It’s clear that companies are doing more with video today. With the increase in demand for video comes the need for more content, better distribution and of course monetization. As you plan out your video strategy its important to make sure you are purchasing the right enterprise video platform for you organization. Technology that’s centralized, relevant and can scale to meet your needs in the future as your use of video grows.
Organizations that succeed with video have purchased enterprise video software from a vendor with features that include:
- A comprehensive video platform with capabilities to support both internal and external business activities
- Easy-to-use so all users can deliver compelling video experiences without the need for coding or external technical resources
- Enterprise-class manageability and security, IT can support and manage video, company-wide resource
- Access to trusted video resources and advisors to help design and support the implementation of a video strategy
1) Comprehensive Video Platform
Capabilities to support both internal and external use cases are critical for video to succeed at your organization.
At a minimum, you should look for platforms that include:
- Fast, scalable transcoding
- Advanced video analytics across
- A robust video content management system both your own sites and your social platforms
- A fully customizable and high performing HTML5 video Player
- Robust APIs, SDKs, and developer resources for easy integration
- Fast, high-quality, and reliable video delivery
- Proven security, reliability, and scalability
- Reliable live video streaming
Video technology is changing quickly, here at 50Wheel we add over 30 vendors to our directory a month. Each year we say goodbye to at least 5 vendors that go out of business. When evaluating a video software vendor look beyond a vendor’s current functionality. Examine their track record and check out their roadmap of future development plans.
2) Easy-to-Use Functionality
To get the most out of your video investment and promote organizational adoption the software must be easy for everyone to use, including non-technical teams. If the video solution helps your functional teams be better at their jobs, whether that’s marketing, sales, customer support, training or anything else its more likely to be widely adopted.
Look for solutions that offer the following:
- Simple video portal creation: Templates to create professional video portals and web pages.
- Easy social distribution: Natively publishing to multiple social media channels and analyzing the results and comparing them to your own website is time consuming. Streamlining this workflow can save time and money.
- Easy live streaming: Simplifying the end-to-end process, from encoding to creating dynamic video publishing and on demand use will make a complicated process easy.
- Robust analytics: Effective video analytics should span multiple levels of data, from viewing and engagement at an aggregate level down to a specific individual activities. The data should be accessible for export via API to major third-party software.
3) Enterprise-class Manageability and Security
Video has become a valued communication medium across large enterprises. Today IT teams have expanded their support and management of video. To meet the needs of enterprise IT teams, the video platform have the following key capabilities:
- Advanced security and control: Ensure that sensitive video content remains secure and is only seen by intended individuals, be they internal employees or external partners. The ability to support single sign-on, define IP restrictions, and control permissions at varying levels of granularity is a must-have.
- High network performance: Widespread internal video viewing can put a strain on network performance. Leverage existing network optimization solutions for enterprise content delivery (eCDN) to address this concern.
- Integration into existing technology stack: Leverage existing robust technology infrastructure. Look for a video platform that supports integrations for core systems (e.g. CMS, CRM, Marketing Automation, SSO, analytics, QoS, and more).
- Enterprise-grade SLAs: Enterprise-Grade SLAs look for a clear service level agreement (SLA).
- Simplifying complexity for seamless video delivery: The video software vendor should solution provide tools for automatically optimizing video quality with minimum bandwidth, future-proofing video libraries against format changes, and improving player performance.
4) Access To Trusted Video Resources & Advisors
Enterprise-class video strategies require strong, trusted partnerships and shared commitments between an organization and its vendors. Support for a successful video strategy should include:
- Global technical support with response times that align with your business needs
- Dedicated account managers and customer success specialists with deep video production experience to support both end users and IT teams
- Professional services for consultation, special customizations, or key development projects
- Education and training services
