Ooyala's findings on the growth of demand for video content on mobile devices, saying video and digital content are becoming more important to any business strategy.
He says the ability to produce a captivating visual promo on a product, even as mundane as a keyboard, could be spiced up to produce an engaging video. The impact of this is most evident on social media platforms that have a far higher interaction rate if they include a compelling video element.
He cautions, however, that this democratisation of the video-publishing model has its drawbacks in that it can tend to the mediocre if everyone wants to get the benefits without investing the time and energy to produce worthwhile content.
"It isn't necessarily cheap to put together these types of videos, so you have to make sure you evoke a fair reaction to make it worthwhile," he says.
Alcatel-Lucent, which has a long history in the enterprise communication and networking environment, has been witness to all the changes in enterprise needs and communication preferences over the past decade.
Its director for sales development in South Europe, Middle East & Africa, Roch Muraine, sees great potential for these changes and how they will impact on corporate video usage.
"Will it be there? We think it will be. It's a bit like a jigsaw puzzle at the moment in that while you're in the middle of it, you don't see the full picture," he says.
Changing the conversation
The types of shifts in the corporate landscape include the shift to unified communications, as it has been envisioned and promoted for the past 10 or more years.
"We see a big increase (55%) in the use of video driving needs for embedded video communication as well as video storage," says Muraine. "In the past 12 months, we've seen a big change to video collaboration changing the conversation."
This shift serves largely the internal audience, meaning less reliance on third-party services like YouTube, but also a greater need to find solutions or systems that enable fast and stable video viewing.
This does, however, raise the question of security and the added need to ensure this content and communication is shielded from prying eyes, particularly as internal communications are more likely to contain sensitive information.
Muraine says the infrastructure to support increased use of video is improving, with concerns more around the cost of bandwidth than the quality of service.
"Things are really happening in South Africa for IP communication. It's more a question of the investment and size of investment that's needed, but I think we're getting there."
Presenting the counter argument to proprietary systems, St Clair says YouTube's big advantage is the scale of the audience it has. "We're essentially the IP cable provider of the world. And now every user has the ability to host a channel."
DaxData's Richardson applauds the abilities that have been enabled by both proprietary and public video services, but warns that companies should guard against producing video for the sake of producing video.
"Make sure it's a fit for the company and that you get the return on investment. If you have a corporate culture that is very 'professional' with little social media interaction, you will need to adapt your whole strategy to get that return on investment from video. This requires that you have a long-term plan on how you are going to use the video, why, how you will flight it and who it's aimed at."
First published in the November 2013 issue of ITWeb Brainstorm magazine.
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