Using the Internet to communicate with customers? Your thinking may be out of date.
At least, that’s what Cisco reckon. Cisco build the routers and hubs that keep information flowing around the net. When they tell you that by 2015 an astonishing 90% of web traffic will be made up of video, you’d better listen.
That statistic isn’t so surprising when you think about it. After all, you see an awful lot of moving images on Facebook and YouTube. Maybe the real surprise is that the majority of company websites are still designed around a text-and-graphics model that dates from the last century.
So, you think your corporate website needs a shakeup? You should get some perspective.
Let’s take a long view of the development of media on the Internet. The ‘net got started in the early 70s, but during its first couple of decades it was text-only — and pretty much unknown outside of government and academia. The 90s Internet explosion was driven by the development of the web, and the web required PCs with decent graphics. (It’s no coincidence that the web arrived at about the time that graphics-intensive Windows took over from text-only DOS.)
Sound came next. The average turn-of-the-millennium PC had a reasonable screen and terrible sound, so it took a few more years until online music could gain a toehold. Well, Napster and the iPod may have had to wait awhile for the advent of cheap, high-quality sound cards, but we all know how that story ended up!
Now video is the next big step.
Not that long ago, if you’d wanted to see moving images on a computer, you’d have had to pay a visit to a specialist production company. That’s because working with video requires a codec, an uncommon piece of hardware in the last century.
When the DVD arrived a decade or so ago, it changed everything. The demand for playback led manufacturers to put codecs into their PCs. Users soon discovered that their new codecs – coder/decoders – were good at making compressed files as well as reading them. They began making and uploading their own movies, fuelling more demand. Codecs began turning up in mobile devices of all kinds, not just desktop PCs.
Today, high-quality video is standard across desktop PCs, laptops, smartphones, tablets…
Your customers watch online movies and TV ads every day. When they visit your website, many of them are expecting to view your message in full-screen video and high-quality sound.
If that’s not what you’re giving them, perhaps it’s time for you to talk to us?
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