Collaborative: Survey Reveals Web Conferencing Purchase, Use Trends

Posted: 8/2003

Survey Reveals Web Conferencing
Purchase, Use Trends

Wainhouse Research released in May
the results of its Web Conferencing Products & Services survey conducted in
July 2002. In all 1,182 surveys were completed including 543 end users.
Highlights include:

• About half of the end users have
  an official Web conferencing solution in place; another 29 percent are using
  Web conferencing informally; 13 percent planned to use Web conferencing
  eventually, while 8 percent had no plans.

• There is no clear decision-maker
  for purchasing Web conferencing: 43 percent made their purchasing decision
  on the departmental level; 38 percent made the decision individually and
  only 19 percent made their decision centrally.

• The primary motivators for an
  organization to host its own Web-conferencing server are economy and
  security, which tied for first place and then integration, followed by
  reliability.

• End users say the three most
  important Web-conferencing features are the ability to show PowerPoint slide
  presentations, initiate ad-hoc conferences and show applications.

Does Your Company Use Web Conferencing?

Copies of the free report can be
downloaded at www.wainhouse.com/surveys.
In addition, the survey results were used as part of the Wainhouse Research
report, "Riding the Web Conferencing Tsunami — A Detailed Look at
Products, Services and Finding the Optimal Solution."

Video Streaming Use Up 50 Percent
in 2002

Streaming media registered
double-digit growth in 2002, with total video streams up by 52.3 percent to more
than 3.9 billion. Some 62.5 percent of those streams were served at broadband
rates, according to the annual market study published this spring by AccuStream
iMedia Research.

The report, "Streaming Media
Growth Analysis and Market Dynamics: 2002 vs. 2001," is a detailed
comparison of the past two years in streaming audio and video, with data by
audience, content category, bit rate, site, network, channel and aggregator. It
contains 300 pages of primary market research.

Broadband video streams grew by 84
percent in 2002, and narrowband streams at 18 percent, compared to 2001, the
study shows. Across all sites with video content available, the total number of
streams served per unique user per month rose 25 percent in 2002 to 1.53.

The number of broadband streams
served per unique user per month averaged 6.89, with an average length of view
of over 2.5 minutes per file accessed. That’s a total of 17 minutes worth of
video viewing per unique broadband user per month.

"Broadband users both at work
and at home are driving the streaming media industry," says AccuStream’s
director of research Paul A. Palumbo. "We’ve been surprised at the adoption
rate of streaming video by broadband users, and the fact that narrowband streams
had double-digit growth in 2002. Another growth factor is availability of
quality content at broadband rates from brands like AOL, Real Networks, sports
leagues and major movie and music sites. The total number of broadband streaming
media files increased substantially in 2002."

Video Conferencing Wades into the
Mainstream

Even though the video conferencing
industry has provided a sustainable niche business for more than a decade, it
still has not become a must-have feature for the mainstream of business
communications.

High-tech market research firm,
In-Stat/MDR found, even in today’s economy — with reduced business travel and
increased emphasis on getting the most "return" from a company’s
network assets — video conferencing must find a way to move forward and make
itself more important to the typical business user.

"The video-conferencing
industry has just come through an amazing surge of growth, which lasted for
about 24 months, but it has tapered off as the global economy has slowed,"
says Gerry Kaufhold, a principal analyst with In-Stat/MDR. "To sustain
growth in this type of economy, video conferencing needs to become a component
that can be bolted on to more popular and widespread applications, such as
unified messaging, Web conferencing, electronic meetings and voice over
IP."

With the emergence of IP solutions
for the video-conferencing industry, there is hope video-conferencing
technologies and applications can begin to gradually work their way toward this
goal.

In-Stat/MDR also found:

• The expected value of video-
  conferencing end points will be nearly $875 million in 2007, and the value
  of video conferencing services is forecast to be $5.5 billion during 2007.

• There are less than 200,000
  video-conferencing end points being used to initiate video calls. This
  number is minuscule when compared to the fact that mainstream technologies
  have numbers thousands of times larger.

• The next few years will see the
  high-end conference room applications carrying the load to provide revenue
  growth. The lower cost set-top box segment is likely to show strong unit
  growth, but with declining prices which impact the growth of revenues.

The report, "Videoconferencing
— Wading Into The Mainstream," discusses the state of the
video-conferencing market and provides worldwide five-year forecasts for the
value of video- conferencing end points and services.

Video conferencing Services Market Forecast