>
www.panopto.com
855.PANOPTO
is more than
VIDEO CONFERENCING
VIDEO
Video is becoming ubiquitous across organizations worldwide, connecting individuals and groups live in real time for conferences, meetings, and even simple chats.
Yet video conferencing only scratches the surface of what video can do within the enterprise.
As businesses continue to invest in video technology, the key to maximizing that investment is supplementing and complementing the capabilities of that conferencing technology with an internal video platform that adds a means to capture, manage, search, and share that video output on-demand, anytime and anywhere.
In this paper, we review the key differences between video conferencing technology and video platforms, and identify five ways a video platform can assist in maximizing an investment in video, including:
• On-demand social learning
• Broadcasting at scale to huge audiences
• HD recording for demos, webinars, and presentations
• Cost-effective virtual events from any laptop
• Centralized video content management
We explore practical recommendations for enterprise video from the industry leaders, including top analysts at Gartner and Forrester and forward-looking organizations like Siemens, Microsoft, and the New York Stock Exchange.
Panopto creates software that enables businesses and academic institutions to record and view searchable video presentations in minutes from any device. Businesses can use Panopto to record and live stream:
• Employee training and onboarding video
• Review, recap, and summary communications
• Product demonstrations
• All-hands meetings
• Sales and marketing presentations
• Web conferences
• Executive communications
• Events for customers, press, and investors
Panopto also enables individual employees to record and share videos in a secure, centralized video library. This facilitates:
• Social and informal learning
• Capturing the knowledge of retiring employees
• Sharing knowledge across a global workforce
Panopto’s video library includes unique search functionality that enables employees to search inside videos for any word mentioned or shown onscreen during a video.
Panopto is currently in use at Fortune 500 companies around the world and is the fastest-growing lecture capture solution at leading universities. Privately-held, Panopto was founded in 2007 by technology entrepreneurs and software design veterans at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science.
Panopto has been recognized by Gartner as the only “Visionary” in its 2013 Enterprise Video Content Management Magic Quadrant. Learn more at http://panop.to/gartner-visionary.
Want to try Panopto for yourself? Visit www.panopto.comtoday for a free 30-day trial or to schedule a demonstration of our software.
We’ve Already Got Video Conferencing — Don’t We Have Video Covered? ...5
Video Conferencing Tools vs. Video Platforms ...6
Video Conferencing & Video Platforms — A Perfect Complement...8
5 Things a Video Platform Does... that Video Conferencing Tools Don’t ...8
The Value of Leveraging Video Conferencing and a Video Platform ...12
In 140 Words: Why Panopto Should Be Your Video Platform ...14
Key Takeaways ...15
OVERVIEW
WE’VE ALREADY GOT VIDEO CONFERENCING —
DON’T WE HAVE VIDEO
COVERED?
Organizations around the globe have welcomed video with open arms.
Video has radically improved the way businesses communicate, putting faces to voices and creating a more personal connection during interpersonal discussions and small team meetings.
Or to be more precise, video conferencing has done all that.
While businesses have jumped at the opportunity to leverage video to supplement
traditional phone and conference calls with real-time video interaction many have failed to see the bigger opportunity:
Video is so much more than just a better telephone or conference line.
The real value of enterprise video is in providing a universal tool for capturing and sharing knowledge — a technology that speeds new employee ramp-up, that scales corporate training, that improves executive transparency, and that helps your employees trade
institutional expertise in order to collaborate, innovate, and ultimately drive your bottom line. This doesn’t imply a need to replace your existing video conferencing system.
But to get the most out of your video investment, you need more than what your video conferencing system offers. You need the ability to record online presentations, product demos, town halls events, sales training, executive communications, onboarding videos, and more. You need a place to store and manage all of your organization’s video assets. You need a search engine that allows you to find anything inside of any of your videos. And you need to ensure that any employee can watch your business’ videos from anywhere on any device.
To get the most out of your video investment, you don’t just need video conferencing. You need a video platform.
VIDEO CONFERENCING vs. VIDEO PLATFORMS
WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE?
Video conferencing, web conferencing, unified communications — what were once distinct toolsets have in the past half-decade seen the lines that separate them blur. Traditionally, “video conferencing” implied a physical, often conference room-based
video system using specialized technology that focused on face-to-face interaction. “Web conferencing,” meanwhile, referred to a less formal, desktop-and-webcam system that prioritized sharing on-screen content for presentations and webinars, with the presenter’s webcam video as an optional supporting element.
