Employees and customers are primed for video: Be prepared
1 IF A COMPANY DOES NOT CURRENTLY USE VIDEO, IS THIS A TREND THEY CAN IGNORE?
Over 4bn YouTube videos are viewed every day, and 60 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. So even if customers are not deploying video for business use, that doesn’t mean their employees are not flooding their network with video traffic. Also, even if a company does not currently use video as a business tool, customers typically build networks for three to five years. Consider that three years ago, none of us had heard of an iPad, whereas in the fourth quarter of 2011, Apple sold more iPads than Hewlett Packard sold PCs. So it’s important to build a network that can support future predictions, including the prevalent use of video.
2 WHAT DOES A COMPANY DEPLOYING VIDEO NEED TO CONSIDER ON THE NETWORK?
It’s not just a case of having sufficient bandwidth. Previous networks have been able to prioritise video over voice and data, but with Gartner’s prediction that video will be 90 per cent of all internet traffic by 2015, we need to do more than prioritise video over voice and data. We need to be able to prioritise some video over other video. For example, a company may decide to prioritise business-relevant video-conferencing over social video, or it may decide to prioritise video traffic of some employees based on their rank or job function. Networks today do have this ability and thus guarantee not just that video can be used, but that business-critical video is prioritised.
3 WHAT NEW WAYS DO YOU EXPECT US TO BE USING VIDEO OVER THE NEXT TWO TO FIVE YEARS?
We have already seen a massive growth in the amount of video being used in a business-to-business capacity with video conferencing and telepresence. Likewise, consumer and social video has exploded thanks to applications like Skype and Facetime. But what is still to come is the use of video in a consumer-to-business capacity – using video to purchase goods from an online store for example, or meeting with medical experts and travel agents over video rather than in person, and having a video call with customer services teams. We believe the use of video for ecommerce in this way will become prevalent in the next couple of years.