Technology in the workplace follows a familiar adoption curve. First it’s a novelty. Then the domain of a specialist. Eventually it breaks free, made available to everyone. Finally, it becomes ordinary — a normal part of getting work done.

One could look back decades and cite the quintessentials — telephones, fax machines, email — but even in the last decade, examples abound.

Customer databases used to be only viewable for the select few. Now Salesforce is just another favorite site in everyone’s bookmarks.

Instant messaging was a frivolous way to chat with friends during working hours. Now Microsoft Lync is the de-facto option for quick virtual meetings.

File sharing sites used to be no more than a means for kids to steal music and movies. Now cloud-based sites like DropBox and Google Drive are upending the hardware industry (from servers all the way down to thumb drives).

Business technology is continually evolving, with solutions moving from novelty to necessity as each demonstrates sufficient potential value to justify its costs.

Today another business technology is proving its ROI — video content management.

Gartner Foresees Video Everywhere

Every year, Gartner Research publishes a detailed analysis of the trends at work in a given technology market. These reports, called Hype Cycles, seek to define the current state of a technology, assess its maturity and the risk associated with adopting it, identify current vendor offerings, and attempt to forecast how long it will be until the technology becomes mainstream.

This past month Gartner Research published three new editions of its Hype Cycle reports, for Content Management, Unified Communications and Collaboration, and Education.

At Panopto, we’re quite proud to report our video platform has been included in all three reports, including twice in the Hype Cycle for Content Management.

In all three new reports, Gartner’s analysts identify organizational video content management as a maturing piece of the overall ecosystem for the technology (citing Enterprise Video Content Management [EVCM] in the UCC report, EVCM and Video Search in the Content Management report, and as Lecture Capture and Retrieval in Education).

In every case, video management has moved well beyond the initial buzz, and Gartner Research anticipates full mainstream adoption to be complete before the close of 2020.

On the Horizon: Organizational Video Breaks Free

In a world where we’ve come to think of cutting-edge technology as “The Next Uber of [X],” video seems like an unlikely candidate to make the jump to ubiquity. Video has, after all, been around for ages, and most large corporate and academic institutions already create no small amount of video content.

What’s changed in the ROI calculation of video is not the potential value. Rich media is well known as a more engaging tool for teaching, training, and communicating.

What’s different today is cost and complexity. Only a short time ago, creating professional quality video required a serious investment in hardware, setup, and AV specialists. And that was just to make the recording — making it sharable entailed a whole new set of costs around producing, formatting, streaming, and more. Small wonder most organizations left video only for the absolute most valuable use cases.

Today is different. Commodity recording devices can deliver the same HD quality once only available in ultra-expensive camcorders. And the new generation of recorders has proliferated — today it’s likely every knowledge worker has two video cameras nearby at all times, one on their laptop and another on their smartphone.

And most importantly, a new generation of video platforms have, in short order, transformed the once-complicated world of video management into a simple and mostly automatic workflow. Encoding, formatting, indexing, streaming, access control — all those traditional hoops are now performed nearly instantly by an organization’s central video library.

Tapping into the Power of Video

Here at Panopto, we believe it’s this changing equation of organizational video that’s prompted Gartner Research to include video content management in the newest installments of so many of the firm’s Hype Cycles.

Whereas corporate and academic video was only recently limited to special occasions, today video platforms like Panopto make it possible for organizations to choose their own technology, and make supporting video anywhere and everywhere as easy as just pressing “record.”

Panopto makes it easy for anyone, anywhere to record presentations and share them with anyone, both as live streaming webcasts and recorded on-demand video. To see how Panopto can help your organization teach, train, and share ideas, contact our team for a free trial today.