From departmental teams to global organizations, it’s clear that companies are doing more with video. Most, however, are just getting started. The majority of brands, enterprises, and nonprofits are just scratching the surface of video’s potential, using it for basic activities in one or two functional areas.
Throughout our decade of working with innovative video users, we’ve seen four key elements that are common to companies who succeed in doing more with video:
Capabilities to support both internal and external use cases are critical for video to succeed as a broad communications utility. At a minimum, you should look for platforms that include:
Given how quickly video technology is changing, it pays to look beyond a vendor’s current functionality. Examine their track record of innovation over several years, and check out their roadmap of future development plans.
To get the most out of your video investment and promote organizational adoption, creating, managing, and publishing outstanding video experiences must be easy for every user, including non-technical teams. And even more than easy, you want a video solution that helps your functional teams be better at their jobs, whether that’s marketing, sales, customer support, training or anything else. Look for solutions that offer the following:
Templates and wizards help non-technical users create professional, high performing experiences utilizing video-rich portals and web pages. The trick is to find a set of tools that enables business users in any functional area to quickly create great video experiences without coding while at the same time helping video experts streamline many of their day-to-day tasks.
Your customers spend hours every day on social media. But natively publishing to multiple social media channels is time-consuming and error prone. And trying to analyze the results across multiple channels and compare them to your own website is even harder. Streamlining this task can yield a real competitive advantage.
Live streaming is getting a lot of love these days. Simplifying the end-to-end process, from encoding to creating dynamic video destinations before, during, and after the event to capturing and publishing clippings for on-demand use is becoming a mainstream need for both internal and external use.
Analyzing video viewing data to guide decision making should be at the heart of any video strategy. Effective analysis 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 to both a specific vendor’s own analytic tools as well as exportable to major 3rd party analytics packages.
As video becomes a valued communication medium across the entire organization, IT teams are being asked to expand their support and management of this new utility. To help IT succeed in this role, a video platform must provide the following key capabilities:
Companies need to ensure that sensitive video content remains secure and is only seen by intended individuals, be they internal employees or external partners. So,the ability to support single sign on, define IP restrictions, and control permissions at varying levels of granularity is a must-have for virtually all organizations today.
IT teams worry that widespread internal video viewing can put a strain on network performance. In many cases IT has already adopted technical solutions to optimize their networks. Leveraging a company’s existing solutions for enterprise content delivery (eCDN) goes a long way toward addressing this concern.
Your company has invested huge amounts of time, money, and expertise to create a robust technology infrastructure. You need to have your video solution leverage those investments. Vendor-supplied and supported integrations for core systems (e.g. CMS, CRM, Marketing Automation, SSO, analytics, QoS, and more) is an important aspect of making video a manageable utility. So too is the availability of an open, API-rich platform.
Look for a clear service level agreement (SLA). This demonstrates a vendor’s high level of confidence in the robustness and scalability of its solution.
With continual pressure on their resources and budgets, IT teams don’t have the time to troubleshoot and fix less-than-perfect video experiences. They depend on innovation by their chosen solution partner to deliver advances such as optimizing video quality with minimum bandwidth, future-proofing video libraries against format changes, using Quality of Service metrics to prevent or quickly resolve delivery issues, improving player performance, and supporting the explosion of new devices and formats.
Enterprise-class communication utilities require strong, trusted partnerships and shared commitments between an organization and its vendors. Support for video, with its rapid evolution and explosive growth, requires the following elements: