Every second, a million minutes of video are shared. There is no doubt that video has taken over the world by storm. It is an ever-expanding part of our everyday life, both personal and professional. And why not? This rich media asset provides us with a much more engaging communication experience. It proved to be a lifesaver for businesses when the pandemic arrived through remote working technologies like video conferencing applications.
Video Content Management System (CMS) is one such technology that companies are rapidly adopting to automate the management of their seemingly exploding pile of video assets at hand.
If you are here, you must be wondering what exactly is a Video CMS (video content management system). Let us explore it and share with you why your business must adopt one.
What is a Video CMS?
Short for “video content management system”, a Video CMS is a platform that allows your organization to stream live and on-demand videos as well as facilitate the management of your ever-growing pile of videos.
Video content management encompasses everything from video storage and processing to playback and sharing. It includes multitudes of functionalities, including encoding, transcoding, security, access management, content organization, searchability, analytics, sharing, and much more.
These capabilities are much more critical for large-scale enterprise use cases. Gartner sums up well that enterprise video content management supports simplifies, and automates the management of one-to-any, live, or on-demand video content delivery.
Why Buy a Video CMS?
Wouldn’t you like to have all your videos in one place, organized in an easy-to-navigate YouTube-like video library with top-notch security measures in place? This can be your Single Source of Truth, ensuring that your team members are never lost while searching for a particular video.
It could be an organized video archive or your knowledge hub promoting an organization-wide learning culture while preserving your internal knowledge for eternity. Video has so much under-utilized potential. It can pretty much allow you to connect globally with your distributed workforces, employees that may be operating in different time zones.
Video brings in a human touch to your internal communication and makes your learning initiatives more effective and engaging. It is also a handy tool for external marketing, sales enablement, as well as a useful investor and public relations tool.
Must-Have Features of an Efficient Video CMS
As with any other type of product, there is a variety of Video CMS out there. They might seemingly look the same but are drastically different in terms of their offering. Some are designed to only cater to external audiences. Some offer only private, internal streaming. While some cater to both audiences with end-to-end video management capabilities.
The difference also lies in the fact that some Video CMS only provide surface-level basic video management capabilities. However, businesses with consistent video load require an efficient Video CMS with AI-powered advanced video management capabilities.
Let us go over some critical features that you should have in your Video CMS:
Automatic Transcoding
HD video experience is expected in most video use cases. No one likes to watch grainy footage that is buffering every two seconds. Viewers will not even tolerate it for a minute.
Even worse is a situation where your video is not optimized for mobile viewing or is not supported on a certain type of browser.
Your Video CMS must have automatic transcoding capabilities to create multiple renditions of your videos (different resolution levels and formats). These need to be utilized to support multi-bitrate streaming. Efficient Video CMS goes one step further by providing Adaptive Bitrate Streaming (ABR), allowing end users’ playback quality to be automatically adjusted based on their bandwidth conditions. They basically are able to view the video at the best quality possible without the video constantly buffering.
All this ensures that your videos’ playback is supported on all devices and browsers, and are playable under varying bandwidth conditions.
Flexible Deployment Options
Some Video CMS only provide their simple video platform as a ready-made SaaS application. These are not customizable and lack a variety of critical video management capabilities. They are also drastically limited in terms of their compliance coverage and security offering.
It is best to opt for a Video CMS with flexible deployment options that can include deployment on-premise, in the cloud, in a hybrid environment, or as a SaaS application. Opt for a solution that is customizable based on your unique needs. It is a must to have a scalable solution as video needs are ever-changing.
Robust Security
Video used for corporate communications, knowledge management, or training & learning contains a ton of private and confidential information that must be restricted to a limited audience. Leakage can prove to be highly hazardous for your business.
Your Video CMS should have advanced security features, some of which include:
- Single sign-on integration for user authentication
- Content protection through end-to-end encryption and DRM support
- Domain, IP, and location restriction to limit certain types of audiences, even in external streaming
- Options to password protect individual videos and block their downloads
- Limited sharing options to securely share your videos with certain external individuals for a limited time and with limited views available
- Role-based access control to limit what video action different types of user roles can perform. Some can be admins, some can moderate content, and some need to just remain viewers.
- Content segregation restricts content to certain user groups as your entire organization does not require access to every video.
Wide Compliance Coverage
If you are operating in a highly regulated industry like healthcare or if you want to operate in a regulated economy like Europe, then you must be well aware of the struggle of meeting these stringent compliances.
Be highly vigilant in choosing a solution that has wide compliance coverage, with features like:
- Audit logs
- Custom security policies
- Anonymous user policy
- Custom retention period
- Option to host or store your videos in the region of your choice
Automatic Transcription with Translation
Videos these days need to be accessible to audiences globally. Hence, opt for a Video CMS that supports automatic transcription and translation of your videos in multiple languages.
Extensive Search and Discovery Capabilities
Video CMS must have advanced video organization capabilities, automated with the help of AI-powered video indexing capabilities.
Automatic tags can be generated for all your videos with the help of AI-generate transcripts. These could be used for filtered search. Video CMS also allows you to manually optimize your video’s metadata, organize them in playlists and categories and feature them on the home page.
Advanced Video CMS goes one step further to allow you to use AI to search within videos.
Out-of-the-box and Custom Integrations
These days technologies that operate in a silo are left behind. Opt for a Video CMS that can integrate your business and IT systems. These can include your video conferencing solutions (like Zoom or MS Teams), LMS, CMS, tracking applications, etc. Plus, having support to opt for custom integrations is critical as each business has unique requirements.
Detailed Analytics
Video has a ton of data that efficient Video CMS can collect and present in terms of a variety of metrics and easy-to-understand dashboards. Businesses use this to track course completion, understand their audience behavior, ensure a smooth viewing experience.
Conclusion
Video CMS is the need of the hour for organizations to keep up with the time and progress ahead. Be sure to conduct an internal content audit to know how much content you have, future requirements, storage needs, use cases, and other relevant details. Use this research to choose a Video CMS wisely, staying one step ahead of your competitors.