Today, however, as many web conferencing tools offer two-way video and video
conferencing tools add the ability to share content and present, the applications have
become more similar and the nomenclature more interchangeable. Now whatever your tool, the resulting output is typically a video-based, real-time two-way interaction, emphasizing near-zero audio and video delay in order to allow for a conversation.
What does it do?
While the features vary and the technical aspects of each are different, the value delivered in a WebEx, a GoToMeeting, a Lync chat, an Adobe Connect session, or a meeting in the Cisco- or Polycom-equipped conference room is consistent — an instant audio, video, and screen-sharing connection with anyone located remotely.
Fundamentally the value these tools offer is what the industry calls “synchronous communication,” or more simply, two or more connected video feeds that each update so quickly they can allow for real-time conversation between them. This makes video conferencing technology perfect for live, interactive meetings, but it limits the number of people who can tune in to the meeting, as we’ll discuss more later.
Video conferencing technology makes it possible to meet with someone in another room, another building, or another country
as if they were sitting on the other side of the table. And while it was the first application
many organizations found for video, it’s now proving to be a gateway to using the technology for even greater ROI — which is where video platforms come in.
Whereas the conferencing tools are built for one task, video platforms have evolved as multipurpose technologies.
Modern enterprise video platforms — sometimes called video libraries, video content management systems, or simply a “corporate YouTube” — are intended to support video production from end to end — recording, managing, searching, sharing, and viewing — enabling organizations to do more new things with video as well as get more value out of existing video.
What does it do?
As with conferencing tools, the specific sets of features and capabilities for each video platform will be different. At their most basic, however, most video platform solutions will enable the following:
• The ability to record higher quality video with greater flexibility to support more and more varied types of content, and without all the on-screen clutter and additional workflow required by video conferencing systems
• The ability to upload, store, and centrally manage all of your organization’s video assets, in a secure library integrated with your identity management system
• The ability to convert almost any type of video into other formats so that it may be easily shared, streamed and viewed with almost any web browser or mobile device
• The ability to allow users to search across all the videos in your library and find any and all relevant content inside your videos
• The ability to provide video usage analytics data and statistics Along with these core features,
you’ll find several others available depending on the solution.
Some video platforms also offer webcasting features that enable you to broadcast live video. Others offer enhanced video experiences for mobile devices, with native apps and mobile-aware player design and video
Unlike video conferencing tools, which are built for synchronous, two-way communication, video platforms are built for what the industry calls “asynchronous communication.” This simply means that video platforms can be used to stream video one-way to massive audiences, either live or on-demand. Fundamentally, these technologies are built for different communication scenarios — video conferencing tools excel at conversations among small groups, while video platforms excel at presentations to large audiences.
VIDEO CONFERENCING
&
VIDEO PLATFORMS —
A PERFECT COMPLEMENT
While conferencing solutions and video platforms each offer their own subset of features and benefits, the technologies really begin to shine — and the use cases begin to multiply — when you leverage the two together.
Where conference tools are weak — for example, in recording video for on-demand viewing, or managing and searching video content — modern video platforms offer the ability
to record video from virtually any device, offer a centralized library for efficient storage,
automatically transcode recordings for on-demand playback on any device, and index the video content so it can be searched for and found by your team at a later date.
Likewise, where video conferencing tools are strong, video portals can further help them flex their muscle. Modern video platforms can enable organizations to scale meetings held via video conference to thousands or tens of thousands of viewers — far more than video conference technology could otherwise allow. And because they make it easy to record and store video, video platforms can make it possible to capture important video conference calls and save them for future reference in a central library.
A video platform provides your organization with the tools needed to drive more value out of your investment in video.
5 THINGS
A VIDEO PLATFORM DOES
...THAT VIDEO CONFERENCE TOOLS DON’T
Conferencing tools like GoToMeeting, Adobe Connect, Lync, and WebEx are great for connecting small groups for live, interactive meetings. These tools excel at real-time
information exchange — but the ideas and insights shared during these sessions typically aren’t saved anywhere and are all too often simply lost when the meeting ends.
A video platform is the perfect complement to your web conferencing tool. Your video platform allows you to:
• Record every detail of any or all of your web conferences in HD – every slide, every whiteboard diagram, and every webcam video feed
• Make those recordings available instantly to anyone you choose as soon as the meeting ends
• And automatically index every word spoken or shown in the video recording of the conference to create a searchable record of the meeting
What does that mean for your business? Here are 5 opportunities a video platform opens up for you that your video conferencing tools don’t.
