Gartner predicts multimedia-dominated content in future

12 Dec 2008

STAMFORD: The popularity of video among consumers will fuel a similar interest in video within enterprises, leading to the severe disruption of existing content strategies, according to Gartner Inc.

The proliferation of video within the enterprise will require numerous modifications in content authoring training and procedures, information management strategy and improvements in analytic technologies. Information managers, architects, record managers and content creators will all need to adjust their strategic plans accordingly.

“Consumerisation has proven a force of unmatched potency in the past and the same will be true when it comes to the explosive spike in the popularity of consumer online video, fueling a similar interest in video within enterprises,” said Whit Andrews, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “Video use on the web is growing swiftly, with 73% of the internet audience watching a video online at least monthly, that is about 90 million viewers.”

Andrews said that enterprises that see such growth as irrelevant to their operations risk alienating themselves from customers who start to request video communication services. He said the typical first uses of video for commercial entities have been for promotion, generating contests where users are encouraged to submit creative or funny videos to compete for prizes or for part of a promotion.

According to a Gartner survey of 800 end-user organisations in July 2008, software for the management of images and video is the fastest-growing segment of the content management market, with just 44% of enterprises having such products today but 22% intending to install it in 2009.

“The wave of content management products aimed at satisfying simple content management problems through consumer-attractive capabilities like blogs and wikis will surge through digital asset management (DAM),” said Andrews. “Users who film their children and pets at home and upload the results to the Internet in minutes will not accept onerous restrictions of inflexible security, access controls or forced metadata schemes in the workplace.”

Gartner believes that the popularity of simple DAM will force a number of different technological problems to be solved, such as the ability to incorporate video simply into other document types. Such uses are likely to be so compelling and the demand for them so great that by 2013, more than 25% of the content that workers see in a day will be dominated by pictures, video or audio.

Internet video is also driving interest in shorter bite-size videos. Consumerist expectations are intriguing customers as they see the possibility for improved search ability in rich media as well. The ability to search within a collection of videos, owned or uncontrolled, is an inevitable flare in the content market for the enterprise.

Ultimately, according to Andrews, enterprise search will subsume video search as simply another format, just as it is doing with audio, and as it did with graphical media before that. Video search will incorporate elements of social networking, social tagging, metadata extraction and application, video and audio transcription and conventional enterprise search to make it possible to find videos.

Additional information is available in the Gartner report “Video Killed the Document Czar.” The report is available on Gartner's website at www.gartner.com.