The rising popularity of video as an organizational asset has created the need for video platforms to resolve challenges revolving around effectively managing and utilizing them in order to reap their most benefits and maximum ROI. Choosing the right platform can be a difficult and game changing decision for your organization. It’s important to clearly understand what your organization needs in order to ensure you make the right choice.
So how to choose which video platform is best for your enterprise?
What You Should Look for in a Video Platform
There are a few key features you should look out for when choosing a video platform for your enterprise:
- Customizable Video Player
- Live Video Streaming
- Digital Content Management
- Security & Compliance
- Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- In-Video Interactivity
- Video Editing
- Media Analytics
- Integration with IT Applications & Infrastructure
Customizable Video Player
Other than basic features such as auto play, bookmarking, closed captions, and speed and quality selector menus, a video player should have room for customizations to fulfil certain organizational requirements. A video player for a video platform offers a lot more than most public platforms like YouTube.
With a brandable player template, an enterprise can customize the player according to their organization's branding guidelines in order to represent their brand image, develop employee and customer coalescence and offer a desirable user experience to viewers. Another important feature is the avoid 3rd party ads tarnishing or redirecting you viewers away from your content.
Live Video Streaming
Live video has become a highly demanded feature enabling organizations to interact with their internal and external stakeholders in real-time. Live streaming is helpful for employees geographically dispersed in a large corporation and for producing interactive content.
A video streaming solution needs to be able to stream high quality video under low latency across distant and multiple locations. Moreover, they need to enable their audience to interact during the stream through features such as live chat and Q&A for different use cases, such as for customers to ask questions during a product demo. They should also be able to share other informative digital multimedia related to the topic of discussion such as documents, presentations and even on-demand videos in the stream so their audience can better understand the topic or message they’re trying to convey. For example, the manager of a company can share a list of all the rules and regulations during an onboardings session with new recruits to download and memorize at another time.
Digital Content Management
Enterprises tend to have large amounts of videos and digital media which they need to store, search, organize and share internally or externally. A reliable video streaming solution needs to be able to store large amounts of videos, enable users to easily find and quickly retrieve the video they’re looking for, organize videos to categorize similar content and simplify navigation & accessibility, and share videos securely with specific groups or individuals and on other platforms. Moreover, videos sometimes need to be supported or linked with other digital media containing additional content to expand on the information in the video, such as documents, images, audio, presentations, etc. Therefore, in addition to videos, an ideal video platform should be able to act as a digital content management system and support digital media assets other than video as well.
Security & Compliance
One of the biggest concerns for any enterprise is ensuring security and privacy of their digital property. This includes preventing external individuals from viewing confidential videos such as internal meetings, controlling access for content based on the teams, departments or roles in the organization, such as preventing other departments from accessing meetings between the HR department and upper management, and placing controls to share or play media for external audiences. Additionally, an enterprise needs to ensure that they adhere to compliance with all laws and regulations they are subjected to at an international, regional or industrial level, such as GDPR in the European Union (EU).
As such, a video platform meant for enterprises needs to provide robust and extensive features. These should include end-to-end encryption that is FIPS 140-2 compliant. It should have features for controlling access and permissions for the platform, content, groups or individuals, and enable legal compliance based on their locations and line of business.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
AI has had a huge impact on modern enterprises, significantly reducing the amount of time, costs and resources needed to be invested for many organizational functions and eliminating the chances for human error.
Video platforms leverage AI for a number of valuable functions , such as automatic transcription and translation for greater accessibility and search inside videos, metadata extraction for creating auto-tags and improving search capabilities, and video insights for facial & object recognition, OCR, topic inference, sentiment analysis, and more. Integration of AI media helps organizations save a large amount of resources for managing videos, adds more value to content, reduces errors and increases total ROI.
In-Video Interactivity
Interactive videos are becoming increasingly popular and important for organizations. For example, adding quizzes to videos allows organizations to perform knowledge checks and evaluate employees in training, surveys enable feedback collection from customers about products, and handouts make videos a single source for all related information.
