Movies began as epic spectacles produced by large film production companies as entertainment for the masses, a theater for the proletariat, if you will. Then from the silent “moving pictures”, we saw theater legends as living, breathing, and speaking icons of beauty, strength, and coolness. The modern movie was born. From there, the medium became more intimate, as movie houses were threatened with extinction by the advent of mass-produced, distributed and cheap VHS videos that could be viewed from the comfort of one’s own couch.
It was a small jump, relatively speaking, from there to the ability of everyday folks to make their own videos and the technology grew to enable them to eliminate the step of having them transferred at a photography shop, to being able to plug directly into the viewing device of choice and hit “play”. In the few decades that videos have become massively available media, a lot has changed, most significantly the uses and users of them. The home movies made over the past several decades, are paradoxically intimate and universal – they belie the human desire to document and share knowledge and experience that is relevant to a particular group or subset of people, i.e., a family, group, or association. And it is perhaps this jump that most coincides with the business applications of video – to convey a story that is personal, engaging, and transmits distinctive value to the audience.
With this prime imperative in mind, the use of video in business has gone from dry, bare bones, “orientation”, or “how to” videos, to videos that can address a wide range of organizational needs and responses to those needs – from all levels of an organization. Business video solutions take communications beyond traditional forms of communication, because of their mobility and accessibility – they are a way of democratizing corporate communication and putting a human face to it.
Some Compelling Reasons for Video in the Enterprise:
Consumers are loading 35 hours of video to YouTube every minute. For the enterprise, a similar growth in the virility of video as the optimal means of information dissemination is predicted (by 2014 video will exceed 91 percent of global internet traffic). Small, “mom and pop” outfits, to large multinationals, are globalized through video. And a global and Millennial workforce (those people posting all those videos on YouTube) necessitates that robust information is available anywhere, anytime. Should I be in Bangladesh or Bermuda, to perform at the rate of 21st-century business, I need to be able to “speak” to someone in a real and meaningful way – whatever their time zone. Enter: video conferencing, video-based distanced learning, events, communications and safety and security, as the new drivers of best practices.
Better Than a (Faceless) “Live Chat”
We’ve all heard the statistic: 64% of all communication is non-verbal (and one-third of the human cortex is dedicated to the processing of vision), so video as the “great differentiator” shouldn’t surprise anyone. “Live Chat” became a game changer in the previous decade, because it put a live human voice and immediate response to the otherwise impersonal and boring process of getting technical assistance. In this century, the ability of video to create virtual teams that are as responsive, dynamic, and visually cued in as a group huddle outside in the courtyard, will do the same for teams operating across great divides of time and space – which is the new business paradigm.