At Streaming Media East 2010, I spoke with Steve Vonder Haar, Research Director and Founder, Interactive Media Strategies to talk about the state of online video, growth trends and forecasts for the future, and the great evolution in the overall marketplace over the last years he has attended the Streaming Media conferences. Interactive Media Strategies is a research and consulting firm that focuses primarily on video for business communications.Vonder Haar outlined the massive changes he's seen over the last several years in how companies are deploying video technology. Today, many companies already use video to make employee training and All Hands meetings more engaging. Historically, it's been large companies deploying on-premise solutions that were managed internally by IT departments. The focus was mainly on infrastructure and not the interactive experience. Content delivery networks enabled reliable playback of video, and became more affordable over time.
But with the rise of hosted video solutions, small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) found it even easier to deploy video applications, through the robust and scalable SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) offerings of online video platform providers. This has helped fuel the growth of online video communications — with a trend toward moving from internal communications behind the corporate firewall to outward bound audiences.
Vonder Haar cited data from a related article he wrote, Business Video Market Expands, Unfazed by Recession, to comment on the continued expansion of online video business communications. He noted that the so-called “Great Recession” put a crimp in online video spending, which in 2008 was $460 million.
"Despite the dampening effects of recessionary pressures on technology investment for the past 18 months, spending on business video equipment and services expanded at a 15 percent rate in 2009, reaching $531 million for the year. The market totals are highlighted in our new Interactive Media Strategies report that measures the size of corporate spending on technologies that enable the development, management and distribution of online video for business communications applications."But online video spending is now back on track in terms of pre-Recession growth rates exceeding 20 percent on an annual basis, as Vonder Haar explained:
"A rebound in growth rates to pre-2009 levels appears to be already in the works. Based on results from a survey of more than 1,000 corporate executives and on-going anecdotal evidence collected in on-going interviews with industry vendors and corporate end-users familiar with the enterprise video market, Interactive Media Strategies projects that growth rates for online video technologies in the corporate sector will rebound in 2010. This year, the market for online business video tools and services will reach $657 million — an increase of 24 percent over 2009 spending levels."Vonder Haar suggested that the opportunity for SMBs to join the video revolution has never been greater. The emergence of hosted solutions has opened the door to a wider range of companies to deploy online video not only for internal communications, but for external communications and marketing as well. That, he said, is going to drive significant growth over the long haul.
About Steve Vonder Haar
Contact Steve at svonder@interactivemediastrategies.com or (817) 860-5121
For more information, visit http://www.interactivemediastrategies.com/
Also, visit their two newest Channels produced in conjunction with TMC at the links below.
Online Video Platform Solutions Channel
Video Content Management Systems Channel
