Laurent Bridenne's web log about multimedia strategy, design, usability, technologies and much more... Multimedia

Video is on every major web sites today.

As I've talked in the past with my counterparts at other companies (Cisco, Applied Materials, Intel, Oracle) as part of the Bay Area Streaming Media Group (BASMUG), it really astonished me that all of them were at various levels of implementation, deployment and usage... yet most of them had the same problems: managing that content.

From using streaming video as a grass-root movement to have it be part of the corporate culture. All of them had a system/process in place to create, encode and post.

But as content grows and the need to effectively manage all types of online media in a flexible, branded environment, a new system has to be in place.

That system needs to provide design flexibility in how media is laid-out. Will it be embedded into a blog or into a product page? how about a launch page for a live webcast? A simple URL variable can set that. Web designers can work with it, not around it in order to create a seamlessly integrated rich-media experience.

Now, what features/content do particular users see? Can a generic viewer access partner content? Can they view internal (confidential) content? Absolutely not. Should you set up multiple instances of that system for each audience type? No, because managing all of these would prove prohibitive.

How can web publishers effectively have recourse to these media assets, and for these media assets to be part of a content management system, tagged with proper meta-data to improve search results... and maybe even dynamically generate content playlists without the human need to hand code/pick specific UUIDs?

Should we all just hand it all to YouTube to manage this for us? Well... sometimes, that would make sense. That's the easy way out. I don't like easy way out... not challenging and it never is a long-term solution in my humble opinion.

However, as I think about the bigger picture and all the integration points within a company, that system could help generate leads, train/inform sales folks faster, leverage existing content to maximize ROI, help drive marketing campaigns, boost employee communication effectiveness, boost brand awareness and have all these supporting metrics to prove or course-correct any multimedia program... This type of stuff gets my head spinning... in a good way :-)

Don't forget about offline media. Tradeshows, customer briefing centers and digital signage systems could also benefit from it. This system could transcode, or make raw assets available for download and local playback, or create specific playlists based on the customer card being swiped at a tradeshow or building lobby, to bring that extra little something to the client to say: "we know what YOU care about"

As this medium grows exponentially, the system needs to be flexible/scalable to meet new users, integrate in internal/external workflows from various organizations without breaking in the process.

This is what keeps me up at night. Ensuring that multimedia is being used as effectively as possible, tied into all the various departments through a single system that would be flexible/scalable enough to have at least a 5 year lifespan...

Now that I wrote this down, I could try to go to sleep... for a while