Two Key Technologies to Reach Your Audience the Right Way

Engaging with your audience is always crucial, but is arguably a more tricky maneuver to pull off than ever before. Want to connect to your audience better today? There are two things you’ll need: video and the cloud.

By 2019, video is expected to exceed 80 per cent of all Internet traffic, making it one of the most valuable data assets for organizations across industries. In Canada, for example, it’s estimated that subscription video-on-demand revenue will generate $629.6 million by 2020, with Canadians ranking second in the world as active digital media consumers, spending 25 hours of online videos per month, or 291 videos per viewer, according to the Canada Media Fund.

With this growing desire for recorded content, the challenge lies in how businesses handle this huge amount of volume to meet consumers’ viewing needs.

In today’s digital world, video heavily influences how companies communicate, interact and entertain audiences. Likewise, consumer behaviour is altering how this information is shared. Audiences expect to consume content in an instant; according to their individual schedules, and on electronic devices based on personal preference. In order to effectively stream and distribute video, live or on demand – no matter the device or size of data – organizations are turning to the power of cloud.

The Power of the Cloud

Cloud gives organizations the power, flexibility and storage space required to not only manage massive amounts of recorded content, but also to transfer these files quickly. In the past, bandwidth connections were restrictive and meant viewers had to choose between quality videos and speed. With cloud, businesses of any size in any industry can provide enough bandwidth to immediately deliver high quality videos anywhere.  Cloud-based services and infrastructures will grow and scale with businesses as audiences’ viewing habits change and allow them to leverage large quantities of data to guarantee a personalized experience across any screen.

For enterprises, video provides a new way for companies to capture, store and transmit information with colleagues, partners and clients.  It can be used for marketing and brand promotion, training employees, hosting customer webinars, and streaming events and internal meetings. It can be shared on multiple devices, including desktops, mobile devices, TVs and media players. As a result of these capabilities, implementing, managing and scaling recorded content invokes new technical challenges to enterprise network stability.

Cloud gives businesses enterprise-grade security, high reliability and bandwidth control that provides a consistent and engaging viewing experience while preserving high-level performance of internal networks.

Consider a global company that makes an important internal announcement. Live-streaming will help the organization to simultaneously share news to their workforce around the world. But reaching all employees at the same time could strain the enterprise network and force the company to invest in network capacity upgrades. Cloud video streaming can handle large data movement, sharing and exchange without putting pressure on networks. Its scalability also means organizations pay for as much or as little storage as they need, when they need it, which delivers huge financial savings.

Video is Paramount

For media and entertainment, the business of video is paramount. Whether through live streaming or distributing news coverage in real time, the media and entertainment industry heavily depends on video services. Organizations need to deliver high density videos for any screen immediately. Considering anyone can capture and share news with a smartphone, there is increased competition to deliver up-to-the-minute content.

Vantrix, a Montreal-based video service company, is providing video solutions for broadcasters, content owners and cable operators to enhance media processing operations. To help businesses within the media space, Vantrix with support from IBM Cloud Video, is providing businesses with an architecture that can manage massive volumes of content and meet the demand for video on multiple screens. These flexible cloud-based video services will help organizations quickly and efficiently store and handle video content at lower costs, while also supporting new and innovative 360 and Virtual Reality video distribution.

With 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created every day – the equivalent of 170 newspapers being delivered daily to every man, woman and child on the planet – organizations in all industries must look at new, innovative platforms that enable them to deliver content in ways audiences favor most.
The fact is, many businesses are still in their infancy when it comes to adopting and integrating an application architecture that can successfully manage large volumes of video data, support the exchange of massive media files and quickly distribute this content to multiple channels.

But with video on the cloud, companies can inspire and connect with their audience like never before.

Simo Vujovic is the director of cloud computing for IBM Canada.