November 2019 - CircleHD

As online chatter becomes louder due to technological advancements, it’s becoming more difficult to engage with your employees. If you’re looking for an innovative way to cut through the noise, you may want to consider implementing a corporate podcast as your organization. This medium is great for showcasing company news and culture, which humanizes corporate communications, making team interactions more engaging and friendly. Since listening is more of a passive action, it can be less of a burden for your workforce than reading or watching videos.

The stats are in: 70% of Americans are already aware of what podcasts are. It doesn’t mean they are all listening, rather, they’re aware of the medium. What’s more interesting is that 39% of small and medium-sized business owners are podcast listeners, with 72% reporting that their employees also listen to podcasts.

If your company is thinking about implementing a corporate podcast, it can be difficult to know where to start or how to get everyone on board. In order to build a successful podcast that gains a community of supporters at your enterprise, follow these steps:

Plan

The old adage is true: “The more you prepare, the less you bleed in battle.” Click To Tweet

When it comes to implementing anything at your organization, the strategy is key. This is the most important step when it comes to launching any corporate podcast. Start by getting your team together to define a purpose, an audience, and a goal. Then revise it at least three times to make sure you get buy-in from all members involved in the process. Don’t be discouraged if there are a lot of ideas that come out. A shortlist should be sufficient to help you narrow the focus of your content.

The next step in the planning process will be the find a podcast hosting service. A simple Google search can help you find some options, but it’s important to choose one that caters to enterprise users. Since you’ll likely need security for your internal communications, you may need to evaluate several to meet your budget and needs.

During the evaluation process, you should ask yourself:

How many podcasts and episodes you plan to have
When you plan to launch
Where employees will be listening: Are they all in your HQ or will they be listening on mobile devices in various locales, i.e. airplanes, on the road, etc.?
How secure your content needs to be: Most enterprises have security needs and compliance requirements to protect the privacy of sensitive information
Who the podcast will need to be accessible to. Some may be targeted to a specific department audience while others might be suitable for everyone

Prepare Your Content

It takes time to create good content so when you go live, we recommend having at least five episodes in your backlog.

Stuck on topics? Your internal staff can be a great source of inspiration. Start at the top and reach out to your CEO or department heads to find out if there is anything they’d like to communicate or if there are any industry trends they think teams should be aware of. Podcasting humanizes the leadership team and is a great way to bridge the communication gap between management and employees.

Another great source to tap for content is your company’s all-hands meetings. You may have a distributed team, remote workers, and even sales teams out in the field. This can make it tricky for everyone to dial into calls due to other priorities or conflicting time zones. By recording the information and uploading it to your company podcast, workers are able to access the information at any time, from anywhere.

Here are a few other content ideas to get you started (Hot tip: make something exclusive to each episode in order to keep people tuning in):

Training videos with good-quality audio
Corporate webinars
Brown bags
Team demos
Weekly department calls
Product launches
Announcements

Be sure to also consider internal and external resources for your podcast. There may be some thought leaders and subject-matter experts who’d be willing to be featured. Bonus if some of these guests come from within your own organization.

How long should an episode be?

It depends on your situation. Keeping episodes under 30 minutes is a good idea when starting out. Always leave room for improvement and experimentation, since strategy should never be set in stone. As the community shows more interest, you can use analytics to determine if your audience prefers longer or shorter run times. Content may also dictate how long an installment might be.

Announce

It’s essential in this process to let employees know about your podcast and where to find it. Be clear about whether they will have to subscribe to an RSS feed or download an app that lets them listen to content on-the-go. If your company has an internal forum like Slack or Microsoft Teams, this is a great place to post about new and upcoming content.

Give It Some Time

The success of a podcast is dependent on many factors, time being the most crucial one. Most enterprises will not have a shortage of topics and listeners, but you’ll need time and patience for adoption to happen. The key is to keep the content consistent and fresh.

Fuel the Engagement With Rewards

Regardless of the podcasting efforts, rewarding engaged team members is always a good idea. Your employees may already be experiencing “tools overload”, so tuning in to another platform may feel overwhelming for them. Encourage listening and engagement by using follow up quizzes for knowledge retention and incentivize listening with prizes for the best scores. Remember, rewards are not a substitute for quality content, but can assist in getting your company on board.

