MarCom Professional

Smile - you're on camera!

As if business didn't have enough to cope with already, the Internet is pushing companies to embrace the online video revolution. So should your clients be producing their own telly?

Everyone knows that broadband is eating up the developed (and developing, in some cases) world. eMarketer predicts that there will be 413 million broadband households by 2010 and the prime driver of that growth is on-demand video. We love it - 76% of of adult internet users watched online video in 2005 (Pew). But what we watch over the Net is very different from the telly: we like short content pieces - according to BizReport, three-quarters of us watch "clips" of news, sport and information, as we munch our sandwiches over lunch or surf in the evening. No doubt we will stream chunkier bits of content as the plasma-screen PC moves into the living room, but for now, "the Shorts" have it. YouTube is reputed to enjoy 200 million unique users per month.

One of the burgeoning areas of Shorts is the Self-Help genre. At VideoJug we have pioneered this genre, producing 30,000 How To and Ask The Expert films for free-to-user distribution over the web. So now if you want to learn how to eat sushi or how to drive a golf ball you can watch it on www.videojug.com. But what about all the wisdom locked up in corporations? Do internet users want corporate clips? The answer is a resounding "yes": if you want to show your customers and potential customers how a product works, how to perform a task or simply show a human face to your corporation, you can now do just that via your own site and aggregators such as VideoJug. The concept of "Show and Tell" is prime territory for a whole mass of businesses, now that high quality video production is affordable and bandwidth prices are being driven down by competition.

Today, a company without a website would be a prime candidate for an H.M. Bateman cartoon. In a few years time, the same could be true for those without video.

Here's one of our current favourite videos... Stephen Fry on the topic of the Internet.
VideoJug: Stephen Fry: The Internet