InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
October 4, 1999
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Companies turn idle video into digital media assets with new management tools
By Evan Rosen
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any enterprises have a host of video assets sitting on a shelf gathering dust. For the most part, those executive speeches, TV commercials, product launches, and training videos are seen a few times by a few people and then filed away, never to be seen again. But a variety of video sifting, sorting, and searching tools are letting companies make greater use of their video assets.Some companies are aggressively making use of video with the help of new video-management tools. Shell Chemical Corp. in Houston distributes video clips by publishing them to an intranet site. The company uses VideoVisor client software from Digital Lava Inc. VideoVisor can be used to annotate video and link clips to related text files, image files, and Web sites. The software also lets users search videos by key words so that they can quickly review the most relevant portions.
When a digitized video clip is available for viewing, Shell Chemical's nearly 5,000 U.S. desktop-computer users receive an E-mail containing a link to the intranet site. With a mouse click, users can view and manipulate the video.
Shell inaugurated a new era of digital video communications last year when it upgraded its PCs. When users fired up their new computers, Shell Chemical CIO Susan Tholstrup greeted them and explained new desktop features via video already loaded onto hard drives. Shell Chemical also employs video to distribute the CEO's "state of the union" speech and to kick off the annual United Way campaign.
Tholstrup uses video for important messages because E-mail and voice mail often fall flat or get lost, she says. "We think video is incredibly important," Tholstrup says. "It's a critical success factor that people feel connected and know where we're going as a company, and see the leadership of this organization as real people."
The VideoVisor software can link a transcript to each published video clip and scroll the text as the video plays. "When you can see executives talk and see the script go by, it's even more effective than just watching video, because people process information in different ways," Tholstrup says. "When people talk, you wonder if you hear them right. This takes the ambiguity out."
In addition, Tholstrup says, text scrolling also breaks down communication barriers by allowing global executives who speak English with heavy accents to communicate via video. Shell Chemical also plans to use video-management tools in training chemical-plant workers. The company will stream video to plant sites and give workers the ability to access quickly the portions of the training video that are most relevant to their jobs.
Digital Lava charges $5,000 to $6,000 to digitize, encode, and publish an hour of video, and also charges $150 per desktop to license the VideoVisor client. The company says it will also license its vPublisher authoring software, which runs on Windows, so clients can encode and publish video and related files on their own.
These tools are part of a growing and loosely defined market of digital media asset-management tools, including video logging, cataloging, and publishing products from companies such as Digital Lava, Eloquent Systems, Excalibur Technologies, Imagine Products, MediaSite, MediaWare Solutions, and Virage.
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Photo by Jim Caldwell
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