It used to be that web videos were short. Many believed that was because of shorter attention spans. But we are finding that just isn't true. The truth is that short videos were just a technology and financial limitation. I personally no longer have a TV and my kids watch only web-based video content (a TV dial would be as foreign to them as a rotary dial telephone). All this has implications for the enterprise network.

Corporations in the coming years won’t simply be dealing with employees surfing to websites like ESPN and YouTube, as these employees will instead be logging on to legitimate video sites that demonstrate the proper way to repair a piece of hardware or that provide required HR training. Video is an effective communication medium and more and more companies are developing video content for everything from marketing and promoting products to training and demos.

With webcams now built into most PCs, you can expect that employees will become more adept at creating video. If you look at what kids are consuming on YouTube nowadays, it is not just frivolous candid-camera-like stuff, but tutorials about how to do things - often created by other kids. Many of these tutorials don’t even record video from a camera, but just walk through a computer application appearing on screen. 

If you have a corporation, you can spend a lot of time writing a manual on how to fill out a web form, or you can have someone do a quick walkthrough with a piece of software that records the screen while an employee wearing a headset narrates. Because of the pace of change, more and more companies will forgo the long lead time of creating detailed documentation and instead post “walk-throughs” online for the benefit of employees and customers.