Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) has become the latest rage across corporate IT departments, offering the opportunity to reduce hardware costs, increase efficiency, and boost employee morale with one sweeping policy change.

But make no mistake—Bring Your Own Device is a comprehensive hardware investment strategy. Fail to plan for the future and likely you’ll end up both needing to support BYOD—AND still provide additional hardware for employees too.

To realize the cost savings and increased efficiency value from employees bringing their own devices, you need to plan for more than just enough BYOD access throughout your organization. You need to plan for the tools your employees will already be comfortable with on their personal devices. You need to plan for the communications tools they’re already adopting in the office today.

And as you can learn more about in our new white paper, “Bring Your Own [Video Ready] Device,” that means you need to plan for video. Here’s why:

#1: Video is already pervasive in the workplace

The statistics tell the story, and here are just a few:

• Gartner Research estimates that by 2016, large businesses will stream more than 16 hours of video per worker per month.

• Palo Alto Networks reported that the amount of video streaming across corporate networks more than tripled in the first six months of 2012.

• Cisco reports that over 70% of business executives expect to increase their use of one-way video such as live webcasting in the coming years.

• And according to Cisco, incoming Gen Y employees expect to use video as a means to communicate and share information, with 62% uploading videos to share or store on Internet sites.

All this to say that video is not just a nice-to-have anymore; it’s a necessity.

If you haven’t made video a part of your BYOD strategy, you’ve left out one of the most important—and fastest growing—communications tools available to you.

 #2: Video improves communication and increases productivity

Often BYOD-minded organizations want to encourage more openness and more possibilities for sharing in their company cultures.

Early returns suggest BYOD can deliver just that. According to CIO:

• 73% of businesses reported increased efficiency after adopting BYOD

• 47% of businesses reported BYOD increased employee efficiency

• 51% of businesses reported BYOD increased employee creativity.

Those results can be amplified with video. As Gartner Research notes, “Most organizations are only just beginning to understand the need for social video (inspired by YouTube on internal systems) to support business objectives”.

With the right technology in place, front line teams can use their iPhones to quickly record a video of a problem, sales teams can capture instant post-meeting recaps, and home office teams can share training materials across thousands of channel partners—even ones with technology setups that are different from their own.

Enterprise video is more than video conferencing. Video is a communications amplifier, with use cases that touch every member of your organization.

• Video is how we capture product and functionality demos—and how we compare ourselves with the competition.

• Video is how we onboard and train employees, helping everyone understand and play a part in our corporate cultures.

• Video is how we can record and share our institutional knowledge, enabling individual subject matter experts to show everyone, from teammates two floors away to colleagues on another continent, the secrets to getting more done and making the most of your strategic differentiators.

• Video is how we connect with our teams in the field, both to provide our front line employees with insights from home office, as well as to get their insights on the realities of how our market is responding to our products and services.

• Video is how we can share ideas, be it C-suite executive communications or simple rundowns with remote coworkers.

• Video is how we first review, then later preserve our presentations, proposals, and pitches, so everyone in our organizations may benefit from work that’s already been done.

For almost every employee at almost every organization, video connections are increasingly important, and make it easier to communicate more clearly and solve issues more rapidly.

#3: Enabling BYOD with video helps eliminate the need to buy video hardware

Without video as part of your BYOD strategy, not only are you risking losing out on the value of video as a communications tool—you’re also putting your own budget on the hook for any video capture technology your people end up using.

Whether they’re tying up the training, events, or A/V teams, expensing costly recording hardware and hosting solutions, or outsourcing required video production to vendors (paying for both time and equipment), limiting your people’s ability to create their own video is likely already no small drain on your finances.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

Enabling video as part of BYOD opens your employees to the ready availability of a wide variety of commodity recording hardware they’ve already had at their fingertips.

Laptops—both company-issued and personally-owned—almost always include built in webcams. Virtually every mobile phone—from the fanciest smartphone to the most basic feature phone—carry cameras too. Not to mention the other recording technology your people likely already own and would use if only you’d help them—personal webcams, HD camcorders, video-enabled wearables (hello, Google Glass), and more.

Enabling the video recording aspects of these devices can help your organization reap the benefits of video, without incurring the expense of providing hardware or training employees to use it. Which is why is it essential to include in your BYOD program.

#4: You may already have the right video platform to make BYOD-Plus-Video a reality

Successfully including video in your BYOD strategy means getting two fundamental requirements right:

1. Making it simple and secure to share video captured on smartphones and tablets

2. Ensuring that videos can be viewed on the mobile devices employees bring to work

While that’s a short list, it has proven a high hurdle for many early adopters—especially those seeking to enable video as part of BYOD with point fixes and add-on solutions.

A better option might already be in place in your organization. Your video content management solution may already be able to help you roll out video as part of BYOD.

Modern video content management systems typically include transcoding solutions that accept a range of video and audio file types and automatically convert them to formats that can be viewed across a host devices, from standard desktop browsers to mobile-optimized HTML5 and app-based viewers.

Some VCMSs even include mobile clients for multiple devices, including PC- and Mac-based browsers as well as iOS and Android mobile devices. These client apps use the onboard or added cameras to capture video, and typically also allow for the upload of other pre-recorded videos.

Your video content management solution may even help you manage network bandwidth as your organization’s video use grows, by incorporating adaptive bitrate streaming and other file compression techniques to enable you to make video available anywhere on virtually any device.

Modern video content management systems provide a single, centralized library for your organizational video, and many connect well with virtually any device. Your corporate VCMS might be able to make adding video to BYOD quick and easy.

Planning for BYOD? Plan for the future—and video. Panopto helps BYOD-minded organizations enable their employees to create and share amazing HD video, streaming live or on-demand, on a simple, intuitive platform that’s fully integrated with all their devices—right from day one.

Want to see how we make BYOD-Plus-Video easy? Try Panopto free.