And the Oscar goes to… IBM

When streaming video means business!

Tonight is the night! You probably planning on watching the 89th Academy Awards ceremony at home with some popcorn and viewing party beverage of choice, and you're good to go. ABC will continue to broadcast the Academy Awards in an agreement extension through 2028. The network’s previous contract was set to expire in 2020.

After tonight’s broadcast, each Oscar winner will walk away with a 24-karat gold-plated statuette worth an estimated $696. ABC will walk away with over 165,000 times that. Last year, the show brought in $115 million in ad revenue for the network (including $13 million during the red carpet pre-show alone), according to Kantar Media, and with ad prices on the rise, that total will only rise this year.

Behind the Super Bowl, the Oscar ceremony has long been the second most expensive broadcast for advertisers. In terms of ad revenue, the Oscars come out ahead of other awards shows like the Grammy's and Golden Globes—last year by $25 million and $8 million, respectively.

However this is not an article about Academy Awards, nor essentially about movies production, but rather to make sure you really grasp the gravity of what streaming videos can do for your business to generate revenue.

According to Psychology Today, our brains process video 60,000 times faster than text. Since we’re hardwired to avoid cognitive strain, we’d rather watch than read, in most cases. It’s not a real surprise, then, that video is projected to make up as much as 82 percent of all Internet traffic by 2020. Technology has made it simple to broadcast video to much of the rest of the planet, even from a device that fits in a pocket. Video can also be narrow-casted in a protected manner to an authorized or paying audience, live or on demand. As a result, Frost and Sullivan notes, enterprises are now creating more video in one day than Hollywood creates in a year.

There are many different objectives that organizations achieve with video, and this article makes them easy to review. Learn how fast enterprise video is growing and look over the business case for investing in IBM Cloud Video solutions.

What is Enterprise Video?

Enterprise video encompasses on-demand video assets as well as live video broadcasting, with both leveraging streaming protocol. Enterprise video solutions provide capabilities to create, manage, publish, and distribute video to viewers both internally (corporate communications) and externally (marketing communications).

Enterprise video is not the same as video conferencing, nor is it a replacement for it. However, it can extend the reach of traditional video conferencing, which requires that participants are in a room with special conferencing equipment. In contrast, enterprise video is “one to many.”

Viewers can comment socially and submit Q&A questions to the presenter, but viewers are not on camera and do not verbally participate. This is an important distinction.

Why Enterprise Video is Next Big Thing?

(Inspired by Frost & Sullivan)

Video content is the hot commodity in the marketplace. Video is everywhere. Every person with a GO-Pro is capturing video and posting it on YouTube. You no longer have to be a huge production house to create video that is content rich and readily available. In addition, video is a leading driver of online advertising. Has anybody had to sit through an online ad just to watch that hot YouTube video?

For many enterprises still caught up in the transition to digital workflows and mobile work-anywhere trends, video seems to be an interesting yet nascent trend. Though some savvy corporations are increasingly leveraging video to maximize customer engagement, enrich career development and more effectively communicate with internal and external stakeholders, we still see too many executives blissfully unaware of the video-powered revolution under way. The fact is that video within the enterprise is decisively moving past an experimental technology to become a business-critical communication and productivity enabler. Video has also emerged as a very critical element of a company’s content marketing strategy, be it in-bound or out.

While many think of media and entertainment companies as the major content producers in the market today, enterprises today already create orders-of-magnitude more video than Hollywood. Enterprise community generates that amount of video every day, and YouTube reports that volume of content uploaded every minute. According to Frost & Sullivan estimates, streaming media players such as Adobe Flash Player, JWPlayer and others commonly used by enterprises reported a whopping 250% growth in content volumes processed and over 100% growth in active users (…and that was back in 2014!). This emphatically indicates that video engagement is gaining both depth and breadth—and at a breathtaking pace.

Enterprises that are not already actively integrating video into their everyday business processes are not only falling behind the competitive curve, but are also unknowingly impacting their top-line revenues and bottom-line expenses. Enterprises must work quickly to embrace video as a first-class citizen within their networks and in their knowledge management systems. Video needs to be as pervasive as voice and documents in today’s enterprise, and business leadership must empower IT teams to lead the charge in making this transformation.

