THIS SPRING, RIGHT at the beginning of the pandemic, knowledge workers, teachers, parents, doctors, and—for the most desperate among us—hair stylists, took to video chats to connect with colleagues and family, as we sought comfort and some semblance of a “normal” professional culture. As we collectively clicked to join another Tuesday night virtual happy hour, the cloud communications provider Vonage took note of the massive increase in traffic hitting its servers.
The availability of off-the-shelf video conferencing solutions has garnered a lot of attention for remote work and virtual learning environments during the global health crisis. These solutions are appropriate for general meetings, employee communications, virtual cocktail parties and other use cases where people are the main focus of the meeting. However, creating real-time, face-to-face interactions for more complex use cases like Telehealth, Financial Services and Online Learning introduce challenges around security and privacy. Without the ability to provide embedded, programmable and secure video functionality, these off-the-shelf solutions don’t address the needs most businesses have to adequately power essential services during this difficult time. This is especially true when privacy and ease-of-use are key, as well as the ability to embed video capabilities into the platforms businesses are already using.
Vonage collected its findings into a report detailing the exponential growth in video communications usage during the COVID-19 pandemic, including a look at total video minutes for Vonage customers, which increased 232% in March.
A Global, But Uneven, Phenomenon
The spread of COVID-19 exposed just how flat the world is, with businesses affected in every region as travel and supply chains were disrupted. As these waves overtook individual regions, video API data predictably followed, but certain geographies and demographics have accelerated their video usage more than others in communicating with customers.
For example, users in North America under the age of 40 were twice as likely to use video chat as a daily solution than their over-40 counterparts. However, in the Asia-Pacific region this split is far less pronounced, with older consumers video chatting with businesses at around the same rate as younger UK and North American consumers, demonstrating an advanced comfort level with navigating the tech.
Many factors contribute to the regional differences but none may be more predictive than preparedness. While organizations in every region worldwide have experienced a rapid growth in video usage, organizations that embedded video service in their applications were more prepared to meet the demand and succeed in a very challenging environment.
COVID-19 has drastically changed everyday life, and organizations are seeking ways to minimize the disruption to their operations, while keeping their employees safe. Vonage Video APIs are embedded in businesses’ existing applications, powering solutions that are connecting people and delivering services in a personal, seamless and safe way when in-person interactions are just not an option.
Our way of working has fundamentally changed, and this will likely be a constant as workforce strategies continue to embrace a distributed, but highly connected, work environment. As far as business adoption, Vonage has found that the organizations that already had cloud-based video communications embedded in their applications were prepared to meet the onslaught of demand for video communication. Healthcare, for instance, leaned hard into telemedicine for obvious reasons, seeing a 2306% increase in usage from February to April 2020. That’s not a typo.
As educators turned to web-based instruction, virtual classrooms and office hours via video, there were a great number of plug-and -play video solutions that met educators’ immediate needs, however imperfectly as they did not take into account privacy, security and the ability to embed these solutions into the applications schools were already using. As new education-specific services are brought online for the Fall 2020 session (such as it is), the expectation is that traffic will increase, as will the need for programmable video solutions that truly provide the private, secure and easy-to-use learning environment today’s students need to succeed in our new normal...
You can download the April Edition of the “Video Trends & Benchmarks Report” here.
This story was produced by WIRED Brand Lab for Vonage.
