Try these solutions when your company outgrows YouTube
According to the 2011 Enterprise Web Communications
Survey conducted by Interactive Media
Strategies, one-third of all corporations polled said
they produce at least one video per week. Twothirds
of the firms surveyed plan to increase their
video production in the coming year, and the number
of companies with online video budgets of
$500,000 or more increased by 20 percent since
the 2010 survey.
But half-million dollar video budgets also come with
lofty expectations, and posting corporate content on
YouTube and hoping for results is not the strategy to meet
them. In fact, on its own, that’s really not a viable strategy for
a company with any kind of video budget — only for
smaller businesses that have few or no alternatives.
“I think companies should use YouTube for the external
posting of videos, but they should be clear what they are
using it for — promotion and reach,” says Eric Quanstrom,
COO of video solutions provider Sorenson Media. “They
should be using Facebook for the same reasons, but they
should also be prepared for the baggage that comes with
these services such as related videos from competitors and
potentially vitriolic comments.”
The fact that viewers are taken off of a business’ site and
onto YouTube — with its own branding and where potential
customers are more than likely to see content and ads from
other companies in the same industry — can present a significant
issue for big brands. For smaller businesses with limited
video resources, YouTube can be an invaluable solution.
But for the enterprise class, it should remain only a piece of
a much larger puzzle because those companies have additional
options.
“For companies delivering videos on their own website
and building their own video production services departments,
they should absolutely use the right tools for the job,”
says Quanstrom.
So, here is a rundown of three of the top online video
solutions providers that cater to the unique demands of the
enterprise class:
continues below
Video Challenges for the Enterprise
More than a dozen technical issues related to
the implementation of video were identified by
enterprise-class corporations in a 2011 study
conducted by Interactive Media Strategies.
See
them ranked 1 through 13 at Website Magazine.
Sorenson Media
The most recent offering from Quanstrom’s 16-year-old
company is Squeeze 8 professional video encoding, which
has already achieved greater than 70-percent penetration
among Fortune 100 businesses.
The Sorenson 360 video platform and Squeeze Server,
Squeeze 8, 360 OVP and cloud applications are designed
to help enterprise-class corporations simplify their video
production by providing encoding, publishing, review and
approval, as well as storage and archiving tools that accommodate
delivery to any screen including mobile, tablet and
Web TV. Each product also delivers video to DVDs, Blu-Ray,
set-top boxes, videogame consoles and iTunes — as well as
to other syndicates like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.
Pricing for the Sorenson 360 platform runs about $1,000
per month for the enterprise-class package, which includes
2 terabytes of bandwidth, 500 gigabytes of storage, and unlimited
video durations, encoding bitrates and number of
users. Less expensive options include the small business
package for $99 per month, the pro package for $159 per
month, and the pro plus for $499 per month.
Brightcove
Best known as a white label video-distribution platform for
the enterprise class, Brightcove has undergone some significant
transformations since launching in 2005. The company
filed for an initial public offering in August 2011 and
expects to make about $50 million through the IPO, much
of that because of excitement surrounding the newly released
Brightcove App Cloud product for creating and distributing
mobile Web applications to multiple platforms.
But as an alternative distribution platform for enterprise
businesses, Brightcove ranks second only to YouTube with
an average of about 750 million video streams per month,
according to comScore data. The August filing with the U.S.
Securities and Exchange Commission listed 3,300 customers
for Brightcove, most of which are global brands and
media corporations.
Brightcove is often compared to Ooyala (see the Others
to Consider sidebar) in terms of its business video offerings,
which range from customized-usage annual contracts for
the large companies and enterprise-level organizations to a
variety of monthly packages for smaller businesses and
startup websites. The less expensive rates start at $99 per
month for 50 videos, 40 gigabytes of bandwidth for one user
on one account, and go up to $499 per month for 500 videos,
250 GB bandwidth for three users on one account.
The professional and enterprise-level packages can run
into the tens of thousands of dollars for an annual contract.
Vidyard
A brand new player in the space, Vidyard launched in August
2011 to much fanfare and recently secured $1.65 million in
funding to help grow its platform for enterprise-class video
distribution. Its service is similar to that of YouTube but it
eliminates the need for viewers to go to a third-party portal
to watch a company’s video.
“A larger company leveraging YouTube to embed videos
on their site is essentially exposing their viewers to the
YouTube rabbit hole,” says Vidyard CEO Michael Litt. “That is,
ads and related content being promoted by their competitors.
“We work in conjunction with YouTube to ensure that
your video content is published to your YouTube channel in
order to improve both SEO and social discovery,” he adds.
“When you embed a video on your site, it’s a Vidyard player
and the content is served from our servers — we don’t serve
ads and we don’t promote outbound links.”
Vidyard also syndicates with Facebook and Twitter, and
one of its strongest features is a sophisticated suite of analytics
tools that drills down into specific videos and their individual
performances across each channel. Vidyard is trying to
distance itself from other enterprise-class providers with its
pricing, which starts at just $34 per month and maxes out at
about $250 for 100 videos, 10 player skins, 5 users and 100
gigabytes of bandwidth per month.
Perhaps the closest comparison to Vidyard right now
would be the relatively new pro solution from Vimeo, which
provides a less expensive business video-distribution platform
but lacks Vidyard’s analytics muscle as well as some
other features.
“There are currently no other platforms that are actually focused
on the engagement and conversion via video through
business intelligence and the concept of pairing this data with
quality content creation and curation,” explains Litt.