The increasing demand and popularity of video among modern organizations has given rise to the demand for another important enterprise asset; enterprise video platforms. These solutions enable organizations to host and manage their video assets, and utilize them for various organizational functions, such as corporate communication, marketing, and training & learning..
While there are many free video hosting platforms (such as YouTube), they come with certain drawbacks and limitations that prevent organizations from fulfilling their needs and taking full advantage of their video assets. Let’s take a look at why organizations need an enterprise video platform and why free platforms just don’t cut it.
What is an Enterprise Video Platform?
Basically, it’s a content management system (CMS) designed to manage video content for enterprises. It’s also referred to as an enterprise video hosting & streaming platform or as a ‘Corporate YouTube’. Enterprise video platforms provide a range of tools and features that may vary from vendor, such as live video streaming, video analytics, branding and artificial intelligence (AI) services.
Why do Enterprises Need a ‘Corporate YouTube’?
Enterprises incorporate videos in a number of business operations that include:
- Internal communication and meetings
- Training employees and onboarding new recruits
- Marketing & advertising
- Corporate events
- Knowledge management, transfer & sharing
- Other use cases
Videos have become a staple for modern enterprises for a wide variety of use cases. To maximize their returns, most enterprises are adding an enterprise video hosting & streaming platform to their arsenal of IT business applications.
Why Enterprises Might NOT Want To Use YouTube
While YouTube is a great platform for an individual user or at a consumer level, there are several issues to consider for enterprise streaming purposes.
No Brand Customization
Branding is essential for enterprises to portray their identity and show professionalism. YouTube doesn’t allow brand customization for branding, limiting organizations from promoting their brand and personalizing their content, and makes the organization look less professional.
3rd Party Ads
Since it’s a free video platform, YouTube must rely heavily on advertisements for its financing. This means your videos are prone to ads by 3rd parties that can not only be irrelevant and irritating, but also disrupts viewer experience and distracts them from the video. While it does give you the option to skip certain ads after few seconds, sometimes viewers are forced to watch the entire ad before they can watch the actual video. What’s worse is that the ads can pop up anytime, multiple times before, after or in the middle of a stream.
Suggestions for Videos from Competitors
When you watch a video on YouTube, it automatically provides recommendations for videos with similar content. As such, it’s common for videos from your competitors to show up as suggestions when someone comes to watch your videos. Moreover, you can’t control these suggestions, which means your competitors can potentially lure viewers away from your content to their own.
Privacy Concerns
It can also be risky to publish private or confidential videos, such as internal meetings on a public platform. While YouTube may provide settings for controlling privacy, hosting private content on a public platform can pose a major risk to privacy and creates the possibility of someone external accessing your private internal videos.
Internet Restrictions
While YouTube is widely popular all around the world, it is also the most popular blocked website around the world. As such, hosting public videos for uses such as marketing automatically deprives you of a large number of targeted viewers due to restricted connections.
Loss of Content Rights
Another problem is that when you stream or upload your videos on YouTube, you also give away the rights to your content, which can be an issue for some enterprises. You can read about YouTube’s Terms of Service here.
What Makes an Enterprise Video Platform Different?
There are certain key differentiators that differentiate enterprise video hosting & streaming platforms from public platforms like YouTube:
Access & Security
Privacy is of utmost importance for enterprises. At the same time, different use cases require them to be able to share different videos with different people, grant certain permissions to specific users and prevent unauthorized individuals from being able to access of view private content.
As such, video platforms designed for enterprises provide more robust, extensive and flexible options for protecting video assets, such as customizable security policies, role-based access control, video sharing for a limited amount of time or views and end-to-end DRM encryption. And since they don’t face the same restrictions as YouTube, they are more reliable for streaming video to any internal or external viewers. Moreover, they allow enterprises to keep the rights for their content.
Customizable Branding
Branding is a key aspect for most organizations since it shows professionalism and promotes their brand image. Video platforms designed for enterprises typically provide a white-label platform so organizations can incorporate their logos, themes and colors to represent their brand. This includes branding for video players, portals, layout, etc.
When it comes to managing company videos, your organization needs a platform that will effectively communicate the message. While YouTube is popular for hosting and sharing videos for free, it has some serious downfalls for businesses with valuable or sensitive information.
Interactivity & Engagement
Enterprise video platforms generally provide a lot more extensive features such as adding quizzes and surveys to videos to collect feedback and information, inserting handouts to provide supporting digital content such as documents or presentations, AI services, etc. VIDIZMO, for example, allows viewers to search for content in a video through automatic transcription & translation and fast forward to where it occurs in the video to save time and make it easier for viewers to find the information they are looking for. Free video platforms like YouTube provide only limited features that are not enough for the needs of an enterprise.
Integration with Enterprise Technology
Enterprises have a lot of different business IT applications, such as CMS, LMS, CRM and video conferencing systems, as well as infrastructure components, such as cloud, content delivery networks (CDN) and etc. In order to enable smooth interoperability, and create a centralized video library, enterprises video platforms enable integration with other enterprise IT systems and infrastructure.
Conclusion
While free video platforms like YouTube are reliable for consumer-level streaming, they are not designed for meeting the needs of an enterprise. Enterprise video platforms provide the necessary security, features and integrations that an enterprise demands while overcoming the ‘weaknesses’ of a free platform, such as the lack of customizability and branding.
With the increasing use of video for specialized enterprise use cases, it has become imperative for organizations to invest in an enterprise video hosting & streaming platform to successfully leverage and get the most profit out of their video assets. Of course, we recommend VIDIZMO for enterprises looking to leverage a live & on-demand video streaming platform.
If you're still unsure about the best option for your enterprise, check out our blog on how to choose an enterprise video platform for your organization.
Learn more about VIDIZMO enterprise video platform or try our 30-day free trial so you can explore our features and see what our platform has to offer.
