When it comes to big data, video is being regarded as the next big thing to help collect — and help make sense of — information from consumers. At the Structure Data 2014 conference in March, techies and business people will come together to talk about how video can be used for things other than content creation and passive surveillance. Video analysis, for example, is becoming more widely used by retailers and companies to figure out consumers’ shopping habits.

According to GigaOM, Steve Russell, founder and CEO of video analytics company Prism Skylabs, said the goal of video analysis in stores is to give those retailers the same kind of information e-retailers already get by analyzing clicks, searches, pageviews and shopping cart contents.

“Having that type of information can help retailers get a better sense of what inventory they should carry even where they should put it in the store,” the article notes. At the GigaOM conference, Russell will discuss the role of video as “a new source of business intelligence.”

Many retailers are already putting video to the test, using it to analyze when stores are the busiest and where people are stopping and looking. “Some are even using eye-level cameras to identify which items people are looking at on fully stocked shelves,” GigaOM reports. “Facial recognition software is helping stores assess shoppers’ age, sex and race to target ads and provide accurate data about consumer demographics.”

“For most of its time as an IT industry buzzword, big data has been focused on numbers and letters,” the article says. “Sales numbers, medical results, weather, sensor readings, tweets, news articles — all very different, but also all relatively low-hanging fruit.”

But now, video is becoming the next big thing in big data as companies use it to learn about customers with measurements other than numbers.