If you are here, you are probably searching for "What are the alternatives to YouTube Live?" You're not alone. Many enterprises are in search of something similar due to the various limitations of YouTube when it comes to their corporate streaming—especially live streaming.
Live streaming is gaining immense popularity, especially in corporate settings. That's why the industry continues to grow with a massive CAGR of 27%. However, not all live-streaming platforms are suited for enterprises.
Platforms like YouTube Live, while dominant, may not always be the ideal fit for corporate streaming needs, which is why organizations are always on the hunt for a suitable YouTube alternative.
Despite having billions of users on its platform, YouTube isn't as suited for live streaming as you might be led to believe. The platform caters more to individual creators than large enterprises. This means you can expect it to lack a few critical capabilities that organizations need for their corporate communication, employee engagement, and video marketing efforts.
Besides this, the platform doesn't really offer confidence to large organizations, especially with incidents including taking down a WNBA live stream repeatedly for no just reason and recent layoffs dominating the news.
Luckily, you don't have to get stuck in a marriage of inconvenience with YouTube. There are a host of enterprise live video platforms out there that can offer an alternative to YouTube Live to do what it can do and more. In this blog, we will be looking at some of them.
But before exploring different alternatives for YouTube Live, let's first take a step back and try to understand why enterprises need a dedicated enterprise live streaming platform that's not YouTube Live itself.
Corporations and businesses nowadays are becoming heavily dependent on live streaming. They use it for interactive webinars and training sessions, engaging live events, and secure live video communication.
For these purposes, a social streaming platform that's built for creators is not the most suitable option. Corporations have specific needs that can be better addressed and understood by enterprise live-streaming solutions and YouTube alternatives.
Take, for example, live training sessions that contain critical or proprietary business information. Streaming and hosting these would require an immense amount of access controls and data governance. Only a dedicated enterprise live-streaming platform will allow businesses to do it.
Moreover, this challenge is similar to other use cases like town halls with high-level executives, investor relations announcements, and more.
In that vein, let's explore the key advantages businesses or enterprises can gain by choosing a dedicated platform for their live streaming.
YouTube is well known for its user-friendly formats, but a major drawback is that users face a lack of control over content. As a user, you have to comply with their laws. They can restrict it or take down your content. So, you are on their soil and must play by their rules.
As for enterprise video platforms, they give users way more flexibility than YouTube. They allow users to live stream or share stored videos with their desired target audience with access controls and limited sharing.
Although YouTube does have branding options for channels, they are mostly basic options limited to only adding a banner, icon or logo, channel description, and similar.
However, branding and customization within enterprise video content have a vast array of options. It goes way beyond adding logos, adjusting colors, and adding banners.
They can even allow users and businesses to use custom CSS to rebrand the portal, making it look like it's a consistent part of their brand or organization.
Live streaming scalability remains a significant challenge for businesses. Enterprise platforms are capable of providing hours of streaming with granular controls, unlike YouTube's limitations.
Stream using a wider range of formats for better compatibility with your equipment and users. Additionally, choose where your data resides to comply with regulations, be it a public cloud, government cloud, or even behind your firewall.
In short, enterprise live streaming empowers businesses with the control, security, and scalability needed for successful live video communication.
For businesses, security and privacy are of grave importance, but as we have said, YouTube does not give granular or advanced content control features to users.
Imagine having a live stream for your employees only, but due to lack of privacy, it reaches irrelevant people, putting classified and internal information at risk.
This can be really concerning for enterprises that are obliged to comply with data privacy laws like GDPR, HIPAA, and CCPA. These regulations force strict laws to protect data, and live streaming via YouTube is not a good option when keeping these regulations in mind.
Okay, so you've decided that you need a corporate live-streaming platform as a substitute to YouTube. Now what?
Well, there are various types of live streaming platforms out there that aren't YouTube Live. However, that shouldn't be your only qualifying factor. You should consider whether the live-streaming platform you choose will fit your unique requirements. So, if you're planning on choosing one of them, you need to make some important considerations, such as:
Most live streaming platforms don't offer capabilities for video streaming optimization, making the playback experience a mess with continuous buffering and loading errors.
