You’ve rolled out an online video strategy across your company. The marketing team is using video to drive demand, the product team has a video library that details your product, and the HR team has an internal video portal for employees. Videos across your deployment are streaming only, meaning that they can’t be downloaded or accessed offline. Videos are viewable on any device, but your sales team and remote employees need a way to consume important video content when offline. The easiest solution is to enable video file downloads along with streaming. This can be as easy as providing a simple download button accompanying the video player online. Before you enable video downloads to satisfy remote employees consider the following points presented in this article.
Is sensitive content at risk by allowing it to be downloaded? Let’s examine a few different use cases to see how this plays out.
Internal Training
Internal content should remain internal and accessible to those behind “the firewall.” The investment to develop tools and strategies for staff was expensive and time consuming. Streaming video internally with online video tools can help to ensure training retains its efficacy. Offline with downloaded video files, there is a visibility gap making it nearly impossible to monitor trainees and keep on top of compliance.
Offering these same videos as an option for download could benefit your team when training remotely or available while in airplane mode. The question you should ask yourself is it okay to let go of the potentially powerful amount of viewing data you would be getting from online video. In some cases the answer could be yes.
Demand Generation
Video content can drive real results when it comes to driving leads and sales for your business. Marketers are using video across websites, landing pages, and social to effectively convert viewers into customers. With this use case offline videos can be beneficial (rarely), but there are two major advantages of keeping your content online:
- Search Engine Optimization: Having your videos centralized in one place on the web ensures that every time they are shared, SEO get a boost and isn’t diluted by copied content. Additionally hosting videos in a single location allows you to create a video sitemap and get SEO credit for all of your video content.
- Gated Content: Are your videos gated/protected? This can mean that you put a video behind a form or request an email address within the video player before the viewer can watch the content.
Although your marketing strategy probably focuses on content that’s gated and protected, it’s a good idea to consider that the buyer does not have the time or access to watch streaming content, they want to consume when it’s convenient to them. Therefore, allowing (controlled) access to downloadable content can enhance a buyer’s experience, and could allow you to connect with them in a positive, convenient way.
Paid Subscription Video Content
We don’t recommend enabling downloads on paid content. This opens up all kinds of security holes and piracy issues that can end up taking down your business and hurting revenue.
Customer Support and Training
Customer support and training videos may be filled with sensitive strategy and product information as the internal video use case. Just like internal content, be careful on which videos you allow users to download. On the other hand, in some cases support videos can be very powerful for marketing, lead generating, and exposure to your product. But if you’re not trying to collect data, and you just want your customers and potential customers to be able to have content on demand, downloads are okay.
Should you enable video downloads?
Think about the use cases and the ramifications tied to the content leaving your control. If it makes sense allow the download. There are premium video hosting solutions that make it easy to offer both streaming and downloaded video content. Browse our video hosting solutions directory to find the right solution for you.