#1: SOCIAL LEARNING
ON-DEMAND
Have a question and need an answer from your in-house expert? Just open up your web conferencing tool and start a conversation.
Unless your expert is in a meeting. Or travelling. Or out sick. Or lives in another time zone. Or took a new job three weeks ago.
A video platform solves that problem. Developers, analysts, project owners, architects, and other subject matter
experts can simply record a short video of themselves answering common questions and make it available on-demand on the enterprise YouTube.
Now everyone in your organization has anytime access to their expertise — without tying up your experts’ schedules with repeated requests for the same information.
#2: BROADCAST TO
(REALLY)
BIG AUDIENCES
Due to the technology required for real-time interactive video, web conferencing tools limit your audience to several hundred or a thousand people.
That’s usually more than enough for a meeting — but what about an investor relations call? A world-wide all-staff town hall meeting? A user
conference? Or any of the myriad of other reasons a few hundred seats would be far too few?
A video platform with live streaming technology uses a different underlying video delivery
mechanism, allowing it to scale to tens of thousands of people or more — ideal for
broadcasting presentations and events to massive audiences around the world.
#3:
CAPTURE AND REPLAY
DEMOS, WEBINARS,
PRESENTATIONS, AND MORE
Web conferencing tools are nice for conversations, but they aren’t built for the purpose of recording and sharing high-quality on-demand screencasts and video presentations. Many video conferencing solutions don’t record actual video at all — limiting you to just audio and a low-resolution recording of the presenter’s screen. Even then, because the tools were not designed as recorders, the workflow to capture a presentation is often quite cumbersome.
Sharing screens, adding additional
webcams, and other recording techniques you could use to better show your content and make your point simply aren’t possible with most conferencing tools. By contrast, a modern video platform enables you to capture product demos and presentations with broadcast-quality audio and full-screen HD video. Share multiple video feeds to show every angle, and add on-screen recordings and presentation slides to really make your case (and set your company apart).
Best of all, recording presentations helps you scale. According to Adobe, 55% of webinar-type events are viewed after-the-fact as a recording1. If your presentation isn’t available after
the call ends, you’re missing almost half your potential audience — meaning you’re either missing out on opportunities, or sentencing yourself to time-wasting repeat performances.
Webcasting Live to a Large Audience
#4:
COST-EFFECTIVE VIRTUAL EVENTS
FROM
ANY LAPTOP
Web conferencing tools are great for small meetings and webinars. But what if you want to record a professional-looking virtual event with multiple camera angles and HD video cameras?
Video conferencing simply isn’t built for events. Without another tool, your only choice is to call in the AV experts — and pay the expert-sized costs.
A video platform, however, can help you avoid that cost — and create the same high-quality, professional videos faster too. Leading companies like Siemens already record internal events with no more than laptops and webcams — saving time and money.2
With the right video platform, you can record from any video camera into any laptop — even capture multiple video streams across a network of PCs. The video platform will automatically sync all those files and upload everything into your video library, where you can quickly edit the final files and share them with anyone you choose — all in minutes instead of weeks. Your video platform can even live-stream your event video, helping you to extend your conferences to attendees around the world — and save money by eliminating travel costs.
#5: VIDEO CONTENT
MANAGEMENT
What happens when the web conference wraps up?
Well if you didn’t hit “record” in your web conferencing tool, nothing at all. And even if you did — not much. Conferencing tools can often record calls, but the usefulness of those native recordings is generally quite limited:
• No centralized library in which to store the file
• No editing tools to fine tune the recording
Often you’re left with either just a link back to the conferencing systems’ servers, or a giant file sitting on your desktop — neither a particularly useful storage spot.
With a video platform, your recordings are automatically uploaded to a video content management system where they’re transcribed and indexed so that people can easily find and view recorded content on-demand from anywhere.
The value of a real video content
management system only multiplies as your organization begins creating more and more video. Most businesses already have a massive cache of video scattered across file shares and SharePoint sites, where they eat up storage space but are often too difficult for other employees to find and use.
No conferencing tool in the world can help manage those existing videos — but a video platform with a video content management system can quickly upload, transcribe, index, and share them across your entire company, often in just a couple clicks.
