Here are some interesting statistics that we capture on our MVaaS offering:

Last week:

Average number of unique users accessing video per customer: 15

Average number of logins per unique user: 3.9

Maximum unique users accessing video per customer: 464

In layman’s terms, this means that an average of 15 different people per customer used our video service last week and that those 15 users logged in to use the service an average of 4 times during the week, which is 4 out of 5 business days.  It also means that one of our customers had over 464 different people access video during one week alone.

This is impressive on a number of fronts.  One, it shows how extensively video can be used within an organization if you make it easy to use and easy to manage (we’ve talked a lot about how MVaaS addresses those two things versus traditional systems).  Two (and the real focus of this post), the fact that we can even track those statistics is pretty impressive.  You can’t do that if you are using traditional PC-based DVR solutions that aren’t centrally managed – it would be challenging to aggregate user activity across multiple individual DVRs, if the individual DVRs even tracked usage at all.

Why does this matter to customers? If you don’t think reviewing video adds value beyond security, then it probably doesn’t matter that much.  If, however, you make an investment in a video service because you expect a return, then you are likely expecting people to actually use the video.  With statistics like these, a customer can ensure that all of the people that they want to use video (loss prevention, store managers, regional managers, marketing, etc.) are actually using it.  The administrator or project sponsor can easily pull up a report that shows how many times each authorized user used the service, when they last logged in, etc.  With this information they can figure out who might need more training or some additional encouragement.  They could also compare usage to store performance to get a more precise view of the return on investment that are getting from video.

Stealing a line from someone I can’t remember, “if you can measure it you can manage it”.