Tools for Corporate Video Asset Management, Part 1
Sep 25, 2008 8:47 AM,
By Jessaca Gutierrez
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Tools for Corporate Video Asset Management, Part 2
IVT PrimeTime
The corporate world is on the video bandwagon; it’s been on there for a while, and it’s growing. While the proliferation of corporate video use and content creation is no surprise considering that being green (and businesses are getting serious about becoming green), productive, and cutting edge inherently means some video component added to the business model, the asset management portion has been slow to be examined. Now, however, the rise of video assets has created a demand for professional video management tools; the manufacturing market is slowly but surely responding with its own take on how to address the needs of this market, and learning along the way.
This month two companies made product announcements to address the video infrastructure on the enterprise level. Google announced its Google Video for Business and the IVT announced PrimeTime. While Google is a dominant force within the video consumption industry with YouTube, its Google Video for Business might be a mere flash in the pan. Streaming Media’s Dan Rayburn commented on his blog that the application doesn’t meet the requirements that corporations demand in this video era. The application features secure, private video sharing with up to 3GB of video storage per user account. It may be a asset management tool useful for smaller organizations, but it may not have all the features or sophistication a Fortune 500 needs.
This week, IVT announced PrimeTime, a new content management product geared toward the corporate market. Although the company likens the product to an enterprise-level YouTube, the product, PrimeTime blazes a different trail to address a different need.
“YouTube is great way to share a squirrel falling out of a tree; YouTube is not a great way to share your secret marketing presentation that is going to be released next week and only 10 executives should be able to see it,” says IVT CTO Greg Pulier. “YouTube does not allow you to share anything but a video. So let’s say you want to share a webcast that included searchable slides and downloadable materials like PDFs and other things. It’s just not an option, so YouTube doesn’t do that. YouTube also doesn’t focus on the enterprise environment, so some enterprises need integration of a system like this with their existing environment. For example, employees all have their own username and password log on. Once they’re logged on they want to be able to do this type of thing, not have to go to another system to do it.”
Corporate Need
Because video communications are being used for a lot of things in companies, such as webcasting, videoconferencing, HR seminar and training, product launches, dynamic presentations that include whiteboard and video projection components, companies are using solutions that may not fit their exact enterprise needs. “Most of things being used today are really what I call point-solutions being used by either individuals or departments for specific purposes and then that content isn’t available for the rest of the company,” says Phillip Whalen, IVT’s president and CEO. “That’s really the bigger issue—the enterprise issue that we’re addressing. Video communications is growing really fast for a whole number of obvious reasons, but companies now, with the creation of all this content, realizing that the solution to their buying are these point-solutions that they need more for an enterprise solution here.”
IVT customers include AT&T, IBM, Ernst & Young, and Pfizer—larger companies, Whalen says, that do webcast to 90,000 employees live. “What we started seeing was that these companies were turning to us and saying, ‘We need a library of this stuff. We can’t keep emailing out links. When people are searching for old stuff, they’re looking through their email for the links, or we’re posting it to our portal as a link,’” Whalen says. “’We need more of the YouTube experience, where we can promote stuff we want people to see, where we can control who sees what, and where people can find stuff.’ And as we were hearing that from all these big companies that really drove us to develop this software.”
In part two of this series to follow in the next Corporate AV enewsletter, read more about IVT and PrimeTime as well as the other tools that have come to the marketplace.
