 | Issue: | EMEA 2012 |
| Article no.: | 14 | |
| Topic: | Content may be king – But where is your audience? | |
| Author: | Leah Belsky | |
| Title: | General Manger, EMEA and VP Strategy | |
| Organisation: | Kaltura | |
| PDF size: | 210KB |
About author
Leah Belsky is the General Manger, EMEA and VP Strategy in Kaltura. MsBelsky is a serial entrepreneur and thought leader who specializes in open systems and applicationsfor technology in new domains. She is the European General Manager and VP Strategy at Kaltura, a ‘TechCrunch Top 40’ and Intel Capital funded company, launching the world’s first open source video platform. At Kaltura, MsBelsky drives product and business strategy, interfacing with Fortune 100 companies and educational institutions to define the future of education and media on the web.
Leah Belsky is a graduate of Yale Law School, an advisor to numerous start-ups and non-profit organizations, and she sits on the board of Public Knowledge, a leading DC organization dedicated to freedom on the internet.
Article abstract
Video is a transformative, horizontal technologythat has the power to change our life style. The audiences are not only to be found within the youth consumer market. It is actuallyfound where people spend a large part of their time – at the work. The Enterprise begins to appreciate the power of video and even traditional organisation are becoming media companies, generating content and addressing their customer base directly. The second large audience is found in education. Video is instrumental in finding new ways to communicate knowledge, and media literacy is a fundamental part of training. Media companies who bring content to where this audience actually is, i.e. in these different industries and vertical markets, are set to be the leaders in their field.
Full Article
As today’s digital landscape becomes increasingly competitive, both technology and content providers are driven by a constant search for the audience. They promote content proactively, create mechanisms to distribute it across the web and enable viewing on any device. Locating the audience is not only about bringing viewers to destination sites.It is about getting content out to places where viewers engage, where creators create, and where new users live and discover. This perpetual search for the audience is a key driver behind technological innovation as well as new content development.
In the video space in particular, theories about the audience are key drivers behind the type of delivery mechanism used, the form of monetization tools employed, and the stories created. Yet too often, the video industry is driven solely by the consumer web and consumer electronics world. Content producers race to be one of the top sites on the next year’s Alexa or Comscore ratings. Technologists are fixated on the latest ‘box’, device, or smart TV launched at the consumer electronics shows. It is not that these trends are not important. Indeed, if you run a media company, becoming a Comscore top ten site with the latest TV ‘box’ extensions will certainly be an incredible revenue-generating feat. Yet, in a world where adults spend over 2000 hours a year inside the enterprise and where children spend over half of their waking day at school, those who focus only on consumer entertainment innovation miss a tremendous opportunity to reach and understand their future audience.
In a recent report from Forrester Research titled: ‘Activity and Online Paid Content Forecast’, 09/09, Western Europe’), the percentage of online users accessing video content online is set to rise from 45 per cent in 2009 to 67 per cent by 2014 – Video becomes the most accessed type of content online. As a comparison, Forrester expects the percentage of users accessing news content online to rise from 53 per cent in 2009 to just 61 per cent by 2014.
The online video world is now emerging out of its infancy. What we as technologists and content creators must embrace is the reality that online video itself is a transformative, horizontal technology. Just as the iPad has changed the way people work, watch movies, or read books at schools, video too can be a revolutionary tool across industries. Video is changing the way we teach and learn, the way we collaborate at work, the way we communicate with peers, and the way we entertain ourselves. The few in our industry who take a horizontal view and identify innovations and user behaviours in different industries are set to lead. So, where is your audience in 2013 and beyond, and what are the cross-industry trends that future innovators must heed beyond the digital home?
At work: video in the enterprise
Adults today spend over half of their waking hours at work. Increasingly, more and more of this time is spent watching video. Gartner predicts that by 2016, large companies will stream more than 16 hours of video per worker per month.Their clients tell the analysts that the amount of video in their organizations is increasing at rates from 50-200 per cent per year. While this number is impressive, it takes into account only the media watched internally within corporations. It doesn’t consider the videos that employees watch as they research and explore across the web during the day. Nor does it consider increasing amount of video produced by non-traditional media companies that is becoming part of our everyday lives.
