Line of Business
Business video search a booming market
Along with the growth in the use of video comes increased demand for users to be able to find exactly what they need.7/30/2010 6:00:00 AM By: Bob Violino
For some enterprises, online video has become a vital tool for training, security, sales, marketing and other functions. And along with that growth in the use of video comes increased demand for users to be able to find exactly what they need.
Video search technology enables users to find specific videos, or to search within videos for key words and phrases spoken in a presentation, text such as subject titles and subtitles, particular people or topics and other content.
In an August 2009 survey of 210 corporate IT and business professionals by research firm IDC, almost 45 per cent of the respondents said that they already publish videos on their public-facing Web sites and another 16 per cent said that they plan to do so.
And in a May 2010 poll of 2,412 consumers by media and communications consultancy Frank N. Magid Associates Inc., half of the respondents said that they watch online video at least once a week, up from 43 per cent in 2009. Although short-form videos, including those on YouTube, are the most popular content for online viewing, some 40 per cent of the respondents said that they watch either full-length TV shows or movies online.
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Tips for deploying searchable video
- Determine upfront what you will need in terms of capabilities and management features. For example, how great a level of detail will users need when conducting searches within videos?
- Based on that analysis, figure out what hardware/software infrastructure and network bandwidth you will need to support streaming video and search capabilities.
- Don't forget about your storage needs -- video files are huge and add up quickly.
- Decide whether you want to manage the streaming portion of the system in-house or if you want to work with an external content delivery network.
In the corporate world it's not uncommon for a video to be an hour long, and you want to be able to jump to the 10 minutes that you really want to watch" rather than sit through the entire 60 minutes, says Dan Rayburn, an analyst at research and consulting firm Frost & Sullivan in New York. Searchable video "allows you to consume more content a lot faster; it's lot more targeted," Rayburn says. And that, in turn, translates into improved productivity.
Further, he says, a big part of managing video is making it possible to search for specific content.
Susan Feldman, an analyst at IDC in Framingham, Mass., says, "Just like presentations, images and video contain enterprise information that can be used and reused for marketing and messaging."
Although video search functionality will likely prove to be an increasingly important corporate tool, it can be expensive and challenging to set up a system that's capable of reliably searching through video.
Page Navigation 1) Demand for more flexible video systems on the rise. - Page 12) Video search tech enhances security. - Page 2
3) How searchable video is helping expand service offerings. - Page 3
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