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Five Things My Grandfather Taught Me about Multicast Fusion

  

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Ilana Greene, the financial blogger who periodically guest blogs for us, just shared a video she created on the topic of social media use at work.  You can check it out at YouTube. http://youtu.be/4GreeTw3JA4.  Her post raises an interesting question, at least for me, which is how new is social media, really?  Yes, of course it’s new, in that people weren’t using Twitter or LinkedIn a decade ago.   But truly, there isn’t anything so novel about a social activity which can distract people in the workplace.  I can remember when office workers used to have drinks at lunch, return to the office for a few hours of low productivity and then slink home at 4:59 PM. Top that, FaceBook!

All of this reminds me of what my grandfather once told me about multicast fusion on the Adobe® Flash® Platform.  Well, not really. He was born in 1884, died in 1942 and never knew that something called a computer had even been invented. (And though I am somewhat ancient, I never met him.)  But, he understood business very well, and how people functioned.  I think he would have had the following insights into Adobe’s revolutionary new online video technology:

1. If a video is meant for everyone in a business, everyone should be able to see it.  My grandfather ran a chain of clothing stores in the Deep South.   He was successful because he understood the need to communicate with all of your employees. Until the advent of multicast fusion, it was almost impossible to enable to reach everyone in an enterprise with a video message.  Now, you can.
2. Cost matters.  This may sound obvious, but it’s curious to see a lot of smart people in big companies invest lavishly in video infrastructure that never quite seems to get the job done. 
3. Keep it simple. My grandfather had a simple, secret code that he wrote on every price tag so he knew exactly what he paid wholesale for each item.  That way, he knew how much he could discount it. It was a simple, clever way for a man (who never went to school) to run a business.  Enterprise video should be the same.  A single system, a single format, should feed all video needs.  Flash can do this, especially now that MediaPlatform WebCaster can multicast Flash inside and outside firewall as well as to mobile devices using HLS.  
4. Don’t wait. Just do it.  My grandfather’s first store wasn’t even a store. Unable to afford rent on a store, he simply opened a trunk of ladies dresses on a sidewalk and started selling them to women walking by.  Multicast fusion is now.  The very simplicity of the technology makes it possible to go ahead and get started without delay.
5. Sometimes, you have to sell the underwear.  Once, upon hearing that there might the possibility of a big crowd in another town, my grandfather loaded a 1931 Chevrolet to the ceiling with underwear and drove all night to put it on sale the next day. (The car’s axle broke, it was so laden with merchandise.)  But, we can learn an important lesson in enterprise video from this story.  Doing video right may require us to go the extra mile. Excellence doesn’t come easily.  The good news is that multicast fusion removes some of the barriers to success.  However, a lot of the time, you need to make that extra, 1931 Chevy kind of effort.