Video has been having quite a moment for a few years now. In fact, in the US alone, users watch over 180 million hours of video content on a daily basis; This accounts for 75% of internet users–a number that is projected to grow in the coming decades.
While this medium started out primarily as a function of marketing, enterprise leaders have been clued into all the ways video can help transform other areas of their business for a while now. But while video offers enterprises unparalleled business and communication value compared to other communication delivery avenues, more content can mean more problems, particularly around how you effectively store, share, access, and keep track of assets without them getting lost in an endless stream of online noise and chatter. That’s why savvy business leaders are turning to enterprise video content management systems.
What is an enterprise video content management system?
Simply put, a video content management system is a solution that allows companies to centralize, manage, and deliver content online. And while that functionality sounds simple, it’s more than that.
Typically, organizations will store any files in a program like Dropbox, Sharepoint, Box, Google Drive, or something similar and assume that method will translate effectively for video content. But the reality is that these systems aren’t set up to handle video files, nor do they come equipped with proper the search or discovery functions needed to help your video content get the mileage it should.
To start, if you’re using a traditional enterprise video solution, you’re bound to pretty strict file size restrictions. Sharepoint, for example, only allows uploads of 50 MB or less, a feat easily exceeded by a simple webcam or smartphone video–which makes storing 30-minute all-hands meetings, lengthy town halls, or even short training modules next to impossible.
But what about my LMS?
We’ve written at length about why traditional Learning Management Systems are ill-equipped to handle the needs of the modern enterprise. Not only are these systems plagued by poor user experience, but they’re also traditionally very cumbersome when it comes to uploading new content and making it discoverable. Some don’t even offer native support for video or the ability to access content from mobile devices.
Ok, so I’ll just use a private YouTube (or Vimeo) channel.
We love YouTube just as much as the next person and appreciate the value it offers to marketing and sales teams but, the truth is that, when it comes to effectively managing your internal video content, it’s just not a great solution. Not only are public video networks a real security threat to enterprises, but you also open yourself up to a host of other issues, including:
- Loss of proprietary content: We’ve heard so many horror stories from our customers and beyond about some of the new policies YouTube is implementing, which can lead to loss of your company content and channels being deleted with no notice. When you hand over your videos to a third party, you put all your creations at the mercy of that platform and risk logging in one day only to see everything you’ve put your blood, sweat, and tears into has vanished into thin air.
- No control over what content your videos are paired with: YouTube’s recommendation tool is great for wasting time on the platform but, as we know, sometimes intelligent tools aren’t as smart as we’d like them to be. You have no idea if your videos will be paired up with competitor content, irrelevant information that leads the viewer away, or even videos that are offensive or tasteless.
By implementing an enterprise video solution, you not only get the peace of mind that comes along with retaining control over your content, but you are able to take advantage of advanced security protocols, such as encryption and access controls, to keep sensitive information from prying eyes.
How Else Can a Video Content Management System Benefit Me?
The most basic corporate video portals should enable you to build a repository of files and share those with relevant stakeholders. But the best solutions available on the market today go beyond that, offering features like:
- Support for large files, high-definition, and 4K video: Consider a minute of video can easily put you over the allotted upload size for many commonly used solutions and you’ll understand why this support is critical to growing your enterprise video content library. Further, even if you do have a product in place that can handle larger files, it’s very likely you will spend more time than you want waiting for videos to upload.
- Native video creation tools: Once upon a time, creating video was a time-consuming, expensive process that typically required special equipment and a lot of manpower. But that’s no longer true. With all the technological advances that have been made over the last few years, video tools are more accessible than ever. Most enterprise content management systems have built-in recording tools that let you quickly capture video or screen shares directly from your portal, cutting down on the time it takes to get your content live.
- Automatic closed-captioning and transcription: When it comes to creating videos, the content is only as good as who can access it. That’s why ensuring every word spoken is able to be understood by everyone at your organization, regardless of abilities, it absolutely crucial. A video content management system should be able to process speech to text automatically, at no time cost to you, so your company stays ADA compliant and inclusive.
- Intelligent search: And speaking of speech to text–it’s not enough to just put your videos out there, caption them, and call it a day. Your content needs to be easily discoverable. Consider, for example, that sales reps spend upwards of 43 hours a month looking for the right piece of content to send to a prospect. That’s over 500 hours a year of wasted productivity. If you choose an enterprise video content management solution that has speech to text capabilities, you are not only able to search your video library based on keywords and metadata, but you can also find where any word or phrase was spoken in your content.
- Mobile optimization: Despite living in an increasingly moble-first world, the sad reality is that many legacy systems are not equipped to be accessed from anywhere. Take, for example, WebEx recordings: in their default format, sessions are unable to be viewed on tablets or smartphones when posted to Sharepoint. A corporate video portal will not only be compatible with your team’s mobile browsers, but the best ones will have a dedicated iOS and/or Android app which allows employees can access your video library 24/7. The ability to custom brand this app should also be available so the mobile experience becomes a natural extension of your company.
- Extensive analytics: Most legacy systems only include analytics as an after-thought and the reporting won’t give you deep insights that help you have thoughtful decisions about your video content strategy–if you get any data at all. By choosing an enterprise video content management system for your assets, you can gain insights into datapoints like who is looking at your content, when they are accessing it, how engaged they were with it, for how long, and more. By generating these types of custom usage reports, you’re able to think more critically about the videos you’re creating and provide more value to your organization.
With the right tools in place, video can become a very powerful tool for onboarding, training, and other communication functions at your enterprise. If you’d like to learn more about how CircleHD can help you become a video-first organization, we’d love to chat.