I was surprised when my 17year old nephew asked for Photoshop CS Elements for Christmas. It turns out he loves to experiment with digital pictures and video recordings and has created more than 35 videos on YouTube. But it is not only the younger generation, many industry analysts have recognized the effect of digital media in the way businesses communicate with their employees.
In a recent article, Gartner suggests 44 percent of enterprises have software to manage images and video and is the fastest-growing segment in the content management market. Twenty-two percent of enterprises expect to install some form of it in 2009. “Consumerization has proven a force of unmatched potency in the past and the same will be true when it comes to the explosive spike in the popularity of consumer online video, fueling a similar interest in video within enterprises,” said Whit Andrews, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “Video use on the Web is growing swiftly, with 73 percent of the Internet audience watching a video online at least monthly, that is about 90 million viewers.”
With more than 5 billion videos viewed on YouTube in 2008, the effect in all aspects of our lives, from entertainment, to political campaigns, to business marketing communications, is palpable. Now enterprises use YouTube to communicate with or even train their employees, partners, and customers.
Internet video is also driving interest in shorter bite-size videos and is becoming more interactive because people can comment on uploaded videos with text messages or other videos. This interactivity overcomes the “passiveness” of commercial TV to date. People don’t just receive messages but rather, they can comment, interact and rate videos.
The old way of communicating by sharing documents with each other is fading away. The new way is short-messages in any format from twitter text, to html web pages, to audio podcasts, to YouTube-like flash video recordings. Thus, the newest way to search must incorporate video searching along with meta tagging to provide a more complete and comprehensive search result of all information requested.
Posted by: George Spatoulas