By providing interactivity for videos, video platforms enable enterprises to easily gather information and feedback from their audiences and create more complete sources of information to save time on gathering relevant information from different sources.
Video Editing
Organizations also need to edit certain videos in order to make them more relevant and remove the tediousness of having to search for information by clipping irrelevant or unwanted parts, combining related or relevant videos into a single media and inserting time-stamped annotations to highlight information at specific point in a video, such as in a meeting recording. They may also need to remove confidential information when sharing private videos such as a meeting with certain groups or individuals.
A video streaming solution should enable organizations to edit their videos and make them more relevant in order to save time, make it easier to find relevant information for customers and employees, and remove unwanted information.
Media Analytics
Detailed media analytics are important for any modern business to measure the impact and effectiveness of their video content. Whether tracking customers, or identifying business opportunities and failures, analytics help achieve company goals by enabling the organization to make critical decisions based on hard data, and keeping the focus and vision aligned.
A video platform meant for enterprises should be able to provide detailed analytics in order to help organizations see how viewers engage with their videos and analyze the impact of their content on the business through hard data as which content is getting the most views, how many times the video content is watched completely, and which parts of the video content generate the most interest.
Integration with IT Applications & Infrastructure
Enterprises usually operates with a broad range of business applications like CMS, CRM, LMS and video conferencing systems as well as IT infrastructure such as enterprise active directory, cloud, content delivery networks (CDN), encoding hardware, etc.
A video platform should easily integrate with other enterprise applications and infrastructure for high interoperability, as well as to easily share & stream video content and maximize usage for video and media in your organization.
A List of the Best Video Platforms to Evaluate
- VIDIZMO
- Microsoft Stream
- Kaltura
- Panopto
- IBM Watson Media
- Brightcove
For more, read our detailed comparison and guide on video platforms.
A Complete Enterprise Video Platform
VIDIZMO provides enterprises with a secure & compliant enterprise video platform with AI capabilities to store, search, manage and share live and on-demand videos, as well as other digital media such as audio, documents, images, presentations and more.
Enterprises can leverage a brandable video player to represent their brand image with customizable behavioral and display settings to control viewer experience. They can schedule or initiate an impromptu live stream with interactivity, such as live chat, Q&A and social media sharing, and record the stream for viewing as an on-demand video. They can store an unlimited amount of media, leverage a powerful platform search to easily find content, arrange content into playlists, collections or categories, assign tags to link and classify similar content, segregate content through multiple portals, and securely share content for limited time or views, with DRM encryption in transit and rest.
By assigning roles to users, organizations can control what they can access and the permissions they have on the platform. And by creating custom security policies, assigning a password to a media or restricting access to media for specific individuals or groups, organizations can have complete control over who can play and view videos or media at content, portal and platform level. The platform is also GDPR compliant, and offers a range of internal, regional and industry-level compliances through technology giants, such as Microsoft Azure and AWS.
By leveraging AI, enterprises can generate automatic transcriptions and translation for greater accessibility and compliance with laws & regulations, such as ADA and Section 508. They can also search inside videos for written or spoken words and fast forward to where they occur in the video. Similarly, through features such as facial and object recognition, topic inference, sentiment analysis and more, they can automatically extract insights such as speakers, topics, sentiments, scenes and other information from a video and fast forward to where they occur in the video with a single click.
VIDIZMO also provides enterprises with in-depth media analytics to monitor user engagement with videos and media, and analyze the impact of their content through metrics such as which content is popular with their target audience in order to make critical business decisions.
Enterprises can create quizzes with passing criteria or surveys and insert them into live or on-demand videos to obtain feedback and engage viewers, or insert media such as related documents, images, audio or presentations to share with the viewers for downloading. And through editing, they can clip unwanted parts from a video, combine different videos and add time-stamped notes for viewers.
Finally, VIDIZMO is capable of integrating with any IT business applications or infrastructure such CMS (e.g., SharePoint), CRM (e.g., HubSpot), LMS (e.g., Moodle) and video conferencing systems (e.g., Zoom), and infrastructure, such as cloud storage (e.g., Azure), CDN’s and etc.
Learn more about our platform by visiting our website or contact us.
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