Video ‘resolution’ key to revival?
Businesses, individuals relying more on its wide reach and is becoming a backbone for economic rebound
Just a year ago, the world witnessed one of the most dramatic changes in human history, forcing people into unprecedented lockdowns and curfews. The disruption was so brutal ‘uncertainty’ became an understatement.
But with any challenge and change comes opportunity and what we saw this past year was how quickly people were able to adapt to technology and prepare for a world that is continuing to prime itself for enhanced levels of productivity and efficiency thorough technology.
One technology that realised a steep increase in popularity and demand both at the corporate and consumer level was video — in every form be it long-format, shortformat and livestream.
Businesses need video, like they need e-mail, as part of their communications mix. But they also need technologies that ‘glue’ together their disparate communications applications — like chat, voice, video, meetings — with the business-critical applications handling, for example, workflows and customer relationships.
Asslan Salloum, unified communications and collaboration lead for the Middle East, Africa and Turkey at Avaya, said: “In short, video in and of itself will not be the key driver when it
The pandemic accelerated digital consumption as consumers shifted to digital entertainment as a welcome distraction Soubhi Droubi
Head of content operations at Huawei Mobile Services MEAI
comes to revitalising the economy, and any strategy focused solely on video is backwards, rather than forward-facing.”
He added that users have been benefitting from video conferencing technologies for over a decade, which partly explains why so many organisations could go remote relatively seamlessly in 2020. Thus, the technology was already familiar.
“But in this new, work-fromanywhere world, mastery of video conferencing only makes up part of the recipe for success. One of the biggest issues that organisations report is employees struggling with the fatigue of managing too many separate apps: They’re constantly switching between their video conferencing, their messaging, their e-mail, their task management and more. All while figuring out new ways to do business in the middle of a global pandemic,” Salloum stressed.