How GitHub Supercharges its World-Class Engineering Team With Rewatch

Software development platform GitHub is the go-to place for forward-thinking engineers. With almost 100 million users, the collaborative code-hosting platform requires meticulous, efficient upkeep by its staff to keep those users happy. Having the right tools has made a major difference in how their global team works.

Stephen James is GitHub’s lead video producer on the Internal Communications team. The team uses video to communicate so much of what happens at GitHub—for archival purposes or asynchronous use—from the yearly revenue kickoff, to the annual manager meetup, to monthly all-hands meetings. After years of working with a clunky old video program that left everyone unhappy, Stephen made the move to Rewatch for GitHub’s video needs.

“We needed a communications platform with rock-solid security that was also intuitive enough to function as a self-serve tool without a lot of admin,” says Stephen. “Rewatch delivered.”

Since using Rewatch, GitHub has seen behavioral shifts, cost savings, and an increase in adoption. Here’s how Rewatch delivered on GitHub’s needs.

Shifting the numbers

Since moving to Rewatch, a lot has changed about the way GitHub works—you can see it in the numbers. One is an important number for Stephen, who previously dealt with messy cataloging, unhelpful search, third-party transcription, and multiple billing structures.

“The stand-out benefit of Rewatch is that it is one cohesive, secure platform that just works,” he says. The rest of the numbers speak for themselves:

• Around 70% of the company now watches meetings asynchronously—they can better manage their time at work
• Since adoption in mid-2020, GitHub’s users have contributed and shared almost 8,500 videos in Rewatch
• That number is a 200% increase in shared videos compared to their previous video solution

Translation: time saved is money saved

With 5,200 GitHub employees, 70% of whom are tuning into meetings on their own schedule, the time savings are huge. If each of those employees uses Rewatch to catch up on monthly all-hands meetings at 2x speed, that’s a savings of 1,310,400 minutes per year.

From just one monthly meeting’s worth of employee time, that’s an estimated cost savings of $1.7M annually.

But helping teams do more with less wasn’t the only benefit Rewatch offered GitHub.

A secure platform you can rely on

One of the major challenges GitHub faced when seeking a new video platform vendor was finding a solution that met their security standards. “The catalyst for change was a company-wide cultural shift toward a greater focus on security,” says Stephen. “We began to consider bullet-proof data privacy and security as a fundamental requirement for any communication platform, and decided it was time to retool with that as a priority.”

When Rewatch came on their radar, security was the first thing that caught GitHub’s eye, but the customer service and design partnership aspect of the sales process was what sealed the deal. “What really sold us was the level of attentiveness in early conversations,” says Stephen.

“We immediately felt valued as a customer and knew that we could rely on a high level of service through the launch process and beyond.”

Having a partner to rely on, especially when launching a new product company-wide, can take a lot of the pain out of the change. “The Rewatch team repeatedly went above and beyond throughout the launch process,” he says. “They worked directly with our security team for weeks to solve a very specific issue, and worked directly with site engineers to migrate thousands of videos from our old platform. And platform security is our primary concern, so Rewatch being SOC 2 certified is huge for us.”

That kind of true partnership—understanding and meeting company needs, and doing so in a supportive way—can make all the difference, even from day one. “Launch day was a breeze,” says Stephen, “and they performed it gracefully.”

Intuitive and easy to use

Installation and launch going smoothly is all well and good—but only if the product is easy enough to use that people actually want to use it. For GitHub, it was clear right away that Rewatch’s accessible platform flattened the learning curve and helped employees start using it right away.

“It was an instant success,” says Stephen. “The UI is intuitive and doesn’t require any user onboarding, and the ability to grant users ownership over certain collections has enabled us to let most of the administration run on autopilot.”

Because of Rewatch’s immediate usability, GitHub employees not only started sharing videos right away, but they began contributing more videos than ever before. There was no coaxing people into adoption, nor was there any administrative heavy lifting on GitHub’s part, and participation rose naturally simply because the platform is easy to use and provides a better experience.

“Everything is very well integrated, and performance is rock solid,” says Stephen. “Rewatch is reliable to the point where we can pretty much let it run itself.”

Between the time and cost savings, and how easily videos are created and shared, all supported by a secure platform, GitHub got everything they needed out of a tool in Rewatch.