Let me start with a bit of history:
Back in the now almost retro year of 1997, a company called Macromedia adopted a small startup called FutureSplash and changed their name to FLASH, making them the standard for web video. Sound familiar?
But it wasn't until 2005 that Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim created a website that allowed users to upload, share and watch videos. YouTube was born. Just a year later, in June 2006, the first video blogger emerged: Lonelygirl 15, dedicated to telling her audience about her day-to-day life as a teenager.
In 2008 and 2009, digital TV platforms such as Hulu and Netflix appeared and gained millions of subscribers/customers.
In addition, regular mobile phones gave way to smartphones, which have become the perfect tool for watching and recording video, always at hand and always ready to be uploaded.
Something is changing: mobile devices record in Full HD and even Ultra High Definition (4K), traditional physical video exchange companies (such as the giant Blockbuster) are disappearing, prices are getting cheaper... and videos are becoming easier to produce, easier to obtain, viralised with millions of views... the growth of online video is unstoppable.
Still, do you doubt the communication power of video?
Video is everywhere, but history always repeats itself and innovation often reaches society first and requires a critical mass of users to be considered by companies.
So why are these organisations so sceptical? Why do they take so long to implement this type of communicative innovation? The answer is THE RISK.
In fact, THE risks: the social risk and the financial risk.
what are they worried about?
Take a look at the figures:
As of today,
- 200.1 billion videos are uploaded on the web every month
- 4.1 billion hours of video are watched every month (450,000 years of video in a month)
- 25% of videos are watched on mobiles globally
- According to CISCO: It will take a person, in 2018, about 5 million years to be able to watch all the videos that will cross global networks. Almost one million minutes of video content will be played every second.
Clearly, social risk is no longer an issue, which is why companies are starting to rely on social media (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube...). They are beginning to discover that online video is possibly the future of their content marketing strategy.
However, most large organisations are still at a very primitive stage because they still think in terms of broadcasting, i.e. mass media, point to mass. Companies have not yet learned from ordinary users. They don't know the real power of social video.
In fact, production costs have been dramatically reduced thanks to technological advances in the multimedia and audiovisual field.
It is time for companies to understand the value of audiovisual communication:
- Mobile training applications with interactive videos, quizzes, metrics and tracking options ideal for employee training. Perfect for HR.
- Animated GIFs, cinemagraphs, 360º creatives or micro-videos that use storytelling to tell short stories that build loyalty and reinforce the brand in the minds and hearts of customers. A marketing department's dream.
Online video is here to stay, it's there to take advantage of its benefits.
Occam Digital Agency helps you to produce and implement audiovisual content in your marketing and internal communication strategies, because we make digital part of your DNA.
What's next?
