If your company is like most enterprise organizations, 2019 is going to be a whole lot more about online video. In fact, over 80% of IT teams at global North American companies are planning on evaluating new online video technology in 2019. To be specific, in the context of this post, online video technology references video platforms that enable the upload/creation, broadcast, management and streaming of video content for consumption by both external or internal audiences. Not to be confused with online meeting software, video platforms provide the ability for marketing to place video content on valuable website pages and HR to live stream the CEO’s town hall.
Over the past three years we’ve seen online video transform from a compartmental solution found primarily as a tool for marketing and digital teams externally, and training and learning organizations internally into an ‘enterprise-wide’ solution that addresses a multitude of use cases within a single platform solution. As a result, today IT teams are striving to centralize departments on one single platform in order to maintain control and reduce technology expenditure. There are a number of other benefits as well such as authentication workflow and security as it relates to the reduction of the number of video technologies that require different user credentials and put the company’s data at potential risk.
The search for the perfect enterprise platform is on! Unfortunately, in online video there is not a ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution available and with over 70 different types of online video solutions, online video software evaluations can get complicated quickly. How do you fit your enterprise’s needs such as content creation, video security, user management, live streaming, advanced search, slide sharing, etc.. into one solution? It’s no easy task, but we’re to help. Instead of doing feature-for-feature comparisons blindly, maybe this short article can point you in the right direction and we’ve even included a FREE RFP template you can download and use in your vendor evaluations.
Bottom line your video platform needs to be simple to use, easy to implement and cost effective over time. If you’re rolling out online video for both internal and external use cases, consider these feature categories at a high-level first and make sure the vendor can check these boxes before proceeding with a deeper evaluation:
Content creation, video upload and ingest
The enterprise online video platform should have the following features:
- Ability to upload video files of any size
- Ability to launch a live stream or webcast
- Ability to have multiple input sources simultaneously
- Ability to instantly publish video or allow for DVR on live broadcasts
- Ability to ingest and publish audio files such as MP3s
Video management, sharing and collaboration
The enterprise online video platform should have the following features:
- Ability to manage video content by folders, tags, custom fields and other attributes
- Ability to bulk manage video content
- Ability to access the video library from any location on the web including mobile devices
- Ability to segment video content in the library based on specific parameters
- Ability for users to upload video content from a mobile phone or single-click on desktop
- Ability to automatically encode and transcode videos in real-time
- Ability to edit video content that has been uploaded or captured on the web in a web editor
- Ability to customize the video player with branding
- Ability to meet ADA compliance for video playback and presentation on the web
- Ability to integrate with LMS, CRMS, CMS and other systems using APIs
- Ability to access main platform features through API
- Ability to silo access to feature sets based on user rights and roles
- Ability to manage user groups and related access control
Video playback, presentation and distribution
The enterprise online video platform should have the following features:
- HTML5 video player that supports Flash Fallback for those older web browsers
- Video player supports dynamic bitrate switching for streamline playback
- Ability to create internal video portals for video libraries
- Ability to create and embed video players in 3d party intranets such as Microsoft SharePoint
- Ability to apply security to video players and video portals via IP restriction, domain restriction, single sign-on and geo-restriction
- Ability for users to share video players via email
- Ability for users to interact with video securely on mobile devices
In conclusion, the points mentioned above about each feature and category of feature should be used to form your ultimate online video platform RFP. As we mentioned above, to make it easy to get started we put together a free RFP template you can download and use for your evaluations. You can also browse the best enterprise video platforms of 2018 here.
