In order to attract the interest of a wide range of people both inside and outside the company and deliver information, “video” is an essential tool for corporate activities.
However, video content is now all around us. Simply distributing it blindly will not win you an audience. There are a number of issues that need to be resolved in order to achieve a video strategy that does not become outdated.
## The latest issues in business video
The following are some of the issues that arise in the modern video usage scene.
### Changes in people’s viewing habits
There is a wide variety of viewing devices, including PCs, smartphones, and connected TVs. Viewers want to be able to watch personalized content on the device they want to use, when they want to watch it.
### It is difficult to provide the viewing experience you want
On video sharing platforms such as YouTube, it is easy to expand your reach, but it is not possible to arrange the viewing experience. Your own content may be displayed alongside that of your competitors, or unrelated advertisements may be displayed.
### Content that is scattered in various locations
There are many places where you can upload videos, such as employee portal sites, public web pages, and social networking services. The more places you upload to, the more difficult it becomes to organize your content assets. As a result, you cannot maximize the ROI of the videos you have created.
These issues can be solved by using a proprietary video distribution platform.
A proprietary platform is a system that allows user companies to use the video distribution functions of the platform as if they were part of their own system. Although it is a paid service, it has the advantage of being able to be operated with far greater flexibility than a video sharing platform.
## What can a proprietary platform do?
### A viewing experience like Netflix or Amazon Prime Video
If you use a video distribution platform that is exclusive to your company, you can create a video player that is customized to your company.
You can also set things like video ratings and watching videos at double speed. There is also a function that allows you to play videos that you have paused on another device from where you left off, so you can provide an experience that is similar to the streaming services that your viewers are used to.
In addition to playback in a browser, you can also develop smartphone apps and connected TV apps. Brightcove provides a variety of APIs and SDKs, and also has a comprehensive support system.
### Controlling the Viewing Experience
The advantage of a company-specific platform is that you can control how you want to present your content to viewers.
Since you are paying for the platform, there is no need to distribute irrelevant advertisements.
You can also design interactive video players. For example, adding a quiz (survey) to video content can encourage active viewing. This is also effective for training videos for employees.
### Centralized Content Management
Where do you store your video files? How do you manage the meta information such as copyright information and the period during which they can be published? As the amount of video content you manage in-house increases, this kind of organization and management becomes extremely important.
With Brightcove’s Video Cloud, you can use your entire video library as a CMS (Content Management System). By uploading video files, you can distribute them to social networking services such as Twitter and Facebook, as well as YouTube, etc., in one go. Of course, it’s also easy to publish them on websites and blogs using embedding codes. You can also make them private or unlisted on the CMS, making it perfect for central management of video files.
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## More features for business use
In addition to the above, there are many features unique to business use in the enterprise-only video distribution platform designed with business use in mind.
### Advanced analysis of viewing data
In addition to basic data such as the number of viewers and viewing devices, it is also possible to measure things like the timing of viewing drop-offs, the number of new viewers, and the number of unique viewers. As a feature unique to enterprise-only platforms, there is also the advantage that it is easy to link with access analysis data from websites operated by your company. It is possible to perform advanced analysis, such as which part of the activity history of people who visit your website is when they watch videos, and what kind of changes there are in the conversion of people who watch videos.
### Monetizing content
In addition to not displaying irrelevant advertisements, you can also consider monetizing your own company. It is possible to insert your own pre-roll and overlay advertisements into video content. Brightcove uses a server-side ad insertion tool (SSAI) to ensure more reliable ad content delivery.
### Extensive support system
When using a tool as part of your business activities, it is of course very important that the service is reliable. It is only when there is a support system in place, such as a training program at the time of introduction and a full customer service, that you can use it with peace of mind.
For important live streaming events, you can also request support from dedicated engineers. In order to ensure that streaming does not cut out and cause problems for event management, it is definitely a good idea to use a dedicated live streaming service.
## Let’s use different video distribution platforms
Up to this point, we have mainly been talking about the advantages of company-exclusive platforms, but there are also many advantages to video sharing platforms such as YouTube.
YouTube is sometimes suitable for starting from scratch, as it is free to use and has a much higher potential for spreading your content.
Not using SNS or YouTube at all, and only distributing videos on your company’s website, is also insufficient in terms of effectively utilizing your video assets.
In fact, Japanese TV stations and Abema TV, etc. are partially releasing content on YouTube and directing it to their own platforms. In addition, it is expected that the number of cases where a boom is ignited from short videos such as TikTok will continue to increase in the future.
Using videos for business means enriching diverse customer contact points. It is necessary to use video distribution platforms appropriately without sticking to a single method.
