According to Gartner Research, 10% of business video viewership already takes place on mobile devices — and that figure is expected to rise to 25% or more in the near future.
As organizations big and small make the shift to Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) initiatives, IT departments have begun facing the challenge of ensuring that internal content is ready and available across a wide range of potential devices.
And while support for every piece of content should be planned, enterprise video content for mobile devices in particular requires a little extra consideration. And that means ensuring your video platform is really ready for a mobile audience.
Beyond general concerns about device heterogeneity, there are three specific challenges that IT organizations will need to overcome in order to deliver enterprise video for mobile devices:
Challenge #1: Supporting a range of video formats
When it comes to playing video, there’s no shortage of viewers available on laptops, desktops, smartphones, and tablets—if you have a compatible video format. Apple’s iOS devices famously don’t play flash video, and even a traditional laptop might have difficulty with playback depending on the browsers and video players it has installed.
And those are just the concerns around viewing video. Empowering employees to record and share video messages, meetings, and best practices is essential to social learning and building a knowledge library—and further compounds the format compatibility challenge.
How a Mobile-Ready Video Platform Helps:
Video platforms typically include video transcoding features that accept a range of video and audio file types and automatically convert them to formats that can be viewed across a host of devices, from standard desktop browsers to mobile-optimized HTML5 and app-based viewers.
In automatically transcoding files, a video platform actually helps you twice—first at video upload, when it enables your people to share video from virtually any source with nearly any video format, and again at video playback, when it allows your employees to view the video on whatever device they happen to be using.
Challenge #2: Simplifying access to mitigate security concerns
The flipside to improved productivity that comes with BYOD is the increased surface area for security risk. Devices bought for personal use can unintentionally introduce personal productivity habits into the workplace. Personal email may be sent from the same inbox as work email. Sensitive files may be uploaded to a personal Dropbox account rather than a secure SharePoint site. And sensitive business videos may be uploaded to YouTube rather than the appropriate secure video library.
Most employees don’t intentionally take files outside the firewall—when they do, it’s typically in the name of efficiency. Ensuring your internal video sharing systems are easy to find and easy to use with a mobile device can mitigate many unintentional security lapses.
How A Mobile-Ready Video Platform Helps:
Video platforms are typically built to integrate with existing learning management systems (LMS) and identity providers, including Active Directory and SAML. Many video platforms also offer developer APIs to allow you to perform custom authentication and integration and automate user management.
With these connections in place, your administrators don’t need to create, distribute, and manage custom credentials for employees to access and stream video to their mobile devices.
Challenge #3: Reporting Concerns
As your employees begin to access your business video across more and more devices, you’ll also run into the challenge of tracking and reporting all that user behavior. Especially for organizations or teams charged with compliance, training, and human resources, the need to know whether a specific user watched a specific video (and whether or not they watched it all the way through) is paramount.
Challenging this requirement is the new trend in user behavior to consume video virtually anywhere, and often across different screens. Especially for the longer videos common to training and compliance, viewers may start watching on a laptop during office hours, get distracted, and wind up finishing the video on their smartphone while riding the bus home.
How A Mobile-Ready Video Platform Helps:
To ensure your employees have access to those videos whenever and wherever they wish, and as just importantly, to ensure your organization can accurately track who’s watching what, it is essential to plan for user-based, mobile-ready video analytics as part of both your BYOD and enterprise video strategies.
A video platform solves this challenge. Your video platform will be able to identify viewers individually as they log in, and that login allows you to find out everything from what they watched and whether they finished the video, regardless of which device they may be using to watch.
Learn More About Supporting Mobile Video
A modern, mobile-friendly video platform can help your organization ensure employees can access and share important business-related video content securely — even in a Bring Your Own Device world.
To learn more, including six reasons why a BYOD strategy is incomplete without video, check out our white paper, “Bring Your Own (Video Ready) Device”.
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