Bandwidth, video tools catch up to hype

Four years ago, when Todd Dorff, director of Internet marketing for KPMG Consulting, began looking into streaming media, he found that audiences - KPMG clients, consultants and employees - weren't ready to receive streaming video content at their desktops . . . yet.

"We knew that because we had our own consultants in the field working with our clients to pilot streaming media in various business applications. There were issues they were facing for which we didn't have solutions internally or that we could recommend to them," Dorff recalls.

But Dorff recognized the potential of streaming media for communications applications and forged ahead. Working with the IT department, he assembled the necessary technologies - client software, streaming servers, and video-capture and compression hardware. And he won approval from upper management.

The kickoff Webcast in late 1998 featured CEO Rand Blazer rallying employees around the idea that KPMG should go public. "Just by trying this, we demonstrated that we were willing to take a risk," Dorff says. "We were aware that there would be people who couldn't get a satisfactory experience, especially those who were offsite, but those who watched what we did with what we had were impressed."

Streaming media catches the wave in 2001
Return on investment
Client software flows to the desktop
The setup
Video network of champions

KPMG Consulting's experience with streaming media is typical of what is occurring at many large financial institutions, consultancies, and communications and high-tech companies. Usually, a champion within the company pushes the idea, while the technology to create, store, compress and distribute streaming media, not to mention the bandwidth required to view it, catches up.

Generally speaking, large companies, such as KPMG Consulting with more than 10,000 employees, are leading the charge. That's partly because these companies made significant Y2K-related infrastructure investments and because the more global and dispersed a company is, the more it stands to gain from using streaming media to bring training and corporate communications to far-flung locations.

Streaming media is expected to trickle down to midsize companies in 2004 and beyond. These companies will use streaming media to reach employees in branch and remote offices, but they are less likely to build their own systems and networks than larger companies are.

Doing it yourself

Communicating a "high-tech" and "high-touch" services vision at a company with 22,400 employees, 11,900 registered representatives and 7.8 million active clients is a challenge few undertake, much less achieve. But with Chairman and founder Charles Schwab leading the way, the Charles Schwab Corp. has become a pioneer in streaming media.

When Schwab wants to reach employees with a personal message, he rides the elevator in the company's San Francisco office building to an in-house streaming media production studio.

"In the studio we can produce pretty much anything we need to stream - on demand or live. We usually have a two to three month lead time to plan everything for a training program, for example, but that's not to say that we can't create content and stream it on the same day," says Tracy Behler, director of e-messaging development in Schwab's Electronic Brokerage Group.

Behler says executive communications was the original driver for streaming media, but that has been expanded to include video presentations from fund managers and analysts streamed directly to customers.

"Our mission is to help our customers gain access to people they normally wouldn't see or hear from, and by using streaming media the customers can form relationships, they connect with the passion and character of the analysts as human beings, not just text," she says.

Schwab initially offered text chats between customers and analysts. In early 2000, these were moved to audiocasts. At the same time, the studio building project began, and in 2001, video Webcasting was introduced for those who wanted to see analyst briefings on demand or live.

"Live events are much more difficult to do," Behler says. "You have to put the bandwidth and the technologies together properly with the people. Working with a wide-area network partner like Akamai really helps us reach global audiences without building out a large streaming network."

She says everything is archived, so customers and employees can search through the library anytime they want.

On-demand access is where the big return on investment is found, Behler says, especially among people on the go who can't adjust their schedules to meet a set broadcast time.

Jim Kelly, director of marketing for PricewaterhouseCoopers' Global Risk Management practice, agrees. "With on-demand media, we can capture content at the convenience of the subject-matter experts. And playback is available for viewers when it is also most convenient and relevant for them."

Kelly was the champion for streaming media at PricewaterhouseCoopers. "I had a conviction that this technology would work," he says.

But Kelly faced challenges. "We still had the issue of technology catching up to the hype. There were so many shortages in infrastructure. We wanted to be doing this when the mainstream user could get in with a couple of clicks." It took a while, but he finally reached that point about a year ago.

