Video nasty or video beauty?

The latest from our Guest Blogger -  Mark Darby, Visa Europe:

I just spent 2 days in Barcelona at the Successful Intranet Strategy Forum.  The two biggest eye-openers for me (apart from eating snails the size of obese slugs - see below - ) were

a) BT have external advertising on their intranet.  (Do you know anyone else who has?)

b) Deutsche Bank has incredible video streaming on its system. I want it!

If your intranet is a bit like ours, where getting video online is a nightmare, expensive, and IT go mad about bandwidth?  OK, well go and see DB - they have a catalogue of 15,000 videos, and add around 50x3 minute videos a day.  The cost of each?  Up to £90, but often cheaper.   You can then watch them through any PC, or download them to an MP3 player.  Have slides to go with it?  No problem - the slides are on screen at the same time and change at the right time?

They have 4 recording rooms around the world, but videos can be done at the desk using webcams.

And the business reason?  To stop analysts from all over the world having to take part in team meetings where only 1 minute is relevant to them. 1 one minute of information that they need to talk to their customers about?   It's used by the board (a lot of media training has taken place), and it's now used at every level.

The business benefit? It's given them a competitive edge to start with. They are getting to customers quicker with better information.  It's a huge cost saver - the equivalent of 4 analysts a year (not much?  - they earn around 1 million euro a year each).  And it's better for employees - 4.5x the number of people are aborbing the video as would the equivalent email.

It's a fantastic idea for a large company where information is your competitive advantage. But does anyone know of smaller companies doing the same?  Because I want to use it too!

Comments

[Martin Ross]

Great to hear success stories like this. Our clients are using our system (intra.tv) for training, comms, sharing success stories, big ticket announcements. One used it to launch the IPO internally, another to replace a big, expensive Business TV project with something cheaper, nimbler, faster to air and a whole lot more popular.

You want it? We got it!