Mobile Video Challenges and Opportunities: A Chat with Eric Burns

In case there’s still any doubt about the incredible growth of smartphones and tablets, last week I got a call from my dad saying that he’d bought an iPad Mini. For those of you who don’t know my dad, that’s him on the right with his favorite piece of AV equipment. He longs for the days of rotary dial phones and refuses to buy a car with automatic locks and windows (because “it’s just something else that could break”). So my conversation with him spoke louder than any statistics about the growth of mobile devices.

That said, the stats back up what I’d heard on the call. As of late 2013, almost 3 in 4 people in the US and the UK owned a smartphone. And tablet use, although a bit behind, is growing even faster. More than half of Americans own tablets, and by the end of this month, 45% of people in the UK will too.

When you combine these stats with those of video consumption on devices, you get a sense of how important mobile video has become to businesses and academic institutions. In the past year, more than half of all network traffic from mobile devices was used to watch video.

Mobile video opens up new opportunities for sharing knowledge, communicating important messages, and delivering training. At the same time, getting video to phones and tablets can be tricky. Device fragmentation, multiple competing video standards, and bandwidth constraints introduce challenges that organizations need to address.

In this 3-minute video, I sat down with Eric Burns to discuss the trends and issues we’re seeing in mobile video delivery and how Panopto is addressing mobile in our enterprise video platform.

If you’re interested in discussing how Panopto can help your organization capture and share video on smartphones and tablets, drop us a line.