Videos are the future, accounting for 65% of all internet traffic. They dominate social media, drive interactive education, and enable corporate communication. With so many videos being produced, shared, and viewed, it's essential to organize your video library effectively.
While the buzz of video is appealing, harnessing its potential comes with great challenges. Your organization might have embraced the power of video but keeping it under control is an entirely different matter.
And there's a cost to this chaos. A disorganized video library can lead to inefficiencies, wasted resources, and missed opportunities, among other things. It can drive down productivity, hamper business goals, and create unmanageable deadlines.
In this blog, we'll delve into the key challenges companies face with disorganized video content and how organizing your video library can help solve them.
What is a Video Library Platform?
A video library platform lets you collect all of your videos in one place. These libraries make it easy to access and share the content when needed without relying on messy solutions like physical media or saving files across scattered devices.
Organizations use video libraries to help centralize their videos and allow anyone to view them at any time. This is where they store their training videos, recorded meetings, product demos, webinars, and internal communication videos.
Challenges Companies Face with a Disorganized Video Library
For large organizations with thousands of videos, a disorganized video library isn't just a nuisance; it poses significant challenges to the efficiency and effectiveness of your organization.
Here are some of the key challenges your organization may face with a disorganized video library:
Lack of Centralized Storage System
What happens when you don't organize your video library and simply treat it as a dumping ground for all your videos? It becomes hard to keep everything in one place.
Instead of having a centralized repository where all videos are neatly categorized, you end up with a fragmented system where finding the right video is cumbersome.
Of course, nobody likes making the effort to organize files. But nobody likes a messy library, either. And when they can't properly place their files in an ordered manner, they may resort to alternatives.
Soon, you may find employees storing files in their emails, scattered flash drives and memory cards, or even their personal devices. Suddenly, nobody knows where anything is placed anymore, teams don't know where to put their files, and everything gets lost in the clutter.
And what if an employee decides to leave the organization? Say goodbye to that data forever.
Struggle Finding Videos Due to Not Having a Searchable Video Library
Finding a needle in a haystack may be hard, but finding a video on demand in a library of thousands is even harder. And the job is made nearly impossible when you don't have the necessary tools for the job.
Based on a recent survey, out of seven file management activities, participants showed that having to find (or re-find) files was the least satisfying. It's not hard to imagine why. The average person prefers spending a few effortful minutes organizing files to the frustrating hours it may take to find them in the future.
But that's the problem that occurs when videos are thrown all over the place with little effort made to make them findable. And if your video library software does not include extensive search capabilities, then finding them can be nearly impossible.
Video searches are already a growing issue because of the large digital footprint they take up. They're not like documents that can be found by searching text within them or simply going through them after downloading them in bulk.
Videos require you to watch through them until you find what you're looking for. Streaming videos means having to wait for them to load and buffer. And then you can't even download all of them at once, given their large file sizes.
Difficulty in Categorizing and Tagging Videos
Say you find yourself in a bookstore in search of a specific book. What do you do? First, you head to the category section where it may be placed. Then, you narrow your search down based on the title of the book.
It's the same with video libraries. Simply knowing the name of the video, you want isn't enough. You need to know what category it falls under or tags that can be used as digital breadcrumbs to find it.
When online video platforms are disorganized, they can make the process of categorization practically impossible. With thousands or tens of thousands of files to deal with, putting the right videos in the right place is like trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle with your eyes closed. Sure, you might get the pieces to fit, but there's no guarantee that they belong there.
That's the kind of problem disorganized videos fall under. Unless you take the time to open each video to get a clear idea of what it is, you'll never come to a consensus on where it's meant to go.
Risk of Content Duplication or Loss
In large organizations, content is often created on a regular basis, and it can end up measuring in the terabytes. But when those resources aren't shared with others, they may have to be needlessly recreated from scratch.
Say, for example, your marketing department commissions a video production firm to create a promotional video about your company to show off to partners and investors without informing anyone. Later, your HR department goes around and does the same to promote your company culture. Just like that, your company paid for the same thing twice.
Facing Non-Compliant Video Library Platform Risks
Here's a question: is your video library compliant? If you answered anything other than "yes," you might be in for some bad news.
Video libraries can include videos that house a wealth of information about the organization, its partners, its clients, and more. In the eyes of the law, these videos act as a source of information that may require protection.
This is why organizations must comply with industry-standard privacy regulations to process, store, reproduce, and retain data. These regulations can vary depending on the industry and region, but they often have some common considerations that apply to most of them. These include:
- Retention: Various regulations require that certain records be stored for a minimum period of time. With a disorganized library, it can be hard to keep track of which videos are meant to be retained and which ones are not.
- Access Control: Some data privacy regulations, such as HIPAA and GDPR, mandate the use of access controls to certain sensitive information. If you don't organize your video library, you may run the risk of being unable to implement proper access controls.
- Reproduction of Records: Record requests and auditing processes require that businesses hand over certain data in their archives in a pre-defined turnaround time. Without a categorized and searchable video library, this can take much longer than needed.
- Documentation: Standards like ISO 9001:2015 necessitate the need to ensure proper documentation control with version history and revisions. Adhering to this becomes challenging when data is scattered across your video content library.
By not being able to meet requirements set out by data privacy regulations, your organization could be at severe risk of financial penalties, reputational damage, legal repercussions, and more.
Want to get started with a video platform that complies with GDPR, HIPAA, and more?
