interactive Video Sharing for Business (iVSB)

Everyone knows YouTube. Almost everyone has used it at one time or another. It is fast, convenient and fun. People upload videos, share and view them because the experience is rewarding. However, more people are discovering that it is not just for entertainment. It is a great way to learn technical knowledge and to share your own best practices - and this raises an interesting question:

Why don't companies have internal versions of YouTube?

Video Sharing for Business

iPOV has been exploring video sharing for some time. When we asked companies this question, everyone was intrigued, but no one knew what it would mean in practice. Most of the available software was intended for public applications on the Internet (i.e., YouTube). Ultimately, we identified three special requirements:

Businesses need to control access to the video contents.
Businesses have very specific and consistent uses for shared videos.
Businesses must integrate video sharing into established operations

In other words, business video sharing needs to be an operational tool, not the personal entertainment that everyone has seen. iPOV developed interactive Video Sharing for Business (iVSB) to fill that need and you can see how iSVB features compare to YouTube.

Link to iPOV iVSB Portal Demo

Candidate Business Applications

Every conversation about potential business applications for video sharing rapidly expands into a wide array of opportunities. If you can record video with inexpensive equipment and upload it easily so others can immediately view it, the possible applications are exciting.

Feedback to Suppliers - Every time you receive a badly made or packaged product, you can record the problem on video, upload it and send the supplier an email with the link.
Sharing Best Practice - When an engineer in a plant finds a better way to handle a common problem, they can record an informal video and make it available to their counterparts throughout the organization.
Problem-Solving Teams - When a group of workers at dispersed locations work on a project together, they can record quick videos and share them quickly with their team members.

Field Service Technicians - When a technician is working alone and encounters an odd problem, they can make a short movie and upload it for their colleagues at the office to review it.
Marketing Teams - As marketing and sales personnel perfect great PowerPoint presentations, they can record their delivery and post it for ideas and comments.
Vendor Information and Training - In addition to sending a confusing text RFQ, make a short on-site video and include a link in the bid document.

For all these applications, the common thread is the need to tailor the video sharing technology to the workflow. The video sharing technology must be flexible enough to cope with complex business rules about who can view the material, it must be able to handle a variety of different document types and it must be easily linked and searched. As good as they are, public YouTube-like websites can never satisfy these requirements. So we had to look elsewhere for technology.

iVSB Technology

We found little in the commercial software community. This may not be surprising when all of the market leaders (Google, Yahoo, etc.) in a software niche offer their services for free. Eventually, we expect that enterprise software vendors (e.g., Oracle, IBM, Saba, etc.) will introduce commercial video sharing packages as defensive offerings: "Of course our ____ includes video sharing". However, it is not clear when or how a solid commercial market will emerge.

That left the open source community. We scoured the open source projects and low-cost script solutions and we were underwhelmed. Most were just starting, or were nearly identical to Youtube and completely focused on the personal Internet user. It was hard to even find a starting point with any relevance to practical corporate needs.

Ultimately, we decided to review the problem afresh. What if, instead of looking for a video sharing solution, we looked for a document sharing solution. That led to the Gallery2 open source project. Gallery2 is an open source image and document sharing application that is a close fit to many corporate use patterns. However, its support for video was rudimentary. Fortunately iPOV has experience in this area and can supply the missing technology. We took Gallery2 as our base and added proprietary modules, handlers and procedures to greatly strengthen its video handling and operational capability.

iVSB Services

As the potential application examples illustrate, iVSB must work with a wide variety of corporate practices. Whie it is possible that a single software design might someday accomodate all of the possible requirements, that seems impractical at this point. To us, it seemed better to take a solid foundation and tailor it to the needs of each individual business application.

iPOV's mission is to provide services that help companies to adopt video as a day-to-day business tool. By adopting Gallery2 as the basis for iVSB, we ensured that 80-90% of the overall technology will remain in the hands of a high-performing, highly active open source development project. It also frees us from the tyranny of tracking software licenses and deployed editions, so iPOV can concentrate on helping clients to adapt, deploy and manage this new type of software.

Bottom Line

iPOV has been applying web video to industrial problems for nearly a decade. We used video across a broad spectrum of business activities and we are intimately familiar with the underlying software technologies. iVSB combines that experience with a powerful, malleable software platform that lets iPOV do what it does best - help companies use web video to make money and save time.