It's important to look for adaptive bitrate capabilities in a live streaming platform, where multiple video quality options are created for live streams. This lets the live stream switch between different bitrates and resolutions for an uninterrupted streaming experience.
You organization may often want to increase the number of people it wants in the live stream. There could also be random surges in viewership.
For enterprise use cases, it's important to look for a solution that intelligently routes videos through an eCDN (Enterprise Content Delivery Network), or your network will be overloaded.
Most popular live streaming platforms let you leverage CDNs for intelligent load balancing to deliver content globally, even as viewership increases. All of this is done automatically, without you having to invest time getting into technical details.
Being able to create engaging and captivating content is your first and foremost priority while conducting a live event. Live streams are better served when they help captivate your audience and allow them to interact with you in real-time.
By default, YouTube offers options for live chat, video feeds, and some other interactive options. So, if you're looking for a YouTube alternative, you might consider one that matches or expands on those features. For that purpose, choose a live streaming platform with different interactivity options, like Q&As, live chat functionality, FAQs, social media feeds, etc.
It's important to look for a live video streaming platform that uses the latest streaming technologies to ensure compatibility with all devices, browsers, and streaming servers.
Make sure you look for a live streaming platform that uses HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) protocol, as this is what YouTube Live also supports by default. Of course, that's not the end of it. Live streaming platforms can also support MPEG-DASH, Microsoft Smooth Streaming, or other protocols for broad support by most infrastructure and devices.
Organizations often require in-depth analytics to monitor and understand how their live-streaming efforts are being translated into their end goals. Without having a window into how your live streams are being received, you could end up operating based on blind faith.
YouTube Live offers analytics for watch time, audience retention, demographics, playback locations, and traffic sources and devices. It's important to look for a live streaming platform that gives you detailed analytics such as this to really dig down into your content.
Having a platform that lets you see real-time live analytics such as engagement trends, user-level analytics, geographical heatmaps, and top devices can be extremely helpful in making you understand how your live streams are performing. Some of the top live-streaming platforms allow you to do this out of the box.
The biggest drawback of YouTube Live is that it is only offered in a SaaS (software-as-a-service) configuration. This means that the data is hosted in a server you don't control, operating in an infrastructure you don't have direct access to.
This may not be a deal breaker for some, but it's important for organizations that care about where, how, and by whom their data is accessed. For instance, you might want to host your data on-premises or on your private cloud infrastructure. This may also be necessary if you're looking to meet regional compliances like GDPR.
That's why it might be worthwhile to consider a competitor to YouTube Live that offers on-premises, cloud, and hybrid deployment, along with SaaS, if you need it.
Finding alternatives to YouTube should not be a burden anymore, as we have compiled the top substitutes to YouTube Live. Let's jump right into it.
As a comprehensive enterprise video platform, VIDIZMO EnterpriseTube not only provides advanced live streaming services but also allows them to host videos on demand. It enables them to deliver their content at their own pace and with their plan to users around the world.
When delivering video content, businesses also look for a platform that allows them to bring their own identity in live streaming and video conferencing. VIDIZMO Enterprise excels in this. If you have a custom CSS of your own, you can bring it to your EnterpriseTube video portal and make it look like your desired appearance.
The branding element of VIDIZMO takes the lead over everyone else because of the detailed options like customizing the video player portal, adding custom domains, category branding, and much more.
Users can also leverage adaptive bitrate streaming (ABR), ensuring that the live stream reaches every individual of the audience regardless of their latency and device. Live streams can also be embedded with VIDIMZO EnterpriseTube video-sharing capabilities. Furthermore, these live streams are backed by eCDN and live streaming.
These live streams are protected by powerful access control functions like tokenized URLs and SSO-enabled live streaming, making it an ultimate substitute to YouTube.
Professionals in the educational sector can heavily leverage Panopto because of its undivided attention to online education.
Therefore, they provide vital tools like variable playback, RTMP live captioning, and much more to create a YouTube-like learning platform.
Integration with learning management systems and video conferencing tools like Zoom, Teams, and Webex. Its live streaming is also supported by HTML5 and RTMP, along with live captioning capabilities.