Measuring Success

You can’t improve what you can’t measure. You should have a system in place to monitor how your employees are engaging with corporate podcast content. Ensure they’re able to access it in a user-friendly manner, regardless of where they are. They should also have a channel to voice feedback or suggestions.

When it comes to determining what success for your podcast looks like, download count isn’t the only metric to judge by. Here are a few other KPI’s to consider: Click To Tweet

Number of episodes listened per week
Number of episodes listened per employee
Top episodes for a given timeframe
The average percent of engagement per episode rolled up by a given timeframe

Make It a Team Effort

Rome wasn’t built in a day and, likewise, it’s very difficult to run a podcast by yourself. Your team will be the first evangelizers of your corporate podcast content and your greatest influencers when it comes to company-wide adoption. Don’t hesitate to collaborate and seek out ideas from them. Anyone in the company should want to be a part of it and leadership should encourage participation.

Bonus: Don’t Forget About Accessibility

When it comes to great content, you want to be sure it’s accessible to as many people in your organization as possible, that includes those with disabilities. Be sure your recordings are broadcast safe so the peak signal levels don’t exceed the nominal level by more than +10 dB.

Additionally, while the audio is a great medium, it’s not always able to be heard by everyone. So it’s important to have an option that doesn’t solely rely on hearing. Consider transcribing the talks into text or making a video with closed captioning. An enterprise podcast hosting service like CircleHD allows you to host both video and podcast content and can automatically transcribe spoken words into text with closed captioning. This allows you to spend more time creating great content while the platform takes care of the rest.

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Want to learn more about podcasting? We’d love to hear from you and tell you more about how CircleHD can assist with implementing your own corporate podcasting strategy. Contact us today.

Video file size can be a tricky thing. How large is the one you just recorded? This complex storage format holds a lot of information and there are many reasons why you may want to check the size of it. In order to get the most accurate calculation, we need to start by dispelling a common myth:

Video file size depends on the bitrate but not the video resolution.

Bitrate is the most important factor in determining a video file size. Technically-speaking, you can have a 4K video with a lower bitrate than a 720p video. However, in this instance, the 4k video quality would appear poor but take less space on the disk when compared to a 720p video. And if your video contains audio? That track has its own bitrate as well.

File Size = Bitrate x duration x compression ratio

Here is a reference chart taken from sample videos found on Youtube/internet

Resolution	Bitrate	1 minute	Recording Duration per GB
4K (UHD)	20 Mbps	84MB	12 minutes
1080p (FHD)	5 Mbps	20MB	50 minutes
720p (HD)	1 Mbps	5MB	3.5 hours
480p (SD)	500 Kbps	2MB	8 Hours

The above table is for heuristic estimation and reference only. There are a lot of other factors influence the actual video file size such as compression ratio, variable bitrate, color depth.

Bitrate = Frame size x Frames Rate

Although the original intent to write about video file size, read along if you would like to learn more about videos, overall. This guide purposefully hides complex details to simplify the understanding of most common terms and their usage. If you have any questions or suggestions, please reach out to our team.

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A Glossary of Terms

Frame: Any static picture you see on your screen while playing or pausing a video is called a frame. They are consecutively presented in such a manner as things appear moving on the screen. That’s why video is also called moving pictures.

A frame behaves just like a photo, and all the attributes such as color depth and dimension. A 1080p or full HD video will have frames of size 1080×1920 pixels with each pixel storing RGB (Red, Green, Blue) 8-bit color data and maybe some more. The frames are presented usually at a constant rate called frame rate.

Frame Rate: The number of frames (frame rate) presented on screen per second is represented as with FPS or frames per second. A typical video can have 15 to 120 frames per second. 24 is used in movies and 30 FPS on common on TV.

The frame rate should not be used interchangeably with shutter speed. Shutter speed is an in-camera setting used to determine the amount of motion blur in film production.

More FPS means smoother playback but a bigger file.