How Disorganized Video Library Can Affect Your Business
It may be intuitively clear how important it is to organize your video library. But how does that translate into the real world? What kind of negative impact can it have?
For an individual, it might mean a wasted afternoon and some frustration. For an organization with a large video content library that has thousands of videos, the stakes are much higher.
Here are some of the growing pains an organization may face with a disorganized video library:
Decreased User Experience and Engagement
Video libraries serve a key function, which is to make content accessible to the audience and engage them. Whether your organization is delivering a webinar, making a learning course available to viewers, or showcasing a product launch to potential customers, the end goal is always to create a seamless experience.
One of the key purposes of online video platforms is to serve video on demand to users seamlessly. When your viewers struggle to find the content they want or need, they can end up with a frustrating experience.
We live in an age where technology has made it possible for content to be made accessible to audiences with minimal effort. That comes with a few basic expectations.
Viewers want a user-friendly video library with clear categorization and search functionality to navigate effortlessly through the content. It's not just about the experience; it's about how the disorganization gives your users unpleasant feelings.
However, there are pitfalls for user experience when you don't organize your video library. It can end up sending even the most well-meaning efforts into the stone age.
Inefficient Content Retrieval and Reuse
Ever feel the frustration of scrambling to find your car keys when you're late for work? It's the same for organizations when finding crucial videos and files on strict deadlines. The only way to avoid it is to organize your video library.
If you don't? You could face consequences like wasted time and money, decisions based on incomplete data, or worse.
With a disorganized video library platform, time spent trying to find useful content like training videos or marketing material can be disastrous. It can lead to stress, missed opportunities, and lost productivity.
On average, employees spend 19% of every work week finding information. That roughly translates to about a fifth of their time trying to get at the heart of what their job requires of them.
Time is money. Businesses pay their employees by the hour, and loss of productivity ends up translating into very real financial losses for the organization itself. Even for basic tasks such as searching for or verifying files, organizations can end up paying as much as $8,200 per person per year.
But it's not just that. The impact of lost time translates to other aspects, such as missed deadlines, unnecessary delays, and unfinished projects. These drawbacks can create a domino effect, leading to ballooning costs, damaged client relationships, and a hindered ability to achieve business goals.
Negative Impact on Brand Perception and Credibility
Your brand image isn't just limited to your name and logo. Everything from the way your company makes decisions, interacts with partners and clients, and institutes its policies echoes your brand image.
It's the same case with your video library. The way the library is structured, and the content included matters for your brand perception.
When your audience see a disorganized library, they see much more than just clutter. They see a lack of organization that suggests a lack of attention to detail and professionalism. That leads them to potentially question the quality and reliability of your products or services.
When your partners and investors see a disorganized library, they see it as a reflection of the company's overall management and organization. That means doubts about the company's ability to execute strategies effectively.
Inconsistencies in video content, such as outdated or duplicate videos due to poor organization, can confuse your audience including customers, partners, investors, employees, and students or any other stakeholders. For example, if a customer comes across conflicting product demonstration videos or outdated marketing collateral, it's a threat to your company's consistency and credibility.
Disorganized Video Content Library Causes Data Death Spiral
What happens when you continue to let an unorganized video content library accumulate data haphazardly? You don’t just have trouble finding and streaming videos: you enter the data death spiral.
As content continues to build in an unorganized video library, it goes beyond the stage where it can be properly contained. Suddenly, you end up with a large mass of data that could contain something useful but will be hard to ascertain because of "unknown unknowns" — i.e., you don't even have enough information to know what you don't know.
With video, this is a significant problem for organizations as video data gets buried in storage with no idea how to retrieve what's relevant. There could be an important recorded meeting with helpful insights existing somewhere in your video library, but you may never even be aware of its existence.
The solution to an important business problem could be lying right under your nose without you ever knowing about it.
Leverage Video Library Software to Organize Video Content
If you don't organize your video library, you can significantly hamper your organization's efforts to use video effectively. In this situation, you have a choice, either organize video content or constantly suffer the consequences of disorganization.
But all hope is not lost. The good news is, there are simple strategies available to streamline your video library. Learn more about how to better organize video content with 10 best practices for organizing your corporate video library.
Still not sure where to start? Luckily, there is a solution. You can adopt video library software with tools to help you categorize your videos effectively. VIDIZMO EnterpriseTube is one of the leading solutions to help you upload, store, categorize, view, and share your content with others.
Don't let video disorganization hold you back any longer!
Learn more about EnterpriseTube or contact us today to discuss your needs and explore how we can help.
People Also Ask
1. How do you organize your video library?
Organizing your video library involves establishing a systematic approach to categorizing and storing videos. The best way to do this is to use a video library platform that lets you make categories, add tags, and organize videos into playlists or folders.
Want to see these capabilities in action? Check out our recent blog on how you can simplify organizing your video library with category access rights
2. What is the purpose of a video library?
A video library serves multiple purposes within an organization. It acts as a centralized repository for storing, managing, and sharing video content.
3. How do I share a lot of videos?
To efficiently share a large number of videos, consider using video-sharing platforms or video content management systems. These platforms allow you to upload videos, organize them into playlists or categories, and share them with specific individuals, teams, or the public.
4. What are the uses of a video library?
Some common uses of a video library include facilitating content creation, maintaining brand consistency, supporting marketing campaigns, enhancing training and educational materials, and improving internal and external communication processes.
5. Where is the best place for organizations to store videos?
The best place for organizations to store videos is to use a video library software with scalable hosting, organization, and sharing capabilities.