Online video content is a powerful tool for businesses for training, internal communication, product releases and demos, advertising, sales pitches, and much more.
Is your business ready to start creating online content? If so, you need to find an enterprise video platform to host your content.
But what features do you need for an enterprise video platform? We are here to help you learn about video platform features that will benefit your business so you know what features to look for when choosing the best posting platform for your business.
In this article, we’ll review the essential features of an enterprise video platform as well as compare the top 12 video CMS software systems on the market for enterprises and consumers. Here are the specifics of what we’ll be covering:
When it comes to live streaming video content, it pays to do your homework and weigh the pros and cons of each enterprise and consumer-grade video solution, and that’s why we’re here to help.
While you may be wondering “what is the best video platform” now, by the end of the article, you’ll have your answer and a lot of helpful information about enterprise video sharing.
We will help you choose the best enterprise video streaming solution for your business needs.
Let’s get started!
Enterprise Platforms vs. Consumer-Grade OVPs
Have you ever used or watched content on YouTube Live, Instagram Live, or Facebook Live? If so, then you have used one of the three major consumer-grade online video platforms (OVPs). These are the biggest platforms for consumers; there are many smaller consumer-grade OVPs as well.
What makes these platforms consumer-grade is they are free for people to use, and they are designed for the masses. They are social media platforms with content-sharing capabilities.
The biggest advantage of consumer-grade OVPs is that millions of people use them, and they can be a good way to connect with your audience on platforms they already use. Additionally, consumer-grade OVPs have a low barrier to entry, meaning you can get started with video creation and hosting on them with ease. It’s also a great way to give your video content the reach it deserves online. However, for businesses, there are some major drawbacks to using consumer-grade OVPs as the sole source for your video hosting, including:
Content restrictions: All consumer-grade OVPs have content restrictions and rules you have to follow. If they find that your content violates these rules, they can take it down. You often have little recourse when it comes to appealing content take-downs on free platforms.
Lack of monetization: Many free consumer-grade platforms have limited or no direct monetization methods. Others, like YouTube, run advertisements on content and allow you to apply to their monetization program, but only if you meet specific requirements. So, you can primarily use these consumer-grade platforms for increasing online delivery of your content, but nothing more.
Outside branding: When you share content on a free consumer-grade platform, your branding isn’t going to be central or even included outside of what is contained in the content of your video.
No simulcasting: When working directly with consumer-grade OVPs, you can’t multistream or simulcast to other social media platforms and sites at the same time. Some allow you to embed links in other places, but you don’t have access to simulcasting software.
Lack of customization: With a consumer-grade OVP, you cannot customize the video player and don’t have API access. You get what you get and can’t customize the video player or how you use it. In most cases, there’s no way to add your branding to the player on consumer-grade OVPs. You can deliver your videos online and brand them, but not the player itself.
Those are a few of the reasons why working with a consumer-grade OVP isn’t the best for businesses that want to use video for a specific purpose, such as internal training, marketing, or sales pitches.
However, consumer-grade OVPs work out very well for creators and influencers. Even businesses can use them in collaboration with enterprise-grade video platforms to increase the online reach of their content and enhance the delivery.
The distinct advantage of publishing some of your content on consumer-grade OVPs is that you can access their vast audience base and use it to attract users to your own video platform.
When you work with business-to-consumer video hosting platforms, you lose control and rights to your material, which is why you should use a private enterprise video hosting service platform.
A few other drawbacks of working with a business-to-consumer video hosting platform include:
Limited security functionality, meaning piracy can be a problem
Indiscriminate advertising with little to no control over ads associated with your content
Lack of technical support
Overly sensitive copyright protection mechanisms that may find false positives and take video offline
Suggestions that may drive viewers to unrelated content, competitors, or critiques
Public comments and likes can serve as a place for naysayers and disgruntled individuals to make unpleasant comments.
As an enterprise, you may wonder: what’s the solution to these problems? Simply put – why not opt to use a powerful enterprise video platform instead? An enterprise video platform provides all the enterprise-grade features you need for successful operations and none of the above mentioned concerns.
An enterprise video platform goes by many names, including: live streaming and video hosting platform, video content management (CMS) system, and video streaming service. All of these names refer to the same type of platform.
An enterprise video platform is a video streaming service that is designed to fit the needs of larger clients. They are full of features that help you better manage, protect, promote, and share your content in order to meet your business goals.
To help you out, we have identified 5 key features that an enterprise video platform should offer.
Powerful CDN for streamlined global delivery
Secure video delivery
Multi-level access for user management
APIs for integration and development
A white-label platform for branding
Video access control
These five features are designed to support large enterprises video hosting and streaming needs. Each feature helps solve a problem that an enterprise or organization is facing.
We are going to dive into deep detail on each of these five points, so you fully understand what they mean and why these features matter in regards to video content delivery.
