As you look to expand your organization’s use of online video technology its important to understand all terms and acronyms associated with online video software toolsets. This post serves as a high-level guide to the terminology that will come in handy when evaluating potential solutions. Some terms listed are highly technical and you may never come across them in the wild, while others may be referred to constantly. Nevertheless, it’s good to know your stuff!
The basic online video platform terms you need to know:
- OVP or OVMP (Online Video Platform or Online Video Management Platform) video asset management or streaming.
- EVP (Enterprise Video Platform) is designed specifically for large businesses and organization to manage vast quantities of video assets.
- CMS or OVCMS (Content Management System or Online Video Content Management System) are used to manage business content or dynamic text for websites. CMS may have been adapted to handle video where OVCMS will have been designed specifically.
- VCP (Video Collaboration Platform) is designed for teams to store, manipulate and work together on video assets.
- CDN (Content Delivery Network) is a video player solution that enables hosting, embedding, delivery and streaming of videos from a website.
- ECDN (Enterprise Content Delivery Network) is an on-premise solution that empowers scaling of video assets around a central network or geo-location. ECDNs are designed to reduce online video bandwidth strain on the network.
- DAM (Digital Asset Management) is a system that manages tasks and workflow of digital assets.
- MAM (Media Asset Management) is a specialized DAM that focuses purely on video, animation and audio content.
- PAM (Production Asset Management) is a system that focuses on managing asset during creation and production of feature films, animation, video games and TV content.
- 4K Streaming is high resolution video, resolutions include 4,096 x 2,160 and 3,840 x 2,160.
- Adaptive Streaming (Adaptive Bitrate Streaming) is a streaming approach that offers multiple streams of the same content at varying qualities that are served inside the same video player and often differ based on bitrate and resolution.
- Bandwidth is used to describe an internet connection speed or as a form of consumption in relation to online video.
- Buffering is the delivery of chunks of video data to an end user. The video player will then create a buffer involving chunks that have not yet been viewed. This process is intended to let the viewer watch from the buffer in the event a video chunk is lost. If this occurs the video content will stop and the player will generally wait until more data is received.
- Closed Captions also known as “CC” is text information combined with video content. It transcribes both dialogue that is being spoken but also relates on screen events and timecode in the video
- Embedded Player is a video player that is enclosed in a web source which can be placed on a webpage via an iframe embed and is one of the most common methods of embedding a video player.
- Encoding is the process of taking live video sources and converting it into a digital format.
- Transcoding involves converting one digital video type into another format and involves converting a format that is already digital while encoding relates to converting an analog source to a digital format.
- H.264 is video compression technology, commonly referred to as a codec, that is defined in the MPEG-4 specification. The container format for H.264 is defined as MP4.
- HD Streaming relates to 1080p, 1080i and 720p resolution content.
- HDS is an HTTP-based technology for adaptive streaming. HDS segments video content into smaller video chunks, allowing switching between bit rates when viewing.
- HLS is Apple’s HTTP live streaming adaptive streaming technology that breaks down the stream into smaller MPEG2-TS files. These files vary by bitrate and often times resolution, and ideally are served to the viewer based on the criteria of their setup such as download speed.
- HTML5 Video is an in-browser solution, done through the HTML5.
