The rise of video content has been massive after the pandemic. According to Statista (2018), 85% of all internet users in the United States watched online video content monthly. To support increasing video use, you would probably need a video platform, and to keep track of how videos are streamed, you'd need one with detailed billing reports.
If you use a video platform to stream your videos, it is vital to keep track of the resources consumed, such as bandwidth, storage, processing, etc. How much it is used or needed? Whether the intended budget needs to be controlled, or should the company invest more? Billing reports answer these questions. VIDIZMO is an enterprise video streaming platform for end-to-end video use cases that also provides billing reports for monitoring and managing your resources.
In this blog, we will be discussing the billing reports feature offered in VIDIZMO. Why should you use them, how will they help you analyze your costs? Further, we will discuss the parameters used in billing reports, highlighting consumption measures, and what exactly the billing reports show. Lastly, we will discuss how you can set notifications to get alerts when you cross a certain consumption threshold.
Why Use Billing Reports?
The purpose of the billing reports is to track down your resource consumption while simulating your costs. The interactive report will provide you with accurate information, help you manage your resources effectively, and enable you to make informed billing decisions. Here are two reasons why billing reports are important in a video platform:
Understanding and Analyzing Your Cost
Billing reports help you understand your costs and whether departments are using the cost according to the limit. For instance, if a department uses more than the assigned limit of 1TB; this is where you can understand and analyze your cost trend.
Prevent Costly Overages
Cost overages can be annoying. The budget which you have set aside may exceed its limit quite often. Through VIDIZMO, you can identify your package limit, how much has been consumed, and where VIDIZMO starts to charge over the exceeding limit.
Billing Reports in VIDIZMO
Just by one simple click, make informed decisions by viewing billing reports in VIDIZMO. You can filter down a report to quarterly and on an annual basis for a more comprehensive analysis. So, no cost or resource can squeak pass through your knowledge.
Parameters of Billing Reports – From Invoice to Insights
Following are the attributes of a billing report.
1. Consumed
Organizations are charged based on their usage for better monitoring of resources. The consumed metric specifies the number of units used against the resource.
2. Package limit
The maximum usage limit of the resource every month. Let’s suppose you are allowed to have a storage limit of 12 GB; the storage category will show the maximum content storage consumption as 12 GB in your account.
3. Overage
When you use a resource over the package limit, you will be charged for the exceeded amount. Control your budget by keeping an eye on the overage. Billing alerts play a vital role in tackling the issue of overage and we will discuss that later in the blog.
What The Report Shows?
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Users
In VIDIZMO, the metric ‘users’ break down the consumption in terms of user roles. These user roles can be Administrators, Managers, Moderators, Contributors, Viewers, or Anonymous. You can have a clear idea about the package limit assigned to these users and their availability and consumption.
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Portal
Keep track of the total portals used in the account by analyzing the statistics or chart. Measure them against the parameters such as the consumption, allowed limit and overage.
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Bandwidth
This metric shows the amount of bandwidth consumed in streaming, uploading, and playing back the content. Furthermore, it informs how much the bandwidth limit is left before purchasing additional bandwidth.
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AI
For a high-end and seamless experience through AI, the content goes through workflows that includes: OCR, Content Redaction, Video Indexer, Face detection, Transcription and other AI options. The data is accumulated in this category with the following attributes:
- AI Ingress Summary, the content input measured in GBs.
- AI Content Duration Summary, give you insights on what’s the length of your consumed content in hours
- AI Computation Summary, tell you the amount of AI time consumed to analyze your video
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Storage
A garage or shed for your content, of course, is measured in GBs in the computing world. It is the amount of storage allocated for a particular resource to be stored.
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Transcoding
Video content is rendered into multiple formats through transcoding, and the amount of transcoding available and consumed is recorded and billed accordingly.
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Trends
Have a clear idea and see what the consumption trends are. Trends show users' everyday usage history in a graph or in a chart format that can be viewed weekly, monthly, or by a custom date.
Generating Alerts to Stay Informed
Stay notified by billing alerts. Set thresholds and view the list of administrators who are subscribed to the alert. You can configure billing alert thresholds on various resources being consumed in an account.
One of the drawbacks of most platforms is that they don't notify overages until they are charged. However, in VIDIZMO, this is not the case. You can set custom alerts to notify you when a certain level of consumption has passed.
You can specify a billing resource by selecting a billing category. The report will then show against that billing category which will display the consumed limit followed by the allowed limit. The exceeding limit of the resource will generate an alert that can be monitored through overage.
Summing it Up:
VIDIZMO EnterpriseTube is an enterprise video platform that allows you to stream videos as well as keep track of the resources available and consumed. Not only that, but you can also get a notification and stay informed of the overages just by a simple click. All done in our product EnterpriseTube.
EnterpriseTube offers much more than streaming videos live and on-demand. It has a broad range of integration and AI capabilities. You can securely share, manage and organize your videos in playlists and collections. You can even restrict your content access through user groups, roles, and domain restrictions.
