Best Video Hosting Platforms For Small Businesses

A quick guide to getting started with premium video platforms.

Best Video Hosting Platforms For Small Businesses

If you are a small to medium sized business looking for a solution other than YouTube, there are plenty of options available. But before you embark on this journey, you need to first map out your goals and what you really want to achieve with video, which will help narrow down the type of solution that is right for you.

Here are 5 questions to ask yourself designed to help you self identify — the results will lead you in the direction is right for you.

1. What is the business process you are looking to inject video into?

The business process can be sales/marketing, support/training, or maybe your business is built entirely around video, in which case you will need to architect a solid revenue plan to accompany your video strategy.

2. How does video fit into the goals you have set for the process and what metrics will you use to measure it’s effectiveness?

Video is a channel to communicate your message, much like a blog post, static landing page, white paper? Measurement of ROI will differ depending on use case, but some examples could be:

a) Increased the conversion rate of a landing page in which the video is embedded on.

b) Raw conversion from a video gate or lead form.

c) Reduced training cost from viewers completing a video course.

3. Do you have a content creation plan — in other words, cost effective reliable sources for scripting and producing videos?

It’s typical that a lot of businesses get into the game before they have even thought through their content creation plans and pipeline. This means putting a video production supply chain in place. Someone to script the content, film and produce, and then deliver. Once delivered its time to look at a video platform, the stage you are most likely looking at right now — implementing on your website.

4. How many videos will you be hosting within a given year?

Since you have a content creation plan in place, you can reference your content calendar and understand how many videos you will be creating in a month and then multiply it by 12 for the year. The total number of videos will most likely give you a ballpark range of how much storage you need to purchase and will help in negotiating with your premium video provider.

For example, if you produce 100 videos a year and you know the average raw file size for each video is 250MBs then you know you need at least 25GBs of storage to host those files — would recommend at least 50GBs of storage to be safe. Note: Some hosting providers will count video transcodes towards your storage allotment — something worth asking about.

5. How large is the audience the video will be exposed to? 

Understanding your audience size can give you a general idea of what you will pay in bandwidth fees and the amount of resources you will pull. If you are thinking about calculating video view traffic based on YouTube plays to-date, its not recommended. Premium video technology will be placed on your website and the numbers should be linked to raw traffic, specially consuming content similar to video.

Using the example above, where you have 100 videos at 250MBs each. Say you get 10,000 website visits in a given month, using the 4% rule, at most in the first 12 months of your video strategy you will not surpass 4% of the traffic as video views in a given month, and of you do, congrats. So in this case you will have at most 400 video views in a month.

Translating to bandwidth: 100 videos at 250MBs each, played once equals, 25GBs. So for 400 video plays you are looking at 100GBs of bandwidth a month.

Those are just a few questions that will get you thinking about the basic questions you need to answer before you enter contract with a premium video provider. Here are a host of small business video solutions you can find here at 50Wheel.


 

To make your search easier, here are a few we recommend.


Wistia

WistiaWistia gives marketers the power to track and analyze web video viewers including the ability to measure each individual’s video viewing session, their location, organization and IP address. Wistia’s video marketing application has been adopted by su…[Read More]


Oculu

OculuThe Oculu platform can be used to serve overlay, embedded and lightboxed videos onto any designated webpage, ad network or mobile device. The videos launch instantly, seamlessly delivering pristine video while collecting relevant data and reporting t…[Read More]


Vidmeup

VidmeupVidmeup is the only online video platform that gives you the ability to create your own videosite for free! vidmeup.com makes building branded video sites a simple exciting experience and its start level is free. Businesses can easily incorporate vid…[Read More]


 

Vidizmo

VidizmoVidizmo provides a platform with all the tools necessary to create, edit, distribute and measure live & on-demand interactive video presentations that can be used for everything from corporate communication to training & learning, marketing communica…[Read More]

 


 

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