The approximate size of each uncompressed frame is 5MB. At 30 frames per second, a raw HD video will need 5MBx30 = 150MB storage space per second. We are going to need around 540GB per hour for the raw footage. that’s a lot of disk space even today. Many of our storage drives can’t even write to a disk that fast. However, you usually won’t need that much space, thanks to compression and lossy encoding (quality compromise to save disk space) techniques.

Compression reduces the space required to store similar frames that have fewer moving parts. Such as a landscape scene with little or no motion between frames. Since motion in scenes can drastically change in most videos, some encoders allow encoding at a variable bit rate by consuming more than average when needed and less when the scene is mostly static.

Encoding: Encoding is the process of digitization of analog video streams. Just like getting an electric wire feed from the camera and storing the content in a .mov file. The process may happen in hardware or software. Many digital cameras encode video natively, without needing to have any additional software post-processing and requiring less storage space.

The conversion between different file formats is called transcoding. These terms have different meanings but are used interchangeably since digital cameras have greatly eliminated the need for encoding these days.

Codec: Codec is the program that is responsible for the encoding and compression of the video and audio tracks. A lossless raw encoder may not compress the data hence need a lot of storage space to store every bit of the video feed. A lossy codec such as H.264 could store the same video on a fraction of filesize. Different codecs are used to achieve a balance between quality and storage space.

H.264 aka AVC (Advanced Video Coding) by the MPEG group is internets current popular codec. This codec is widely supported by most mobile devices, web browsers, and operating system vendors thankfully requiring many different formats for playback like the old days.

Mp3 by MPEG group and AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) by Apple are the most popular audio codec on the internet. Since the mp3 patents have expired AAC is being recommended.

A newer video codec H.265 aka High-Efficiency Video Coding or HEVC is now available as the successor of the H.264 codec. H.256 provides better compression and faster decompression. This codec is being promoted for use by video pioneers such as Netflix and Youtube to improve the streaming video quality and experience, especially on slower connections.

Containers: Often called file formats such as MP4, MOV, AVI, WMV, MKV, and WebM. There are a lot of different container formats. MP4 is very popular on the web and WebM is an open container format being actively promoted by Google for royalty-free internet use.

The container is a file format that describes how the tracks (video/audio/subtitles) stored inside the file. The file format is just a matter of choice often used along with well-known codecs that work together. Some containers allow streaming video playback while others require the file to be downloaded entirely before playback. Since these container formats support different feature sets and require some agreement and royalty payment by the manufacturer, vendors tend to prefer one format over another.

If you like to learn more here is a detailed comparison on Wikipedia.

MP4: MP4 (MPEG-4 Part 14) is a well-known internet container/file format that is supported by a wide range of devices such as mobile phones and digital cameras. This container allows storage of multiple video, audio, subtitles, and other metadata, where containers such as mp3 container only allowed audio tracks and a limited set of metadata inside it. A variant of this format supports progressive streaming, this is the most preferred format for internet video playback.

Above are the main factors used for determining the file size.

HDR: High dynamic range. Modern TVs and cameras are able to capture greater details of images and video in senses that contain brighter and dark objects. In traditional SDR (Standard dynamic range) images were either bright or dark depending on the contrast application. HDR format can, however, capture more information per pixel (32 bits) and let the display decide the actual contract at the time of presentation. This method requires double the amount of storage file size and some advanced compression technique that can impact the final file size when applied.

Audio: Some containers allow multiple audio tracks embedded in the video files. Hence the size of the video depends on no of tracks and bitrate of the audio as well. 192Kbps bitrate is considered good quality audio for stereo sound.

Encryption: Video security mechanisms such as DRM (Digital Rights Management) that use encryption to protect playback of the content on authorized devices. For example, Netflix only allows you to play their video only if you have an active membership. This is often done to implement licensing and prevent piracy. This protection usually increases the file size due to metadata inclusion.

Video streaming: Video streaming is a process of watching a video over a network without having to download the entire video file. This technique often begins by buffering (downloading some metadata and the portion of video currently being watched) parts of the video and provides seeking and skipping parts that are not being watched. Streaming provides smoother watching experience and requires less network bandwidth and disk storage.
There are many methods available on the web to implement streaming.

Month: November 2019

7 Tips for Starting a Successful Corporate Podcast