Kelly says a key lesson he learned is that the IT staff needs to be brought in early in the process. IT needs to understand what technology is being used so it can monitor the network and respond quickly to technical problems. Also, the IT staff needs to be onboard to help set up connections to remote locations. Kelly is also using Yahoo's Broadcast.com network and services to deliver video to large audiences.

Applications

The most popular internal application for streaming media is the executive address. When the merger between Boeing and McDonnell Douglas occurred in 1997, the employee base doubled from 100,000 to 200,000. CEO Phil Condit leveraged the combined network of 4,000 servers to deliver a streaming video presentation to employees.

Learning, or corporate training, ranks second. Cambridge Technology Partners (CTP), now a wholly owned subsidiary of Novell, does "road shows" to introduce new products to its salesforce. The alternative, bringing the entire salesforce to one location for a weeklong program, would cost at least $1 million, says Jim Conley, of the learning and development group, CTP.

By putting a dozen, hourlong sessions in streaming media format, adding links to relevant documents and quizzes, and requiring that employees complete the online courses prior to the classroom training, CTP is able to compress traditional classroom time from five days to two days. "The value proposition was indisputable," Conley says.

CTP works with a company named Eloquent, which developed LaunchForce, a platform and application suite designed for accelerating product launches and reducing their cost. LaunchForce manages the distribution of content tracks who views it, and quizzes the participants to gauge how well the content is being absorbed.

Streaming media doesn't replace classroom learning, Conley says, but it cuts costs and increases the value of the time that people spend in the classroom.

He adds that one of the keys to the program's success is involving the IT group. In many companies, projects begin with interdisciplinary teams including IT but funded by a specific business unit. And frequently, the pilot project is limited to areas of the network that aren't considered mission critical.

At National Semiconductor, there already was a well-established corporate video group that did live events, but Blaise Gomes, engineering manager for quality and reliability, wanted to "break the rule that video was hard to do and extremely expensive."

He started with a $75 capture card and an old PC, got a free copy of Real Producer and started encoding. Then he scraped up a second PC, set up a server and got the attention of the IT group, which agreed to support the project.

Today, Gomes and his group have created more than 100 training videos that are available to the company's 10,000 employees. In addition, employees can make videos to deliver messages to co-workers, for example, explaining why they made a particular business decision.

"We have lots of experts in this company," Gomes says. "We have people who love to share their knowledge. We've captured these people on video and now they can train all day while they are doing their jobs."

He's now using Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) technology to allow employees to jump to specific places on the video. And streaming media has been integrated with e-mail so employees can fill out an evaluation form and send it back.

At MFS Investments, the company's chief asset is the knowledge held by its analysts and fund managers, says Jerry Potts, senior vice president of communications.

"We want to give our best people the option of communicating with as many people as possible, without leaving their office," Potts says.

MFS took its existing videoconferencing systems and linked them into a delivery platform that integrates Real format video files with a "dashboard" application based on SMIL.

Potts says customers pick the data types they want in their window: text, slides or video. Customers then can choose to host the content and application internally or with a streaming media service provider. Once loaded on appropriate servers, the user clicks on buttons that are linked back to the content.

Looking ahead

The customization of content is important to the companies creating streaming media. In the most advanced projects, indexing video makes it searchable and integrates it into a corporate knowledge portal.

In other situations, the media is transcoded and hosted at different data rates to permit transmission over a variety of different last-mile networks, permitting someone in a hotel room to access the same content in lower bandwidth format as someone on a corporate 10M bit/sec LAN segment.

Dorff of KPMG Consulting says his agenda includes "searching for simpler and lower-cost options for our experts to self-publish rich media content."

Another area of expansion is the level of interactivity supported in streaming media. Today, there's already the ability to chat with a professional during a live event and to follow up with e-mail or real-time messaging when the subject matter's content is being viewed on-demand.

Links with databases allowing extensive searching within streaming and launching collaboration between users during a session will continue to expand the range of experiences people call "streaming media."

Streaming Media Technology Insider - More articles and background on the technology

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Bandwidth, video tools catch up to hype

Doing it yourself

Applications

Looking ahead

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