What Your Organization Can Achieve With Video?

ENGAGE

Gallup reports that 70% of workers are not engaged, and video is one of the best ways to connect them. The results are observed directly in the bottom line, with the price tag for disengaged employees accounting for $450 billion-$550 billion in annual losses in productivity.

• Unify and align employees internally by reaching out with streaming town halls and all-hands meetings to virtually any device anywhere, protected by Single-Sign-On (SSO) access.
• Enable division, group, and team video meetings, strategy sessions, salons, and lunch and learns.
• Reach external audiences and scale quickly. Live video gives investor briefings additional impact, and it enables them to be clarified with charts, graphics, and pre-recorded videos.
• Hold a media event via live video while a moderator fields media questions through a Q&A module, enabling added control.

SELL

According to Frost & Sullivan, customers - on average - spend three to five times more time on pages with video content as compared to pages with simple text and images.

• Tease a new product by sharing video previews and video blog posts on social media, capturing leads.
• Launch products with a live event that can be viewed on demand later.
• Bring in more prospects with “Live Ad” technology such as LiveAd that streams your event within standard ad units at key sites across the web; prospects click to view.
• LiveAd drove 100x more viewers to Mazda's live event, compared to the prior year’s event without the ads, and average engagement was 16 minutes. Read details here https://ibm.biz/BdsNXw
• Stream video sales kickoffs and huddles. Weekly video huddles enable a global beauty products company to share best practices, demos, role-playing, and sales tips. Novices learn from top performers. Teams react faster to market changes.
• Update sales reps and customers with video briefings from subject matter experts, indexed so viewers can quickly find the few minutes they need.
• Video demos/best practices/tips guide customers and partners to maximize value delivered and get questions answered.
• Customer testimonials enable your prospects to hear directly from their peers.

ENABLE

Capture Knowledge

• Enable remote sites to collaborate and update each other.
• Encourage field employees to make short videos documenting challenges, tips, and changes in the market.
• Retain knowledge by interviewing departing employees on video, indexed so others can quickly access needed insights.

Recruit

• Share company spirit and values to attract the right people.

Empower

• Embed video players in web pages that show rather than tell.
• Track who watched and for how long, streamlining compliance.
• Spotlight employee success, building morale.
• Bond new teams after acquisitions or mergers.
• Crowd-source videos with “make-your-own” contests.

Train

• On-board each employee and customer with customized video playlists.
• Illustrate new policies and benefits.

REVEAL

With the power of cognition and analytics

• Analytics indicate who’s watching, what they’re seeing, and how, when, and where they watch, enabling you to optimize results.
• Learn which videos lead to the most conversions, helping you use customer time more efficiently.
• New cognitive computing capabilities will generate new opportunities:

1. Live event analysis identifies audience reactions by analyzing social media feeds.
2. Scene detection automatically segments videos into meaningful scenes, making it more efficient to find and deliver targeted content.
3. Speech to text can turn spoken words into written ones quickly, useful for closed captioning and transcription.
4. Most video data is difficult to see, analyze, and manage. IBM Watson capabilities are now being applied to IBM Cloud Video platform to address just that.

The Business Cases for Enterprise Video

Video is a fantastic and dynamic business opportunity for enterprises to find new ways to capture mindset, market share, add value, or in the case of YouTube, increasing advertising revenue. Video is projected to be a $3.1 billion dollar market by 2019, so it is clearly a strategic direction for IBM and for our clients.

Videos come in two flavors; Live and on-demand (VOD). Live videos delivers contents over the Internet in real time as it is being captured; this is depicted in several uses cases including Sports, Conferences, and Web meetings…etc. Live streaming features real-time encoding and live streaming server. In VOD, however, videos are selected from a catalog and can be viewed at any time; its use cases include Movies, TED, Education, and Knowledge Centers…etc. VOD features content management, search, and discovery.

Videos are used for two reasons; it either supports the business, as means to deliver value (i.e. Communication, Marketing, Product support/tutorials) and features lead generation, and click-through tracking.  On the hand, videos can be “The Business”, as-in the “end product” and is monetized. This is the case with Media and Entertainment, Surveillance, and Online Education Programs. It features Ad serving and subscription management.

