Okay, so this post has nothing to do with MVaaS really.  This is a pure video application.  Maybe a video that is accessible by a cellphone application.

I was fortunate enough to attend the Democratic National Convention at Denver’s Invesco field tonight, complements of my Chairman and friend, Dan Caruso (neither of us were expressing a strong political view in attending, we just felt fortunate to witness history).  Dan, his son, me and another friend all walked over to Invesco field around 3pm at the start of the event thinking we’d wait in line for a little bit but get into the stadium in short order.  Wrong.

The line that we entered snaked all along the stadium and wound around some parking lots and nearby streets.  That and it didn’t really move at all.  It was amazing to stand there and watch as the line behind us grew and grew and grew.  By the time we got into the stadium we heard stories of people waiting in that line for more than 4 hours.  It was not fun.

So where is the video application?  I learned a couple of things standing in line.  First thing I learned was that there were no organizers, police, or team of people with orange vests managing or watching the lines.  It wasn’t until 90% of the way through the line that we actually encountered someone that was “working”.  Second thing I learned was that, according to the first “worker” we encountered, we were lucky – this side of the stadium where we were standing was set up to handle 25,000 people, we should consider ourselves lucky that we weren’t on the other side of the stadium where they anticipated 50,000 people to be in line.  It must be a madhouse on the heavier volume side of the stadium he said.

Here’s the problem with that logic, and where the video would have come in really REALLY REALLY handy.  They may have anticipated 50,000 people on the other side of the building and only 25,000 on our side of the stadium, but I swear that 60,000 people didn’t get that memo and were standing in the same crazy line I was on the shorter staffed side of the venue.  No one on our side had any idea what the line looked like on the other side or I can guarantee you there would have been a mad stampeed to get over there (where some of my fortunate friends tell me the whole line took only 45 minutes – and where the people were complaining about that, not knowing how lucky they were they came in the short way)

Maybe it wouldn’t be practical to give me, a random person in line, access to video of what is going on on the other side of the building.  But surely they could have made up for the lack of people working the line by having just one volunteer take a peak at a camera on both sides of the stadium and see that this enormous problem was happening and take some corrective action.  There were hundreds of cameras all around the stadium – but no one thought to use them to understand the customer experience and try to make it better.

Video is everywhere, but apparently not everyone has clued in to the fact that you can actually use it.