The State of Enterprise Video Beyond COVID-19

Despite the questions and vague timelines around when (or if) the world will return to its pre-pandemic state, the millions of employees working and networking from home have proven that not only is video essential for nearly every business unit across multiple industries, but this industry will continue to thrive well past the end of our current health crisis. Google's recent announcement that their workforce will remain home through at least July 2021, reinforces the need for large- and small-scale enterprises to adapt their work capabilities accordingly. Evolving video delivery technologies, coupled with smart content management solutions, continue to provide benefits to enterprise video deployments. ABI Research forecasts the enterprise video market to generate US$18.7 billion in 2020.

Global Growth

That number is expected to rise at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 1.5%, reaching US$19.9 billion in 2024. North America is the strongest market segment, closely followed by Europe. As the technology continues to evolve, video will be in higher demand to perform real-time collaboration of workforces across different regions. Subsequently, as adoption increases, the demand for solutions in end-to-end video delivery processes will also be high. Solutions supporting efficient encoding, low-latency streaming, scalability, and bandwidth reduction features are crucial for successful deployments. Ultimately, powerful video analysis tools enable organizations to make strategic decisions for operational efficiency and business growth and are essential to maximizing Return on Investment (ROI).

Enhanced Video Solutions: Faster. Easier. More Efficient

Low latency video streaming solutions allow for faster live streaming of corporate events to both internal and external viewers. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) technologies enable enterprise video applications to be more efficient. Facial and object recognition, scene detection, and speech-to-text capabilities are making video indexing and search functions easier, faster, and more accurate. Such features are driving more enterprise video deployments across different industries. 

Enterprise video deployments are increasingly implemented on the cloud, shortening deployment time, and reducing costs since cloud-based solutions do not need a substantial CAPEX on hardware and software. Cloud-based solutions are also highly scalable, providing flexibility to upgrade or downgrade the size of the deployment, as necessary. The expansion of fiber optic broadband networks and ongoing 5G network infrastructure will improve the content delivery process further and open even greater opportunities in enterprise video deployments.

Universal Benefits Across Many Industries 

Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) based video applications are emerging solutions for corporate training and retail and marketing purposes. AR/VR technologies offer immersive and realistic experiences that are highly impactful in healthcare or industrial manufacturing training programs, also serving as powerful marketing tools for promoting products and services in automotive, retail, tourism, and many other verticals, giving the technology high marks in versatility. 

Video enables significant cost saving and business efficiency for all businesses, regardless of size. Companies have saved multi-millions of dollars in travel expenses by deploying video for corporate communications and corporate training. In these unprecedented times of the cancellation of large events, enterprise video applications became essential to connect with thousands of stakeholders across the world. Haivision and Wowza are among the vendors supporting low latency streaming solutions while vendors such as Kollective and RAMP provide eCDN solutions which efficiently manage bandwidth and delivery of video.  

Recommendations

As the market continues to grow, video solution providers need to support efficient features for video searching tracking, video metrics, and meaningful analytics. The capability to integrate analytical solutions into marketing automation and customer relationship management systems will also be beneficial to businesses and organizations.

  • Enterprise video use cases are continuously expanding. As deployments increase, tracking video metrics and producing meaningful analysis of video will become essential to help organizations understand video performance. Video usage by location, time, and user-level video consumption are all essential for understanding the value and effectiveness of the video and measure the ROI.
  • The ability to integrate the video metrics and other corporate platforms, such as marketing automation and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, can be beneficial to companies to provide automated insights and recommendations of sales leads, highlighting customers’ particular interests and demand for products, solutions, etc.
  • Powerful search capabilities will be important to take full advantage of video; reaching maximum audience and providing audiences with the right content. Leveraging AI-based search functions can benefit organizations providing search results fined-grained to the specific part of the video.
  • Enterprise network capability is a common challenge in video deployments at scale. Leveraging enterprise Content Delivery Network (eCDN) to support efficient video delivery is crucial. Video caching and Peer-to-Peer (P2P) content distribution capabilities reduce the bandwidth significantly.
  • On-premises deployments support higher levels of security, while cloud-based Software-asa-service (SaaS) models enable scaling up or down as required. Hybrid deployments offer a balance between security and flexibility requirements. Organizations need to carefully consider business requirements, resources, security requirements, etc. to select cloud, hybrid, or on-premise deployment models.

These findings are from ABI Research’s Enterprise Video: ROI and Use Cases technology analysis report, as part of our Video and Cloud research service, which includes research, data, and ABI Insights.