This year is set to be a big one for the enterprise video market as businesses continue to bake video into their workflows and harness AI to improve user experience.
At the forefront of this developing market is Vbrick. UC Today sat down with Vbrick CEO Paul Sparta to pick out six trends he expects to accelerate in 2023.
The Democratization of Video
The advancement of cloud computing has kickstarted the democratization of technology, with businesses of all sizes now able to utilize enterprise-grade tools in affordable subscription and consumption models.
However, Sparta said that trend has not yet bled into the enterprise video market to the same extent.
Video has become more critical to enterprises over the past few years, particularly with the explosion of hybrid working. This has seen video creation move beyond marketing departments for the first time. But, there are still some challenges to overcome, which Sparta expects to start happening this year.
“This trend is continually overhyped but hasn’t really come to fruition yet,” he explained. “People can do so much with video on their phones now, but it’s been held back in business.
“Businesses have to add governance which is incredibly unsexy, but they can’t have all this video without having some rules.”
Despite these challenges, Sparta does expect this democratization to develop this year, citing Loom and Webex’s work with Vidcast as examples of early success.
Aggregation
The democratization of video will be enabled partly through the growing trend of aggregation.
As enterprises produce more videos, they will need a system in place to collate them and make governance a simpler task.
“The biggest waste of video is in the endless hours of recorded conference calls,” Sparta said.
“There is so much undiscovered risk and undiscovered value, and you can’t unlock that value unless you have them all in the same place.
“This is where aggregation relates to Artificial Intelligence (AI). If you’re not aggregating your video, then you can’t transcribe it, which means you can’t search it, which means you can’t run any kind of intelligent analysis.”
This is critical in industries handling sensitive information, such as healthcare and financial services.
The explosion of data comes hand-in-hand with an increased need for governance and security, which enterprises will find difficult to achieve if they don’t have visibility of their entire video estate.
Sparta stressed that aggregation doesn’t necessarily mean having videos physically stored in the same place; it is more about making them manageable and accessible .
The acceleration of aggregation is crucial to driving two other trends: interoperability and the growing use of AI.
Demand for Interoperability
Interoperability is crucial to providing the aggregation Spata discussed above.
Collaboration platforms are effective for real-time communication and also for asynchronous communication through chat – but most of them do not prioritize video management as a key feature.
This means that, as organizations look to standardize on a collaboration platform as their central hub for work, video management can fall by the wayside.
“We’re seeing this most with the meeting providers, Webex, Zoom and Microsoft Teams,” Sparta said. “These platforms don’t specialize in managing video content and streaming at scale.”
“Companies attempt to reduce their use of enterprise video platforms and just use a conferencing platform. But they go down this path and realize that they don’t have a scalable platform to do what they need to do with video.”
With this in mind, Vbrick’s approach is to be complementary to platforms like Teams, Webex and Google Meet – not compete with them.
Sparta said that some enterprises have opted to go all-in on the native capabilities within these platforms, but predicts that many will u-turn and opt for a dedicated enterprise video platform that integrates with their collaboration tools this year.
Increased Use of AI
The benefits of AI have been mentioned above with regard to aggregation, giving enterprises the ability to transcribe and search through video content – which ultimately makes it more useful.
Beyond this, Sparta predicts that AI will become a building block for specialized use cases in specific verticals. These solutions would likely involve integrating third-party AI technology with enterprise video platforms.
Sparta cited examples of AI being used to help radiologists locate cancer and help manufacturers detect malfunctions in their products.
“These aren’t necessarily things that the enterprise video platform itself would do, but they can collect all of these videos and grab screenshots of everything that the AI has highlighted and create an aggregated video for people to analyze.
“These are perfect examples of how you could do something for specific use cases.”
Rapid Adoption of Embedded Video
Video is becoming increasingly important for enterprises in terms of both user and customer experience. However, it’s important that video can be found in the right place at the right time, not solely on a video platform.
Sparta expects the use of embedded video to explode this year as enterprises look to bake it into their existing workflows.
“We need to get video where it actually needs to be,” he said. “Most work processes are in other applications like ERP and customer support, for example.
“Companies don’t want their employees to need to exit applications in order to find relevant video content, and they also don’t want them to waste time searching through a four-hour video to find the 30 seconds they need.”
With this growing trend in mind, Vbrick recently partnered with ServiceNow to help enterprises build video into the workflows that their employees are using every day.
Sparta said he expects to see the enterprise video market continue to integrate with ServiceNow and other enterprise software platforms like SAP and Workday.
Find out more about Vbrick’s enterprise video platform here.
