Cisco: Balancing Requests and Reality in Enterprise Mobile Video
What internal customers ask for isn't always what they end up viewing.
That lesson was learned by Mark Sherwood, senior director of Cisco's emerging technology IT group, and shared at the recent Streaming Media East show in New York City. Employees say they want full access to internal videos on their mobile devices, but they're more selective when it comes time for viewing.
"What users ask for isn't always what they end up consuming," said Sherwood. "Everybody says 'I absolutely want video on my smartphone. I want it on my tablet.' What we see is that with video-on-demand, people who are using these devices, it's a fairly short video, two, three minutes. For streaming events, there's a lot of people who had requested it, they say 'I absolutely want to watch a company meeting on a device like this.' So, we end up doing some proof of concepts, and we'll put out an HLS streaming server, and there's not that much usage on it. People try it for a few minutes and it's really small. You're not going to sit for two hours to watch a live streamed events, or at least our internal customers don't appear to."
It's up to the IT department, then, to figure out what video to send to mobile devices.
"What we're trying to do now is figure out what are people really going to use, because I don't want to waste time and money developing 'I want this, I want this,' and then find out they're really not going to take advantage of it," added Sherwood. "What we found is that people tend to go and attend an event live, or, if they're going to watch it live streamed, they're going to sit at a desktop."
Sherwood also noticed a surprising usage pattern for social features during live events. For that and more on mobile video in the enterprise, watch the full video below. Also, download the presentations by Andy Howard and David Birnbaum.
Unique Deployment Challenges for Mobile Video in the Enterprise
"Help! My CEO wants video on his iPad." Deploying mobile video in the enterprise presents many challenges that are unique to enterprise environments. Major considerations include encoding video for mobile devices, choosing the correct servers, and delivering to multiple devices and players-especially now that Flash will no longer be supported on mobile devices. The final challenge discussed is networking, as enterprises need to determine if users are going to access the video over the enterprise Wi-Fi network or the public cellular network.
Moderator: Andy Howard, Founder & Managing Director, Howard & Associates
Speaker: Michael Newman, VP/GM, Video Content Management, Polycom
Speaker: Cid Isbell, Video Solutions Architect, Wellpoint
Speaker: Mark Sherwood, Senior Director, Emerging Technology IT Group, Cisco
Speaker: David Birnbaum, VP, Learning and Development, Coldwell Banker
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