THE ANALYSTS
&
THE FORTUNE 500 AGREE:
CONFERENCING TOOLS DO MORE
WITH A VIDEO PLATFORM
As video has become pervasive throughout organizations — supporting everything from training, sales enablement, and customer service to corporate communications, marketing, and personal messaging — a veritable “who’s who” of experts have begun calling for
smarter video management.
Forrester Research leads, commanding readers to “Plan for video content, not just video conferencing.”3
Forrester analyst Philipp Karcher notes that, “A growing number of content and collaboration professionals are interested in using webcasting and YouTube-like video portals internally for corporate communications and training”, seeking to:
• Save on the cost of large virtual meetings
• Drive remote employee engagement
• Improve communications from leadership
• Improve training effectiveness, and
• Encourage employees to share best practices4
Gartner Research has likewise discussed the need for enhanced video management, especially with regard to training and communications materials that may often be repeated many times.
In their report, “Why You Need Video Content Management in Your Web Conferencing Solution”, Gartner analysts David Mario Smith and Whit Andrews contend, “There are cost and time savings to be made in reusing content, compared to running the same live conferencing session multiple times.”5
But it’s not just the analysts expounding for video management — forward-looking businesses large and small have seen the value as well.
An early proponent of video platforms as a means to communicate expertise, Microsoft built its own company-wide video portal called “Microsoft Academy” in order to facilitate peer-to-peer knowledge sharing, improve learning, enable virtual conferences, and reduce costs.6
In just 3 years Microsoft was able to attribute a 569% ROI and annual cost avoidance of $13.9 million to its Academy video portal.
Today the company uses its video platform to support a host of objectives, including:
• To increase the speed and convenience of knowledge sharing, especially across disparate teams, thereby boosting the company’s competitive advantage
• To promote knowledge sharing by subject matter experts (where they also noted, “Almost everyone in your organization is a SME in one form or another”)
• To encourage a less hierarchical, more open company culture
• To encourage employee engagement by meeting three key needs people have, namely: sharing, learning and connecting
NYSE Euronext first experimented with video after finding its project managers had become overwhelmed by demand for demonstrations.7 Video conferencing had improved the team’s
ability to demonstrate the company’s complex products, but the sheer volume of requests for repeated and one-off demos soon began to overwhelm the subject matter experts.
Microsoft’s estimated annual cost savings from
using video for eLearning
A video platform proved to be the solution, enabling the NYSE Euronext team to record demonstrations with multiple camera angles, add presentation slides, and quickly create useful videos that could be shared and replayed over and over — ensuring partners and customers still get the insight they needed while freeing up subject matter experts to focus on new work.
Today the NYSE Euronext team uses video across the organization to:
• Record product demonstrations for internal audiences
• Develop online training
• Onboard new hires
• Record monthly and quarterly reports from the Chief Officers
• Record WebEx meetings, and
• Integrate its global workforce
IN 140 WORDS:
WHY PANOPTO SHOULD BE
YOUR VIDEO PLATFORM
Video is more than video conferencing. But that’s no reason to add a slew of extra video tools to your employee’s laptop taskbars.
You need one video platform that supports virtually every aspect of video, end-to-end. You need Panopto.
Panopto makes it easy to record, share, and search video–in a single solution that runs on any laptop.
With Panopto’s video platform, you can record video presentations with nearly any camera and automatically upload your recordings to a secure “Enterprise YouTube” where they can be shared and viewed from any device.
Panopto makes your videos searchable too, with industry-leading Smart Search technology that indexes every word spoken and every word shown in every video.
Named the only Visionary in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Video Content Management, Panopto makes it easy to get the most out of your investment in video.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
As video continues to grow in importance across every department at most organizations, now is the time to heed Forrester’s advice to “plan for video content, not just video
conferencing.”
Enterprise video is more than video conferencing. Enhancing existing video conferencing technology with a modern video platform makes using video everywhere in your
organization not only possible, but extremely cost-effective.
With established uses cases including employee training aides, customer-facing how-tos, special event recordings, live demonstrations, and more, how your business can make use of video is nearly limitless — both in variety and value.
CITATIONS
1. Adobe. Webinar Engagement by the Numbers
2. Siemens. Siemens PLM Software Panopto Case Study
3. Forrester Research. Leveraging Live Streaming And On-Demand Video In The Enterprise
4. Forrester Research. Leveraging Live Streaming And On-Demand Video In The Enterprise
5. Gartner Research. Why You Need Video Content Management in Your Web Conferencing Solution
6. Microsoft. ROI of Building a Company-wide, Video Podcasting Portal Using MS SharePoint 2010
