No more stuttering starts for video

Imagine receiving a book where passages arrived sporadically over several weeks, words were randomly missing from sentences, and the writing was too smudged to comfortably read anyway. Unless the story was of incredible quality, you probably wouldn’t expend too much effort trying to understand it, and you certainly wouldn’t engage with it on any real level.

Forrester tells us that a video is worth 1.8 million words, that’s about 1.4 million words more than the entire Lord of The Rings trilogy. Yet, much online video is still delivered in stuttering, low quality, across unreliable platforms, streaming to audience’s computers at incredibly slow rates. People love video – Cisco predicts that by 2017 video will account for 69 per cent of internet traffic – but no one is going to stick around for a fuzzy picture delivered between pro-longed periods of buffering.

This is a particular problem if you’re using video in corporate communications. Video can be a highly effective tool for marketing or internal communications but viewers are sceptical of brand content, so it needs to pull them in and engage them quickly. For instance, chemical gas company, Praxair, switched elements of its training programme to videos of instructors talking through a PowerPoint presentation saving huge amounts of travel time and providing video views averaging over 4,000 per month. However, audiences aren’t going to stick around for branded video, or tutorials, if the video is continually buffering.

This will become an ever greater problem for brands: Nielsen recently found that 64 per cent of marketers expect video to dominate their marketing strategies in the near future, and another study found that 72 per cent of internal communications teams are planning to increase their business use. With this in mind, brands need to ensure their video content exists in an environment where it is easily accessible and delivered as quickly as possible, at the best possible quality. With this assured, the content can grab viewers quickly- whether internal stakeholders or potential customers.

This is an increasingly difficult task as audiences move on to a growing range of new platforms and form factors. YouTube, for instance, recently revealed that mobile devices now account for about half of the videos consumed on its site. A brand without a flexible delivery method can end up missing huge sections of its audience because they are browsing on mobile. Platforms like YouTube and Vimeo are obvious candidates to host a brand’s content – they provide reliability and usability, across any device, but internal communications teams in particular may worry about video intended for internal stakeholders being seen across the web.

The secure alternative is for brands to provide video across their own platform, on their own servers, putting them in control. At Tata Communications, we have partnered with Kaltura to provide video platforms to brands reaching audiences anywhere, on any device, and to back that up with content delivery networks (CDN) to ensure that viewers, internal or external, get the fastest possible video experience at the best possible quality.

This kind of CDN delivered, centrally owned video platform is the digital equivalent of binding a book: it ensures the content that brands provide is usable, high quality, and delivered all at once. By investing in these types of controlled, robust video platforms, communications teams can tap into the inherent shareability of video and are freed to concentrate on creating the best possible content for their audience – providing the story all at once, not bit by bit and smudged.

How are you using video? Leave your comments below