Businesses only use 0.01% of available footage for their video content. Why?

Businesses will move most of their communications to video format within a decade, predicts the Center for the Long View and Deloitte. This will require around 500x more video produced per company than today, as training manuals, induction sequences, brochures and even product packaging all move to video.

Put another way, by 2030, 75% of all business communication will be video, which is why the global enterprise video market size is expected to reach US$48.85 billion by 2030, growing 13.8% a year.?

Yet there is a serious issue in the way of this video-first vision: the lack of footage. In fact, only 0.01% of all available footage is ever used by businesses in their video communications.

Video is already the runaway trend of the 2020s. Every year, mobile video consumption doubles and last year that figure was an average of 30 minutes per day spent watching videos per phone owner.

In younger demographics, this figure is far higher. So as teenagers enter the workforce, the idea of paper-based forms or even online learning manuals will be an anathema to them. Their whole approach to learning has been shaped by technology and new ideas are best served in short video chunks.

Luckily for businesses, they have armies of potential videographers. Each of their employees has at least one camera-equipped device, possibly several. All of their customers have phones with high definition cameras. In fact, 5 billion photographs are taken on phones every day and around 500 million videos. By 2030 this figure will be double, with the vast majority being video files.

This is due in part to the fact that Live Photos on Apple or Motion Photos on Android are actually short videos in either High Efficiency Image File (HEIF) format or 3GP. Over half of all photos taken today are actually short videos.

This means there are potentially one trillion new pieces of footage every year available to businesses to turn into the video content they need to produce. This represents less than 0.01% of the content available via stock video libraries.

Stock video usage is already growing at a 7.31% compound annual growth rate, driven largely by businesses needing to create more and more video.

Yet almost all of this is to fuel social media videos. Unsurprising as 25% of all mobile phone use is spent on social media apps. The main viewers of these videos, generation Z, already want to see more customer-created videos. In fact, 65% of 20-30 year olds want user-generated video rather than professionally-produced video. Today only 22% of user-generated content on Instagram is video, despite presenting a higher reach and likes count than any other type of content, but this is shifting rapidly.

This is before you consider the real need for video within businesses. Internal instructional videos, onboarding, video standups, event recap videos and everything that is done today in written form (like this article) will need to be video. But that requires trillions of hours of footage shot by employees, customers or citizens.

Think about an onboarding video that includes a description of parking or locker location in a specific store. There is no way a company would hire a film crew to shoot hyper-local content at one of its thousands of locations. But employees can.

Think about how user-generated footage could apply in other areas of business communications.

• As well as internal use, 85% of businesses need to add customer video to their external marketing mix but cannot due to the cost of acquiring footage for every product
• Internal communications teams are already using video explainers and company-wide training videos, but will need million of hours of footage to create personalised content
• Narrowcasting (ultra-niche, hyper-local and very specialised video programs to small audiences) will be the next trend in social media, but requires million of hours of footage for each target demographic

Today, video creation by businesses at scale is still constrained by human process from filming through to editing. Footage gathering, storage, formatting, editing. Each is a bottleneck, because humans are costly.?That is before you get to the thorny issue of content rights management. Every video used needs a content assignment signed by the contributor.

All this means businesses hold back on video. For example, while 95% of marketing executives we surveyed said they wanted to do more customer-sourced videos, the complexity and cost of campaigns was prohibitive.?Businesses want to do more video, but struggle in three ways:

1.Businesses struggle to collect videos

• Hashtag campaigns on social media are not suitable for internal or sensitive projects
• Downloading videos from social media is illegal and technically fraught at scale
• Securing consent to re-use is lengthy, time-consuming and requires input from legal
• The process of collecting internal or external videos requires cloud folders, creating a bottleneck and IT support

2. Businesses struggle to catalog videos

• Video files swapped or shared need to be manually filed into folders or tagged, often in a document?
• Businesses need to contextualise videos with customer, or business data, often manually
• Accurately capturing customer names and other data is technically tricky and requires humans to enter data

3. Businesses struggle to combine videos

• Under 4% of businesses have in-house video capability, meaning external editors are required, at an average cost of $10,005?
• 87% of businesses have strict brand guidelines they need video assets to meet
• Multiple formats, orientations and lengths make editing crowdsourced footage together into compilations a lengthy pain point

All these pain points have created a massive bottleneck in the way of wholesale adoption of video-first business communication.

As a pioneer of collaborative video, Vloggi sits at the heart of a new revolution in mass automated video production. Our mission is to allow businesses to make video at scale. We make it easy and affordable for teams to collect, catalogue and combine footage created by their customers, colleagues or community. ?

Through the combination of mobile phone footage crowdsourcing and rules-based server-side video assembly, the Vloggi platform is 1000x quicker than traditional video production and 100x cheaper.

A recent government client of ours produced 20 fully formatted, branded, captioned 3-minute videos in under 20 minutes and all within their monthly subscription service levels.

The time is right now for the move towards collaborative video. Not least because capturing professional quality video is now within the reach of everyone. When coffee table book The Best Camera Is the One That's With You was released in 2009, it was kind a joke that phone cameras could produce high-end photography.

Since then, an arms race between Apple and Samsung has resulted in amazing improvements in the lens quality, low light performance, file resolution and aperture depth of smart phone cameras.

The result is that there are over six billion high definition, high quality video cameras

But this requires automation and decentralisation of footage sourcing. This is where we come in.?We're Vloggi and we build workflows and tools for businesses to create video at massive scale using footage shot by their customers, colleagues or community.

If you'd like to learn more about the Vloggi video revolution, visit vloggi.com.