The commercial applications for digital media are growing fast. IDC conducted a survey to assess adoption of video usage within the business environment for internal communications with employees, training, collaboration, etc.
Their findings come from IDC's Enterprise Panel. The panel is an online community of IT and line-of-business professionals who influence the technology-related investment decisions of their organization. The panel includes worldwide businesses of all sizes and in all industries.
If you believe that business video applications are just for large corporations, or that SMBs can't benefit from the availability of digital media basic authoring tools, then you should read my post entitled "Business Video on an SMB Budget" -- which is featured on Dell's Small Business blog.
Key findings from IDC's survey include:
- Videoconferencing (or TelePresence) is the most dominant use-case for enterprise video today, followed closely by employee training, record/playback of meetings, and executive communications to employees.
- At the majority of organizations that use business video today, employees watch the video on their PCs (both on-demand and live). Respondents expect a significant increase in the use of enterprise video to employee's mobile phones and iPods in the next two years. Video will become pervasive across multiple channels.
- The typical employee watches 4.6 hours of enterprise video per month today; survey respondents expect that number to more than double to 9.8 hours per month over the next two years.
- Respondents ranked cost avoidance, improved collaboration, and improved customer service highly as business drivers for adoption of enterprise video; reinforcing company culture or branding ranked close behind.
- IT and corporate communications own the budget for business video, but budgets are often fragmented across the organization.
