When was the last time that you read a memo and said to yourself, “Wow, that was a really great memo”?

Our inboxes are straining and the number of channels competing for our attention just seems to increase all the time. Which creates kind of an odd dilemma for internal communications staff—by rights, the stuff they have to say should have a massive impact on the company, but realistically, it’s all too easy to ignore.

Which is why I find it interesting that an increasing number of organizations seem to be turning to streaming video as a way of getting their own employees’ attention. It makes a certain amount of sense. I’d make a reference to the increasing number of Millennials in the workforce, but let’s be honest—we all like video. We’re watching it on pretty much all our devices, all the time. If video is one of our primary methods of communication, it’s definitely time for internal corporate communications to get in the game.

What’s really interesting, though, is what kind of videos are showing up. I think folks are getting used to the once-a-year CEO webcast. (If they’re not doing this already, they really should be.) As that’s becoming more common, we’re starting to see an expansion.

Not once a year, once a quarter. Not just the CEO, also the division head. I think we’re going to come to a point where, instead of getting another MEMORANDUM, TO: All Staff email, we’re going to be getting an invitation to a webcast instead. (It doesn’t hurt that it’s a lot easier to engage with people—and keep track of who actually engaged—through a webcast than it is with email.) I can see a whole list of potential uses—quarterly kickoffs, sales training, fireside chats, crisis management, strategy sessions, the works.

If it’s going to really take off, though, it’s going to depend on the user experience. People will need to want to engage with the video if it’s not going to turn into just one more thing to ignore. And that goes beyond the synchronous, butt-in-office-chair model. If the internal communications group is serious about reaching everyone, those videos are going to need to be able to be played on a mobile device in a hotel room or an airport. They’ll need to be watchable after the fact—and the Q&A session needs to be intelligible for people not following along live. Maybe even more important, they’ll need to be \"findable.\" Remember that strained inbox? If the only way to search for it is a link in an invitation from a week ago, you might as well not have kept the recording.

Which comes to the other big problem I see—silos. Having yet another platform and yet another repository of videos to search through is only going to make the problem worse. It’s why YouTube has been such a success. No one wants to go searching dozens of different websites for a three minute clip here and a ten minute video there. YouTube took off because it had tons of video content all in one place, with a search algorithm that worked and a recommendation engine that got you hooked. If organizations are going to really take advantage of video as a communication mechanism, they’ll need something of their own.

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Dr. Shay David is the Chief Revenue Officer and co-founder of  Kaltura, an open source video platform.