If you are like many businesses, since recent events, you have probably been using video much more than before 2020. COVID-19 only intensified the surge in streaming content, and even as the pandemic subsides, demand will likely continue to grow.
Video is a powerful, engaging, appealing, and effective medium. In business, every department now relies on video – HR, training, marketing, and of course communications (external, internal, corporate).
But every advantage has its drawbacks. Videos quickly take up considerable space, your content accumulates, finding THE right video becomes tedious, and controlling distribution becomes a critical challenge. This is why many organizations are turning to an enterprise video platform (or EVP for Enterprise Video Platform).
First, let us answer a question that comes up frequently:
How Is It Different from YouTube, Which Is Free?
YouTube is a free platform and easy to use for millions of viewers. But while price and convenience are certainly important, social media platforms are not appropriate for enterprise video streaming for many reasons.
One of the main reasons is that you will not get the level of security and control over the distribution and rights of your video content as you would with a dedicated enterprise video platform like Videas.
Another important reason is the interface your audience sees. Your company may have its banner, logo, and name on its YouTube channel, but it is still primarily a YouTube channel. These platforms do not offer many branding options beyond perhaps a thumbnail, a banner, or a small watermark. And most users will not see your video from your company’s dedicated page, but rather from their feed, where it will be surrounded by third-party ads, possibly even from competitors. Most enterprise video platforms provide an ad-free, white-label solution that is much better suited for professional use.
Finally, the availability of responsive customer support, hosting exclusively in France, and the certainty of retaining ownership of your content and associated data is guaranteed with a solution like Videas. Not with YouTube or Vimeo.
What Is an Enterprise Video Platform?
An enterprise video platform handles all the video-related features a business needs. It provides a centralized location for video content management – a place to upload, host, store, manage, index, search, control access, and share videos throughout the organization for both internal and external use cases.
This type of solution covers hosting, editing, enrichment, distribution, and sometimes even content capture and creation. A public video platform can offer the same capabilities at this level. But what truly defines a video platform as an enterprise video platform are the security features (ensuring the confidentiality of internal content), customization options, and the ability to interface with other enterprise applications (intranet, corporate social networks, etc.).
Why Does Your Business Need a Video Platform?
An enterprise video platform provides everything a business needs for video communications in a professional context. Video is becoming essential in business. From the very first day at a company, video can be an engaging part of an employee’s onboarding experience. It can help new employees familiarize themselves with the company culture and quickly get up to speed on internal tools, for example.
Video can also be used continuously for knowledge sharing, product presentations, replaying key meetings, training customers and partners, marketing, sales, and more. Everything is video, not to mention the external possibilities.
Because video is everywhere, managing it can quickly become difficult. While it is possible for each department to use its own tools and storage, many businesses quickly find this becomes confusing and inefficient. Content is scattered, team members struggle to find what they are looking for, each department uses a different solution. The result: IT has difficulty supporting many conflicting systems, not to mention the costs that add up.
A robust enterprise video platform allows you to manage everything your business does with video from a single, central location.
Overview of Video Platform Features
A video platform like Videas, designed for professional use and tailored to business needs, allows you to host your videos, index them, optimize them for internet streaming, and make them available to your team members, clients, and partners securely. Here is a summary of the possibilities.
Host and Manage Your Videos
You have access to a fully private storage space to guarantee the confidentiality of internal content. A media library with folder-based organization lets you index all your videos – regardless of format (MP4, MOV, AVI, etc.) or size – enrich them, and find them easily through a search system.
To learn about the other features of our media library, check out our guide on enterprise video hosting.
Customize the Appearance
No intrusive ads, no “parasitic” content – a visual environment 100% based on your brand guidelines. Communicate with your brand image.
Share Your Videos Securely
Are you used to using WeTransfer to share a video with a colleague, client, or anyone else? No need anymore. For each video you send, easily retrieve a private sharing link to distribute to anyone you want to give access to. Options are available to ensure confidentiality: password protection, temporary links, download blocking, and more.
Create a Corporate Web TV
Have your own private YouTube in your company’s colors to gather your videos and make them available to your audience. A channel to showcase your products to customers or to train and inform your team members, for example. The video portal is protected by an authentication system to restrict access to authorized individuals only.
Analyze Video Performance
Measure the impact of your videos. Track the number of impressions, views, play rate, and top-viewed videos over a given period. But do not settle for view counts alone… Observe exactly how your viewers engage and which parts they watched, skipped, and rewatched.
Businesses are increasingly turning to video for all sorts of use cases. Team members have become much more comfortable with video than they were just a few years ago. But without the right tools, management can quickly become complicated. By centralizing video management in a single, secure platform, you can be confident that you will easily find your content, give access to the right people, and stream it securely.
