Tapping into Managed Video Services Business Opportunities

Video is most often associated with consumer-grade Web services such as YouTube. But it turns out that video is starting to play a much bigger role in business environments. In fact, Vidyo this week announced that one of its managed service provider (MSP) partners that delivers video-as-a-service exceeded 70 million minutes of consumption of its services in 2014.

Granted, the service in question is a unified communications cloud service provided by Ricoh in Japan, where usage of video service in business environment tends to be a lot higher than in the United States. But data from the most recent Cisco Visual Networking Index report also suggests that as more bandwidth becomes available the amount of video traffic crisscrossing networks is going to expand exponentially. Mobile computing devices may be the primary devices for consuming that video, but the video of it is likely to be hosted on servers strewn all over the Web.

Thomas Barnett, director of service provider thought leadership for Cisco, says it’s almost certain that carriers will look to throttle consumption of that bandwidth, which no doubt should lead to more demand for networking expertise.

In response to that anticipated demand, Vidyo, a provider of video services delivered as Web service based on Vidyo vRouter software that runs on standard x86 servers, has been building out an MSP program.

Vidyo Vice Chairman Ofer Shapiro said much of the demand for that expertise will be driven by organizations that want to include video inside an application. For that reason, Vidyo opted to enable VaaS services based on standard Web application programming interfaces (APIs) rather than proprietary network hardware. The end result is a video service that scales enough to be used as the foundation for a variety of video services, including Google Hangouts.

Naturally, given the level of congestion on corporate networks many MSPs might be dubious about the prospects of mainstream video adoption. But many business users already regularly invoke video services such as Skype. Shapiro contends that thanks to emerging technologies such as WebRTC, it’s only a matter of time before developers invoke APIs to embed video inside a broad array of Web applications.

Vidyo claims to already have more than 50 service providers leveraging Vidyo vRouter software to deliver video-as-a-service. There’s no doubt that video usage will increase in the years ahead. What’s also certain is that many business customers are going to want to know those video services are being delivered securely by an MSP partner they trust.