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Blue Coat Systems: Pan-European Survey Reveals Significant Usage of Online Video by Employees While at Work plus Substantial per Country Differences
January 2012 by Blue Coat Systems
Blue Coat Systems, Inc. announced that the results from a survey it commissioned in France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Spain and the UK showed significant usage of online video by employees while at work, while also showing substantial differences in video usage on a per-country basis. The survey indicates differences in how much time employees spend watching online video for business and recreational purposes based upon the country in which they work. The survey results also indicated that many companies across the region do not have policies or regulate the use of online video by their employees.
Overall, 68% of French office workers watch online video while at work, including both content that is purely recreational and content that is business-related, such as video programming created by their employer. In contrast, only 12% of German employees watch online video while at work, a difference from French employees of more than five times. 56% of UK office-based employees watch online video while at work. 44% of Dutch and 43% of Italian employees watch online video at work, representing over three times more than their German counterparts. 35% of Spanish employees watch online video at work.
According to the survey results, most large and medium-sized companies plan to use more video as a communications platform for employee training, education, communication, morale boosting and for other purposes. 49% of the German office employees who watch online video utilize it for business-related purposes, earning them the highest prevalence of video usage for work and putting them nearly twice ahead of the 25% of Spanish employees that watch online video. 41% of UK office employees that watch online video use it for work-related purposes. 39% of French, 38% of Dutch and 31% of Italian online watching employees use the medium for business.
The majority of surveyed employees across Europe indicated that their companies did not have polices regulating the watching of online video while at work; had only an informal policy that permits watching video as long as it doesn’t interfere with a person’s work; or were unaware of any company policy. Dutch employees faced the least amount of company regulations for viewing online video, with 74% reporting no restrictions. 64% of French employees did not face any company regulation of online video. 56% of UK, 54% of Spanish and 51% of Italian employees reported that they did not face any company regulation of online video. 47% of German employees were not restricted by company policies.
In terms of the total amount of time spent watching online recreational video, UK and German office video watching employees watched the most, with 66% and 65%, respectively, reporting that they watch between one and six hours per week—nearly twice that of French and Italian employees (34% each) and twice as much as Spanish (33%). 37% of Dutch video watching employees spent between one and six hours per week.
“Employee viewing of online video is clearly on the rise at companies and government organizations across Europe and many of these are clearly are struggling to enable greater use of video training and communication using existing network capacity,” said David Ewart, director of EMEA marketing, Blue Coat Systems. “At the same time, the use of Web video for non-business purposes is also growing and, at times, interferes with business applications. Only next generation WAN optimization solutions that improve video performance by drastically reducing bandwidth consumption can help companies scale the use of video for business and recreational purposes while minimizing overall network impact.”
