Corporate owned media used to be centered around text and images, but with more and more people coming into contact with video on a daily basis, the use of video in owned media is progressing. LIXIL Corporation, a comprehensive housing and living company, launched LIXIL-X, a video owned media site for business users, in March 2022, and is using it to reach customers who cannot be approached by sales staff and to build a sales follow-up system.
LIXIL has fully adopted Brightcove for the creation of LIXIL-X. We will introduce the background to LIXIL’s use of Brightcove and the evolution of LIXIL-X that has been achieved as a result.
## What is the video owned media “LIXIL-X”?
LIXIL-X is LIXIL’s video owned media for business users.
The reason the company launched its own video-based media was due to the coronavirus pandemic. As it became difficult for sales representatives to visit customers, the big issue that emerged was “how to deliver information to clients who cannot be visited in person”. As there are limits to communicating information using only text and images, videos came into the spotlight as a more efficient method.
LIXIL had been using the Brightcove platform as a file server for some time, with each department within the company creating videos and publishing them on their own websites. The goal of “LIXIL-X” was to bring all these videos together in one place and turn them into a service that would help the sales department build a follow-up system.
At the time of video distribution, YouTube was also considered for use. However, even if YouTube is used to increase user engagement, it will ultimately only increase YouTube’s engagement. In order to increase our own engagement, we thought it was necessary to bring user video navigation within our own economic sphere, and so we decided to take the form of an owned media.
## Advantages of Using Brightcove
In developing LIXIL-X, Brightcove’s Video Cloud was chosen after considering both using Brightcove and developing the site from scratch in-house. This was because of the following advantages of using Brightcove.
### Benefit 1: Significantly reduces development time
One of the benefits of using Brightcove is that it significantly reduces development time.
As the company only has a limited number of engineers, if they were to develop the site from scratch, they would have to outsource the back-end development. If they were to go through the process of selecting a vendor, defining requirements, and then creating the site, it was expected to take over a year to go live.
However, with Brightcove, there was no need for back-end development. LIXIL-X was able to carry out front-end development with a small group of engineers, and the prototype was released in just six months. By using Brightcove, the time to release was reduced by more than half.
### Benefit 2: Significant cost reduction
If you hire engineers for back-end development from outside the company, it will cost a lot of money. In contrast, using Brightcove will significantly reduce the cost of hiring outside personnel. By using Brightcove, LIXIL-X was able to reduce development costs by more than half.
### Benefit 3: Agile development is also an option
If you were to develop a site from scratch over a long period of time and at great cost, you would need to set out a complete plan from the outset and build towards that, so the site would need to be of a certain high standard from the early stages of development.
However, if you use Brightcove to develop your site in a short period of time and at low cost, you can choose to use agile development, where you first publish the site as a “prototype” that meets the minimum standard, and then make improvements based on the various feedback you receive after publication.
We also chose to use agile development for the development of “LIXIL-X”. As a result, it has continued to evolve since publication.
## Evolution of “LIXIL-X” made possible by agile development
After the release of the “LIXIL-X” prototype, we received a lot of feedback, mainly from the sales department who actually deal with clients. The feedback was suggestions for improvements to the video classification method, expression method, and screen appearance, etc., based on the premise that they would use “LIXIL-X” as a sales tool.
The LIXIL-X development team then listened to the feedback in detail from all the people in the sales department who had given it, and incorporated all the improvement suggestions into LIXIL-X.
For example, because it is not easy to install water pipes freely in showrooms, the water taps and shower heads on display cannot be used to produce water. This meant that it was difficult to answer customer questions about things like “how long it takes to fill a bath” or “how strong the shower is”. So, the development staff collected videos of water flowing from taps and showerheads, and made them available to view on “LIXIL-X”. In the showroom, showing customers videos of water flowing from taps and showerheads on “LIXIL-X” made it easier for them to understand and resolve their questions, and it also made it easier to close sales deals.
In addition, the LIXIL-X development team also made sure to report to the budget approver every time they made an improvement. This was because the budget approver also needed to see the actual response of users as a major factor in deciding how to spend the budget. By choosing to use agile development, where prototypes are released early and improvements are made while monitoring user response, the budget approval process also became smoother.
## Building an owned media video platform using Brightcove
Using Brightcove makes it possible to shorten the development time and reduce costs for owned media video platforms. It also makes it easier to choose an agile development approach, where you release a prototype early and then iterate on it after it’s been released.
If you want to get your owned media video platform up and running quickly, why not consider using Brightcove?