Videos are delivered in two places; internally, where video stay behind the enterprise firewall (i.e. Internal communication, Employee Training, and Collaboration) and features security and compliance. It can also be delivered to external audience as intended to reach the public masses (i.e. Costumer Engagement and B2B communication) and features Content Distribution Network (CDN) and device management (i.e. Adaptive bitrate).

The following are just examples across several industries on how Videos can be and enabler for more revenue for our clients:

• Obviously for Media and Entertainment i.e. Production Studios, Broadcasting Network, Digital Media Libraries…etc. Use cases can include Over-The-Top (OTT), Video Management, Distribution and Delivery, Live Concerts, Red Carpets, Social Network…etc.
• Education can leverage videos in Class lectures, “How-To” for tutoring, Guest lectures, Sporting Events, Dean Announcements, and Alumni Events…etc.
• Government and Law Enforcement in Body Cams (Raid recordings), Surveillance, Content Management and Historical Video Archiving.
• Healthcare can provide with Wellness videos, telemedicine, employee training and certification, town halls…etc.
• Banks can live stream surveillance for ATMs branches around the clock.
• All enterprises can stream for marketing, eCommerce, Customer Support, Webinars, Product Releases, Employee training, CEO Town Halls…etc. Possibilities are endless!

Why IBM Cloud Video is Your Platform of Choice?

• Cloud-based so it deploys easily, with faster time to value. It minimizes training required for users. It supports both live and on-demand streaming, with no-brainer management of channels and on-demand videos. It supports chaptering so each segment can be indexed.
• Scales automatically to reach external audiences with resiliency. Reach up to millions of users, because a software-defined content delivery network (SD-CDN) manages interactions between major commercial CDNs as needed, globally and on the ?y.
• Pay only for what you use. Avoid having to predict audience size or pay too much or too little in advance. Includes an option to offer pay-per-view if desired
• Uses a virtual enterprise content delivery network (eCDN), behind your data center firewall, to manage streams to avoid bottlenecks, since many employees watching a video at one location can choke a network.
• Integrates with an existing corporate directory to authenticate viewers. Offers support through single sign-on (SSO), two-step email verification, or whitelisting.
• Encrypts contents and protect streams even outside the network. It also enable domain restriction so only desired locations can view.
• Supports role and group-based access by video/channel for additional control and reveals exactly who watched and when, for auditing purposes.
• It is built with cloud-based adaptive streaming that optimizes connections for virtually every device, regardless of their connected bandwidth.
• Viewers should be able to reach out to social networks to promote what they’re watching quickly and easily.
• Provides useful analytics and reporting to learn about viewers with virtually real-time analytics for live or recorded content. See views by location, domain, device, and operating system.

Additionally, IBM Cloud Video platform exposes APIs that can add a variety of capabilities, such as enabling the interface to be branded or player to be customized. The following examples relate to APIs for IBM Cloud Video Streaming Manager (also known as Ustream Pro) and Streaming Manager for Enterprise (also known as Ustream Align).

• Fully brand your platform using the white label capabilities of the Broadcaster API. Create and manage your own channels, publish videos to the public or choose to make them private.
• Customize your player layout and features with the Player API
• Read and display messages on your website that originate on your channel page with the Social Stream API.
• Integrate live and recorded video feeds into a fully customized experience within your native application, such as a mobile app or Roku channel, using a Player Software Development Kit (SDK)
• If you’re a hardware manufacturer, you can build cameras and encoders that have a direct connection to IBM Cloud Video Streaming Manager by using the Certified Broadcasting Device API.

IBM Cloud Video puts the power of the cloud at your command, delivering a comprehensive set of tools to help you maximize your video content. And rule your marketplace. Whether video is the business, or video supports the business, IBM Cloud Video provides support for live and on-demand streaming through a robust set of solutions that streamline multi-screen video preparation, delivery, and catalog and subscriber management.

Please feel free to read IBM strategic acquisitions that relate to the topic:

IBM Acquires Ustream to Propel Cloud-Based Video Services Across Industries

IBM Acquires Clearleap to Advance Cloud Video Services

IBM Completes Acquisition of Cleversafe to Propel Object Storage into the Hybrid Cloud

IBM Closes Acquisition of Aspera to Help Companies Speed Global Movement of Big Data