If you’re like many organizations, you may be using a lot more video (yes, video calls count) than you had before 2020. But if you didn’t have a way to manage it all, you may be discovering some of the downsides of not planning a video strategy. Video is powerful—engaging, efficient, even fun. But it also can be bulky, difficult to share, and hard to search. Recordings pile up. Intranets are not always designed with video content in mind. Finding secure and reliable ways to make sure people can find the videos they need—and only the people who need those videos can find them—gets frustrating fast. That’s why a lot of organizations turn to an enterprise video platform.
What Is an Enterprise Video Platform?
An enterprise video platform (or EVP) supports all the video activities a company needs. It provides a centralized place for video content management—a way to upload, store, manage, search for, control access to, and share videos across the company, for both internal and external use cases. An EVP will not only control who has access to which videos through permission sets, it will also track video access and usage through video analytics. But it’s more than just video management. A good video platform supports all video use cases, including real-time, live, and on-demand video. It covers what’s known as glass-to-glass: from video capture and creation, through editing and enrichment, to delivery and publishing.
What Is the Difference Between an Online Video Platform and an Enterprise Video Platform?
An Enterprise Video Platform (EVP) is a specialized form of a Video Platform. While an online video platform can offer all the same video creation, broadcast, storage, management, analytics, and delivery capabilities, what truly defines the video platform as an enterprise video platform is the security features. EVPs usually leverage an organization’s SSO and existing permission sets to determine who is able to access which videos. An enterprise video platform may be used for internal-facing and outward-facing materials, but its ability to securely and reliably handle sensitive materials distinguishes it from a consumer-grade online video platform.
Part of a successful enterprise video platform is its ability to become a part of the company’s intranet and workstream collaboration suite, integrating with digital workplace, content management and social business tools a company is already using, such as Microsoft Teams, Jive, SharePoint, Zoom, Webex, and so on.
Why Do You Need an Enterprise Video Platform?
Video is mission critical in how we communicate in the workplace. From day one, video can be a fantastic part of an employee’s experience with a company. Video in the onboarding process can help new employees get to know corporate leadership and company culture. Video can also be used on an ongoing basis for activities like training, CEO town halls, and community building around fun activities like company family days. Additionally, video has external possibilities as well.
Basically, an enterprise video platform offers everything a company needs for video communication in a professional business context. Companies typically use enterprise video platforms for corporate communications, executive messaging, learning and development, knowledge sharing, employee engagement, client and partner education, marketing, sales—everything video!
Because video is everywhere, managing it can seem hard. While it’s possible for each department to use its own tools and storage, many companies quickly find it becomes confusing and inefficient. Material gets lost and duplicated, people struggle to find the content they’re looking for, and IT has trouble supporting many different conflicting systems, not to mention the costs that add up. But a robust enterprise video platform allows everything your company does with video to be managed from a single, central location. While the possibilities for video in the workplace are endless, the work of managing that video doesn’t have to be.
What Are the Components of a Video Platform?
While different online video platforms have different levels of functionality, there are several key areas that should always be considered.
Making Videos
First, making videos. A video platform needs to contain tools for capturing, creating, and/or ingesting video. These can include features like recording meetings for later viewing and making informal videos right at the desktop. Broadcasting live events, and then saving those broadcasts for later viewing is also a key way a video platform allows users to create content.
Tools to help edit or enhance video are generally also part of a robust video platform. In fact, a video platform can provide the ability to add interactive features – like hotspots and quizzes – to traditional video. Tools that allow for transcripts to be generated (either automatically or by human transcriptionists) can also be an essential part of the video platform to ensure accessibility.
Using Live or Real-Time Video
Video in the office today goes well beyond VOD – we’ve all gotten used to video meetings, virtual classrooms, and townhalls. A video platform should handle all of your video activity—VOD, live, and real-time. (Need a refresher on which is which? Here’s a primer on the difference between live broadcast and real-time communications.)
Managing Videos
Being able to make great video content is essential. But so is being able to organize and manage that content. A video platform allows an organization to decide who can see what video through user and role management, ideally integrated with your SSO solution. It also provides analytics that can help administrators understand audience engagement as well as quality of service. Additionally, search tools allow search across video content – including metadata, text in slides, and captioning. This allows you to know exactly what’s in your video content and to group it appropriately for your audiences.
Hosting Videos
Videos have to live somewhere, and a video platform makes that happen. From storing video on demand content to generating the optimized output files that make sure your video looks great regardless of the type of device your audience is using to watch, a video platform is an essential part of creating a great video experience.
Watching Videos
Also an essential part of the video platform? The ability to create customized branded video players, so that the video experience your audience has is specific to your organization’s identity and needs. A video player should be able to help your audience find the right videos for them. With products like Kaltura MediaSpace you can turn that video player into the center of a full blown video portal, creating what is essentially your own private YouTube. That can allow for interactive features such as upvoting and discussion. These, in turn, can help to increase your video audience, build community around video content, and ensure greater attention to videos in the process.
How to Pick the Right Enterprise Video Platform
While there are many video platforms on the market, not all of them are created equal, especially for organizations that want to integrate video into every aspect of their business.
Here are some key qualities and features to look for in an enterprise video platform:
- Because there are many diverse applications of video, choose an enterprise video platform that can work with live video, real-time communications, and video on demand. In fact, flexibility is a key watch-word throughout the EVP selection process.
- Choose a platform that can offer high-quality playback by having robust video transcoding abilities. Today people are watching video on desktops, laptops, tablets, mobile phones, and cast on to televisions. Most users watch video on multiple different devices every day. An enterprise video platform needs to ensure your video is seamlessly available in a range of formats to deliver a fantastic playback experience every time because playback quality always impacts viewer engagement.
- Select an enterprise video platform with detailed and reliable security and permissions management. Not only do you want to make sure that video content reaches its intended audience and no one else, you want to be able to conveniently change and adjust these access control settings based on individual or group permissions. After all, some video is meant to be seen by the entire internet but other video you may want to restrict to members of your organization, or even a subset of those members!
- Make sure your enterprise video platform will protect your organization’s content and intellectual property. Encryption options can further help safe-guard your content. Digital rights management (DRM), granular entitlement management, SSL delivery, and forensic watermarking are also security features you may want to have access to through your video platform.
- Select an enterprise video platform with a robust search function that can search captions, slide text, and advanced metadata.
- Use an enterprise video platform that allows you to caption and/or translate your videos in order to have the best possible audience reach and provide accessibility.
- Choose an enterprise video platform with a customizable video player. This ensures that your video platform can effectively serve your audience while reflecting your organization’s branding and style.
- Make sure your video platform choice can enable you to add video as native content to your social business, content management, marketing, and learning platforms, and more. Choosing an enterprise video platform that can work with your other systems and goals is essential to making sure video serves your organization to its fullest capacity.
- Make sure that your enterprise video platform gives you the ability to work with APIs and developer tools so that you can create a custom experience specific to your organization’s needs.
Conclusion
Your employees have become far more comfortable using video than they were just a few years ago. But the key to making sure that your company is using video to its full potential (as well as doing so securely and without giving IT a nervous breakdown) is an enterprise video platform. By consolidating tools and centralizing video management in one secure, enterprise-grade platform, you’ll be able to rest assured that your video is getting to where it’s needed most…and no further.
What does a video platform look like in action?
