Corporate Deployment of On-Demand Video: Usage, Benefits, and Lessons

Streaming video to the desktop is becoming increasingly widespread. A key application for corporations is to make informational talks available over corporate intranets. However, there are costs to such deployment, including production and post-processing costs, video-server costs, and indirect costs due to increased network usage. Given the costs, we need to better understand the usage patterns and increase the benefits of such a service. In this paper, we analyze the use of on-demand video on Microsoft Corporation’s intranet. Over the past year more than 160 talks have been made available, and we analyze detailed usage-logs accessed by more than 2000 users in over 6000 viewing sessions. We report on the format in which content was put on the intranet, the viewers’ usage patterns (including impact of content format, portions of talks that were watched, change in usage patterns over time), and present implications for redesigning presentations for viewing over the network. Learning how people access video over a network will lead to redesigning video presentations, just as knowledge of how people browse Web text has led to redesigning Web pages.