A YouTube Business Model in the Enterprise
Distributing video inside the Enterprise today is hard. YouTube can help solve a real business problem for real, paying businesses.
If you want to see how bad the enterprise video end user experience is, head over to Kontiki. You will have to click over to a second page to watch their “Webcast”. There you will have to download a 26.77MB file.
41% of business work is what McKinsey calls “Tacit Interactions“. That means 41% of the work that people do requires analysis and deals with gray areas. When you deal with gray areas, explaining the nuance of a point is often critical. That’s why people like face to face meetings. But, what if you couldn’t make the meeting. How often could distributed video help in a business setting?
Or, how often could basic screencasts like the ones over at Rubyonrails.org help to reduce training costs, or the cost of customer support?
YouTube has started to build a SaaS infrastructure that could be repurposed to help businesses deal with these issues.
TechCrunch has a posting today, talking about how YouTube wants $1.5 Billion.
I think YouTube, can make a fortune in the business setting, as it could help facilitate a new mode of business communication.
The only thing that have to add are simple access control systems. The kind of access control and security tools that SalesForce or iUpload have already proven work in a Enterprise SaaS setting.
In a business setting, many of those copyright issues go away. Companies looking to spice up an internally distributed video with a clip from Office Space, will simply pay for the rights to distribute it to their employee base. If the prices are reasonable - $5 and $10 for a few thousand views of a 20 second bit, people will pay. That’s even more revenue for YouTube. Extra tools to ease feeds from business Video conference calls is yet another revenue stream.
And through out all of this, YouTube will be able to leverage the key advantages it has now over existing Enterprise Video solutions - YouTube is fun, easy and appealling. People are happy to use it. That is more than can be said for many of the tools currently available in the enterprise.
Business Level Presentation on YouTube
OK… this is a little out dated… but it proves the point that you can use YouTube to distribute basic, business like content:
Rod,
Great video. As usual, you have some excellent images and diagrams that get the point across. Ever considered doing Blog Evangelism full-time?
Microsoft is coming out with it’s own ‘YouTube for the Enterprise’ solution. Check out Academy Mobile, a social media and corporate podcasting platform:
Blog entry:
http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2007/08/07/microsoft-academy-mobile-moss-2007-powered-community-driven-videocast-podcast-service-for-the-enterprise-how-we-did-it.aspx
Promo video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-D3g1A5ocik
My company makes a great hardware solution for creating high quality employee generated video content. It’s called Siris Studio Pro, a desktop video studio that is easy to set-up and operate. We already have several large corporate clients like Cisco, Sun, NetApp, Xilinx, and eBay using it to create video presentations.
Deskcaster is being built as a end-to-end solution for enterprise video. Please get in touch if you would like to take part in the preview release.
I hope whatever happens, you tube will not let people post violence as videos. fights, attacking women. what the hell has this world came too… please don’t make the internet a trash place with trash………….