(A White paper research by Steve Vonder Haar of Wainhouse Research Enterprise and commissioned by UStream)

When it comes to business communications, live streaming video is no one-trick pony. Executives are finding fresh, varied applications for corporate video distributed on a oneto-many basis. Indeed, as video technology platforms grow more robust, the range of business use cases for videoenriched communications is expanding in step.

In its most recent executive survey, Wainhouse Research identified more than a dozen applications of live online video that are used by at least 40% of the organizations represented in the survey. (Figure 1)

It’s a diversity of use cases that belie the history of online video adoption in the enterprise. For years, employee training has served as the “killer application” of streaming video for corporate users. By leveraging video to extend the reach of training sessions, organizations can deliver learning opportunities to more employees at a lower cost than would be possible if individuals needed to travel in order to attend a live session in-person.

Figure 1

Little wonder, then, that employee training is the most extensively deployed application of one-to-many online video. More than half of all organizations represented in the Wainhouse Research survey (51%) report than they have implemented online video in employee training applications.

The second most frequently deployed application of one-to-many video in the enterprise consists of “executive presentations.” This particular use case is epitomized by the “all-hands meetings” conducted by organizations to allow top executives to update far-flung staff on corporate news and strategies. Overall, 47% of survey respondents say their organization has deployed one-to-many streaming events to disseminate executive presentations.

While employee training and executive presentations have played a key role in encouraging organizations to adopt streaming video technologies, they do not tell the full story of the technology’s evolving impact on business communications. Indeed, as organizations begin to use live streaming video capabilities more extensively, they begin to embrace increasingly diverse use cases for the technology.
Simply put, expanded adoption of video technologies correlates with a proliferation in the ways that these capabilities are put to work. Figure 2 compares deployment levels for one-to-many video applications between organizations that produce more than 100 live online video events annually and those that use live video between one and nine times per year. The top-to-bottom rankings of applications listed in Figure 2 are based on the size of the adoption gap for each application between active and moderate adopters of live streaming video. As a result, the applications at the top of the list demonstrate the uses of live streaming that gain traction as users’ familiarity with online video grows.

Figure 2

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