As an example, Best Buy, one of the largest big box retailers in the world, generate over 70 million views per month across their internet, mobile, and in store sites. Their sites alone include over 100,000 screens. Considering that the third ranked video site on the internet – Yahoo Sites – received 57,762 video viewers a month in 2012, the potential of a company to like Best Buy to convert its viewers into video viewers is tremendous. What is producing these two trends in the enterprise?
Traditional enterprises are increasingly realizing that video is a powerful tool to increase employee productivity and reduce the need for travel and synchronous meetings. Companies are building Corporate ‘YouTubes’ and unleashing the power of employees and managers to create, communicate, and collaborate with video.
– As repeated regularly in our industry “every company is becoming a media company”. This means two things:
– Firstly, traditionalenterprises who were never involved in media – e.g. SAP, AstraZeneca, Siemens – are now investing in multi-million dollar studios, video for ecommerce platforms and cross-store media networks. They are connecting content to audiences in order to drive business goals.
– Secondly, as the cost of production and distribution decreases, we are seeing companies that might have formerly bought advertising spots from traditional media companies begin to build audiences directly. They are creating their own video destination sites and through social media, mobile apps, YouTube and dis-intermediating – the traditional audience holders.
So why should the video technologist or creator care? These trends might impact other areas of future online video innovation. As enterprises enable video, they create systems with unique abilities to stream inside internal networks, to recognize and authenticate unique viewers, or to generate complex analytic data. In fact, the challenges that enterprises are working out are not too far from some of the innovations we see as media companies push into the closed network of the home, caching content on local TVs, or recognizing purchasers of content on their desktops, laptops or iTunes accounts. What of the time spent viewing video? If I’m a media company, and I recognize that increased amount of video viewing of all forms will take place during the workday or on consumer-facing enterprise driven corporate screens, I would be wise to think twice about my content distribution and advertising strategy.
At school: video in education
The second place where we are seeing a tremendous rise in online video is in education. We all know that nearly half of a child’s waking life – from primary school through university – is spent at school. Yet, many innovators picture the education sector as a technological backwater. We picture old school houses with computers on roller carts, focusing only on educational programming from the BBC, iTunes U, or the new consumer-education leaders.
The truth is that the educational technology space is on the edge of a hockey-stick curve of technological advancement in the video space. As universities deploy lecture capture systems, students bring iPhones and other capture devices into the classroom and professors teach remotely from home, the amount of video flowing through the educational ecosystem is growing exponentially. As the cost of education rises, increasing numbers of educational institutions are employing distance-learning technologies, seeking to recreate the collaborative, face-2-face environment of a classroom online. Education start-ups like 2tor Inc. are finding new and innovative ways to use video to teach basic courses like teaching or nursing, using video as a primary tool for assessment and demonstration.
Yet, beyond the pure technology adoption, what is important about education is that it is a place where the value of video and the way it is analysed is conceptualized in new ways that push technological boundaries. When video is used in the educational context, it’s not just to entertain and engage but also to drive knowledge acquisition and learning results. As students are given video assignments, they learn new ways to tell stories and communicate knowledge. Media literacy becomes a fundamental part of their conception of literacy and how ideas can be communicated. Outside of the classroom, the educational research ecosystem then dives into the new trend, generating analysis on how the use of video impacts learning outcomes and student behaviour, developing new forms of video analytics and analysis. They assess how learning via video compares with text or audio-based learning.
If you are a media company and you want to know how to engage and monetize an audience; if you are an enterprise and you want to know how the future generation will work; or, if you are a technologist and you want to create the next communication platform – then look closely at how the next generation learns. Look at how the youngest generation absorbs and communicates information – not only when they sit at home and play on Facebook or YouTube, but also when they learn in the classroom.
