Video is everywhere these days, and businesses are no exception. Be it marketing adverts, online video calls, internal messaging, or company townhalls, video usage is never-ending in the corporate sphere. The trend is definitely justified, in any case.
Video has proven to ensure the retention of 95% of messages while watching videos, whereas text-based communication only allows for 10% retention in most cases.
The question then arises how best to optimize your videos for fast streaming while ensuring that your videos are compatible with all devices in any bandwidth condition and provide a consistently good viewing experience.
How to Optimize Your Videos for Faster Streaming?
Optimizing your videos and ensuring compatibility with all major platforms and devices for fast video streaming is critical in providing a positive user experience. This helps enhance user satisfaction, reduces bounce rate, and even improves search ranking. Let us explore some of the ways you can optimize your videos for faster streaming
An Enterprise-Grade Video Platform Can Do It All for You
First and foremost, we propose a solution that does it all for you while saving your time and money. Opt for an enterprise video platform that allows you to stream and manage live and on-demand videos in an optimized way while ensuring secure global delivery and meeting all significant compliances.
VIDIZMO is an efficient Gartner-recognized end-to-end enterprise video platform that does it all for you. You can use it to securely store your video in a searchable YouTube-like video library. Here are some of the features offered by VIDIZMO that ensures optimized video streaming:
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CDN
VIDIZMO allows you to make use of Azure Content Delivery Network (CDNs). You also have the option to use your existing CDN networks as well, with VIDIZMO supporting all major CDN providers like Akamai and EdgeCast.
These major CDNs allow you to utilize their edge servers spread throughout the world to reliably serve videos to the end-users residing anywhere in the world. This reduces the distance between the server and the user requesting the video, which in turn makes video streaming faster.
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eCDN for On-Premise
For enterprises wanting to combat bandwidth challenges while securely streaming their videos behind the company firewall, you can configure your internal on-premise servers to operate as eCDNs. You can easily cache your videos on these edge servers, which reduces network congestion and video loading time.
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Transcoding
VIDIZMO automatically transcodes your videos into multiple renditions based on different factors like resolution levels, bitrates, etc., to ensure playback on all major devices and browsers in any bandwidth conditions. It also makes large video files (over GBs) playable by compressing them.
Learn about all the video formats that VIDIZMO supports
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Use of Latest Video Streaming Protocols
VIDIZMO supports live and on-demand video streaming using the latest video streaming protocols like HLS (widely supported on iOS and Android devices) and MPEG-DASH (supported on Android devices). HLS utilizes the multiple renditions created through transcoding for adaptive bitrate streaming, which ultimately ensures optimized consistent streaming without buffering concerns.
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WAN Optimization
VIDIZMO allows you to integrate with third-party network optimization technologies like Riverbed, Blue Coat, and others. This will enable you to take advantage of WAN optimization techniques, including data compression, content caching, and latency reduction.
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Security
Being an end-to-end enterprise video platform, VIDIZMO has security at the forefront of its priorities. You will have SSO integration with more than 25 authentication providers. You may also opt for end-to-end encryption for complete content protection. Role-based access controls are available to limit the capabilities of users with different roles.
Content access can also be limited through the creation of user groups. Moreover, the flexibility of VIDIZMO allows you to have custom retention periods, custom privacy policies, and much more. Finally, VIDIZMO also fulfills a variety of compliances through various features, including audit logs.
Other Tips for Video Optimization
In case you would like to host your videos directly without the help of an enterprise video platform, let us explore some fundamental ways of ensuring an optimized video streaming experience:
Transcoding
It is critical to have your videos transcoded into multiple formats, resolution levels, bitrates, etc. Transcoding is basically re-encoding your videos into these multiple versions through different codecs and settings. This is a must if you want your videos to be accessible from different locations worldwide with varying bandwidth conditions. However, you need to ensure that you have the best possible quality for your original “master” file. The re-encoded versions bring down the quality of the master file to create copies catering to different factors like bandwidth conditions.
Automatic transcoding as part of an enterprise video platform is a lifesaver and absolutely crucial in ensuring optimal video quality. VIDIZMO does it seamlessly for multiple videos at once. In addition, transcoding enables multi-bitrate streaming, allowing viewers to choose a resolution level that best suits their particular internet speed.
Learn more about video transcoding.
Adaptive Bitrate Streaming
Adaptive bitrate streaming is the technology used to deliver multi-bitrate streaming, which requires an adaptive video player.
An adaptive video player is able to automatically detect bandwidth and CPU processing capacity on the user’s end. The video player then pulls the rendition that suits this capacity to deliver the best possible video quality consistently without any buffering or other errors. In simple words, it is just the “auto” option in the video quality settings on YouTube. Therefore, choose a video platform that offers this functionality as it is of utmost importance for optimized video streaming.
Choose Optimized Video Streaming Protocols
Utilizing the right video streaming protocols is critical in ensuring that your video is optimized for playback on all major platforms, devices and browsers. The two main video streaming protocols are:
- HTTP Live Streaming (HLS): is the most widely supported protocol compatible with iOS and Android devices and is used by most professional broadcasters.
- MPEG-DASH: is the second-most widely supported protocol compatible with Android devices.
- Peer-to-Peer Assisted Streaming: allows you to distribute streams in real-time using a P2P network. This is a faster and more efficient way of video streaming; however, it takes up more load on clients’ devices and is a much more expensive option.
The main reason why these two protocols are ideal is that they both have adaptive bitrate streaming as one of their key features. HTTP live streaming (HLS) is also widely used as it uses HTTP for transport, which is the most common protocol used on the internet. Hence HLS streaming is compatible with almost any device or server.
Using CDN is a Must!
As opposed to storing content in one central server, a Content Delivery Network (CDN) allows you to have a network of edge servers spread globally in different datacenters. Usage of CDN allows your video file to be cached in all of these servers. When viewers request playback of the video, it can be pulled from the edge server geographically closest to them.
Hence, CDN ensures faster load time for your video and is another tool that helps you resolve bandwidth challenges. It is much easier to benefit from CDNs through a platform like VIDIZMO. However, you can also utilize CDNs even when you stream your video directly, although it can seem like a daunting process.
Learn more about how CDNs help in video streaming.
Resolve All Internet Connectivity Problems
For live streaming, a high-speed internet connection is critical. It is recommended for you to opt for a wired ethernet connection instead of Wi-Fi. The reason being that Wi-Fi can turn out to be highly unstable at times. Plus, it would be best to have a broadband connection that has an upload bandwidth twice the live stream’s bitrate.
It is recommended to do an internet speed test before starting any live stream. Pay close attention to the upload speed, which is the most critical for a live stream.
Compress Your Videos
Even if you do not want to transcode your videos, you must have them compressed to a version that can support streaming for low-bandwidth users who do not have a high-speed broadband connection. It is critical to do so in a way that does not distort the video and make the audio be out-of-sync.
Optimized for Mobile Viewing
In 2020, there has been an estimated 179.4 million viewers of videos on cell phones in the USA alone. While a study conducted by Statista in 2018 showed that most viewers (62%) watch videos on mobile phones. Hence, it is critical to resize and optimize your videos and page content for different screen sizes, especially mobile phones.
Conclusion
These were just some of the key things you should keep in mind while optimizing your videos for a better user experience and faster video streaming. However, as stated earlier, opting for an end-to-end enterprise video streaming and management platform like VIDIZMO can help you do all of this easily while automating the whole process to save your time, money, and resources.
Contact our team for more information or opt for a free trial to explore our solution yourself!
