How one company saved time, money using Flip cameras

Avid corporate videographers expand their studio, streamline the process of telling employees’ stories

Flip camcorders helped change how one company told its employees’ stories and, in the process, also helped save some money.

NetApp, a storage and data management company, prided itself on sharing company and employee news through video. The videos are shown on the company’s internal news program, Roving Reporter, which started in 2006. The California-based company even had its own in-house video studio. But shooting a video would sometimes require hiring a two-person camera crew, which could cost around $1,500 for a half-day session. Sometimes, internal communicators would shoot videos, but that meant lugging around editing equipment, heavy cameras, and boom microphones.

Plus, the turnaround for posting a video on its intranet, NetApp Live, took a while. If a video was produced in-house and the subject matter was urgent, it could be finished within a few days. However, if an external camera crew was hired, it might take about two weeks to complete.

Flip cams changed all that.