Over the last couple of years the number of digital video viewers has grown rapidly in Asia-Pacific (APAC), with the number expected to exceed two billion by the end of 2022. This trend is not exclusive to purely entertainment content, but enterprise videos as well – data^[1] shows that enterprises in Asia experienced a 267% increase in video consumption, with time watched up by 161%. Japan in particular saw a meteoric rise, with a 647% increase in video views and time watched jumping 700%.

With such a strong appetite for both entertainment and information content, it is no surprise that enterprises in APAC are capitalising on video as their new go-to medium — using this channel as a way to enhance communication between internal and external stakeholders, amplify customer engagement, and nurture career development internally.

We had the pleasure to speak to Greg Armshaw, senior director of strategy at Brightcove, a leading video communications platform that helps enterprises transform business with video. A two-time Emmy and eight-time Technology & Services Industry Association (TSIA) award winner, Brightcove enables businesses to share, host, stream, and monetise video using its easy-to-use solutions.

While discussing how video is increasingly being used as a tool to unify a distributed enterprise, Greg said consumers in the region “spend more of their lives consuming video on the internet” thanks to sites like YouTube. He observed that in Asia, the prevalence of OTT TV platforms were a result of Telco and PayTV companies going into the OTT TV market and “encouraging users to consume video on their mobile phones and reducing the cost of internet bandwidth, and thereby reducing the cost of video viewing.”

This consumer flight to video streaming seems to be the reason why companies are now amplifying their marketing and sales activities online with video. Combined with this, Greg believes that as many companies have become more familiar with video creation they see increased value in using video for engaging with all of their customer and employee communities: externally with corporate communication, marketing and support activities; and internally with employee engagement, town hall meetings and training.

“Actually seeing a subject matter expert sharing knowledge and applying emphasis where it’s important, adds more impact to the message. Whether the video is pre-recorded or hosted in a live environment [it] creates a lot of interest and engagement.” It is this humanising element that sets video apart from other media, giving audiences a wonderful way to feel connected in today’s increasingly disconnected world. We have seen the impact of influencers on consumer demand – putting real employees in the form of subject matter experts on video delivers a level of authenticity that helps build brands.

Video drives incredible engagement, and on the flip side, video consumption generates rich first-party data that enables better customer experiences. It is this very specific capability to build an understanding of customers that makes the medium so appealing, especially since video consumption generates interesting insights about customers’ preferences. This means once enterprises get to know their audience’s viewing history and level of engagement they can better serve customers, and increase customer satisfaction and sales.

Yet, as much as organisations want to evolve and adapt, not all companies are built for this. While bandwidth remains an issue, companies also face other challenges managing their videos, such as different formats and inconsistent metadata management. “Historically, one of the challenges is that organisations are not aware of all of the video assets they have created. Video without proper management is impossible to search except [by] the person who placed it there and assigned some metadata around it such as the filename, the folder where the video is stored, and the context of the video.” Once enterprises take video seriously they turn to online video platforms to simplify video management and help increase the return on investment made in creating video. Increasingly, will also see machine learning used to make video content searchable, thus allowing older video catalogues to be organised more efficiently.

With an enterprise video partner, companies can continue leveraging videos to engage and work with different communities internally and externally, enabling them to feel connected and a part of the organisation. “A great example is an asset management company giving briefings to investors via a live stream, and [using] the recorded version or the transcription of that video to educate their customer facing teams.”

“You don’t have to be technical to manage videos with an online video platform but just have an interest in the content itself. As enterprises see the ROI we can also expect sophisticated production budgets to contribute to video across the enterprise,” Greg said.

Another advantage of having an online video platform provider is personalisation, an element that has become important in customer retention. Greg predicts that customers will expect customer service 24/7/365 and the best way to do this is through video.  Organisations who obsess about the customer journey of their different customer segments can entertain and educate them with video. An example would be to deflect the top customer service FAQs to pre-recorded videos. The customer feels better about themselves because they “self-serve” and the enterprise can be more efficient with their customer service resources.

On the chance that any content loses its relevance, for example if a product is no longer available, the Brightcove platform has the ability to turn availability on and off, making video management frictionless and content always relevant. And as repositories grow in size, companies can leverage access to powerful management systems to properly deploy video on owned assets like websites and e-commerce platforms, as well as social media. Role-based access allows teams in marketing, education, community-building, customer outreach, corporate communications and more easy access to manage the video assets of their enterprise.

Brightcove delivers solutions to pure-play media companies and enterprises across Asia-Pacific, enabling live and pre-recorded experiences to audiences irrespective of the device and connection state. The company is seeing “massive growth around D2C enterprises’, principally among e-commerce platforms and businesses ramping up their customer engagement through digital.

To discover for yourself the capabilities of Brightcove and unlock your video archives to realise their business value, reach out today.

^[1] Source: Brightcove Video Index, Q4 2020 vs Q4 2021