It provides robust security, detailed analytics, and interactivity options to allow the user to insert quizzes and surveys.
However, it is not recommended for individuals because of its deployment complexity. Let's say you, as an individual, want to do live streaming. To be able to utilize Kaltura fully, you would need to have detailed technical knowledge and must know how to use open-source platforms. Unlike other enterprise-level live streaming platforms out there, you won't need professional services.
Vimeo is a good option for external streaming as an alternative to YouTube streaming. It is an ad-free platform whose focus is to deliver high-definition video across all devices. It also supports embedding live streams on social media and websites while using the RTMP streaming protocol.
Vimeo is a good option for those who want to livestream externally but don't have as much need or less adherence to quality, compliance, and security.
Brightcove, founded in 2004, is one of the oldest players in the live-streaming market and is being fiercely used as a YouTube alternative. Brightcove is an ad-free live streaming platform that offers various features, such as an immersive live video experience in minutes, and allows embedding anywhere your audience is.
It also gives users detailed insights about the streaming data, such as user engagement, impressions, unique viewers, and much more. Other than that, it offers global content delivery, and you can also transcode your live streaming. One major drawback is that Brightcove doesn't allow you to choose where your data is stored and how it's handled
It offers global content delivery with no ads embedded to interrupt the video. Dacast has HTTP and RTMP live-streaming capabilities.
Moreover, it also has advanced security features for video content like tokenized URLs, password protection, geographical and domain restrictions, and AES encryption.
Muvi is a simple solution that does not require any technical knowledge and is managed by their end only.
It doesn't require any coding or development. However, its CMS is complex, not user-friendly, and it's hard to connect or integrate with other platforms.
But suppose you're someone with little to no background in coding or development knowledge and are looking for a video on demand (VOD) platform, and audio streaming platform. In that case, Muvi is your go-to option.
Enterprises like yours that use live streaming always have to balance the need between choosing user-friendliness and robust security on their live-streaming platform. Fortunately, live streaming platforms like VIDIZMO EnterpriseTube deliver both, eliminating the need to juggle your needs.
EnterpiseTube provides extensive security features like multi-factor authentication, IP restrictions, and geo-blocking to ensure only authorized viewers see your live streams. Moreover, the encoding and transcoding with adaptive bitrate streaming enables live streaming to reach audiences worldwide.
Following are some of the latest features that come with VIDIZMO EnterpriseTube for enterprise video content needs
Now that you have read all the top YouTube alternatives for live streaming, you will need to determine which platform aligns best with your brand and organizational needs. With so many features and YouTube Live alternatives to consider, the choice may be overwhelming.
If you want a comprehensive customized YouTube alternative, then enterprise live-streaming solutions such as VIDIZMO are for you! VIDIZMO offers flexible deployment options, along with customization according to your organizational or compliance requirements.
Want to get started with EnterpriseTube? Sign up for a free 7-day trial or contact us to learn how we can meet your needs.
What is an alternative to YouTube Live?
Finding the right alternative to YouTube Live depends on your requirements. If you just want to watch consumer-end content, you can use Twitch or Facebook Watch. But for a corporate livestreaming alternative to YouTube, you should consider something like VIDIZMO EnterpriseTube.
Which YouTube alternative is better for live streaming?
There are many enterprise-grade streaming tools available on the market that offer more advanced streaming capabilities than what YouTube offers. These include VIDIZMO EnterpriseTube, Vimeo, Kaltura, and Brightcove.
Which live-streaming application is the best?
VIDIZMO EnterpriseTube is considered to be one of the best tools for live streaming. It includes features like access controls for your live streaming, custom branding, and video-on-demand features.
What are the alternatives to YouTube Live streaming?
VIDIZMO EnterpriseTube, Vimeo, Kaltura, Dacast, and Brightcove are some of the best YouTube alternatives for live streaming. However, it is necessary to take an overview of the tools before shortlisting one tool.
What is the difference between video on demand and live streaming?
The key difference between VOD and live streaming is when the content is recorded. VOD lets you watch pre-recorded shows whenever you want. Live streaming broadcasts events in real time and includes interactivity.