1. Powerful CDN For Streamlined Global Delivery
CDN stands for Content Delivery Network. A CDN is a distribution model that makes the delivery of multimedia internet content faster and more reliable for a global audience. Any digital asset (such as a video or stream) that reaches viewers by CDN is copied in real-time.
From there, these copies reach a network of hundreds or thousands of servers in different geographic locations. When users seek to access your content, the CDN or multi-CDN solutions redirect them to the servers closest to them.
Not only do multi-CDN solutions help bring content to viewers faster, but they also provide enterprises and organizations with better streams that help bring back viewers time and time again. Powerful CDNs are a top feature to look for in an enterprise video solution.
Before you zero in on a video streaming platform for your enterprise, it’s essential to check if the CDNs they’re using are optimized for video delivery. The CDNs must also be distributed well geographically to ensure that the content reaches your viewers quickly. This is especially important as many video platform’s aren’t capable of delivering video inside China.
Reduce latency and buffering with a live streaming CDN
In this way, the toll on expensive hardware is balanced across many different machines. In addition, a CDN minimizes latency—the time between when you start to live stream and when the stream plays on your viewer’s device. And buffering and packet loss are also kept to a minimum. Meanwhile, security increases, and bottlenecks disappear.
If your servers are attacked using common hacker methods like DDoS, the content will still remain online. In other words, redundancy is automatic with a live streaming CDN.
Scale up your video with a top-tier CDN
Most importantly, access to a CDN allows you to “scale up” your video. The CDN approach lets enterprises handle anywhere from one hundred to one million concurrent viewers. These figures are especially accurate if you’re using a top-tier CDN like Akamai. Akamai has a network of more than 230,000 servers worldwide. This high “point-of-presence” means that the Akamai CDN is within a single network hop of more than 85% of all internet users.
With a professional live streaming CDN, enterprises and organizations alike can save money by offshoring the construction, maintenance, and upgrading of the network to another business. This IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) model is highly preferable for most businesses. In particular, this model eliminates the need to roll out a live streaming server and an entirely new division to significantly invest in.
The takeaway? A high-quality enterprise video platform should use a top-tier CDN to ensure a global content delivery experience. A top-tier CDN will help get content to your viewers in a timely manner.
2. Secure Video Delivery
Next up is professional enterprise video platform privacy and security. As you likely know, corporate users often deal with information of a sensitive nature. This sensitive content could include:
Medical records
Valuable intellectual property
Information related to lawsuits
Financial records and bank or credit card account information
Business plans, contract data, and confidential trade secrets
Classified or sensitive research data
Passwords, biometric data, or signatures
Social security numbers and other personal data, such as addresses and contact information
Training and information on innovative practices for competitive advantage
These are just a few of the many categories of sensitive information that businesses, as well as organizations, want to protect. Enterprise video solutions should also provide a variety of tools for securing video in their network. These tools can include the following:
Password protection
Enterprises can restrict access to video content in a variety of ways. One of the most basic methods is password-protected streaming. This feature allows only users who enter a specific password or passphrase to access a given video recording or live stream. All enterprise video platforms should offer this basic security feature.
Geographic and domain restrictions
Restrictions are tools that narrow down the pool of internet users who can access your content. The geographic restriction allows you to “whitelist” select nations. Only users who are located in these countries (as determined by their IP address) can access video content.
Domain restrictions take a similar approach but instead limit video embedding based on a domain name. For example, you could restrict your videos to only play on the Dacast.com domain name.
Let’s say that pirates or other malicious actors are able to access the raw URL for your live video stream. With domain restrictions, however, they can’t embed streaming content on other sites or access it via desktop players.
Geographic and domain restrictions are important security features for video distribution platforms to offer.
Payment security and HTTPS encryption
Finally, if you intend to monetize your videos in any way, payment security is a critical part of your enterprise video strategy. Make sure that your OVP includes payment security features. Bank-grade SSL encryption should also be standard practice here.
General HLS encryption is another layer of security for your video-on-demand and streams. HTTP Live Streaming security ensures data integrity, protects against many forms of eavesdropping, and thwarts man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks. These security features should be a part of any enterprise video platform worth your money.
While we mention the need for a secure online video platform, we want to showcase twelve popular enterprise video platform options in the industry. After the five features are discussed in this article, we’re going into a comparison of the different video CMS platforms available.
We’re giving you this heads up to make sure that you scroll to the bottom of the article to read through the comparison of features, pros and cons, and pricing.
The takeaway? Choose a video CMS enterprise software or the best enterprise video platform that offers multiple security and privacy features to secure video on your business’s network.
3. Multi-level Access for User Management
Video CMS platforms often have to manage access credentials for a wide range of users. Some employees may have unrestricted access, while others are only able to access certain content. On the other hand, some may need extended access without access to certain features.
These tiered access options reduce the risk of accidentally causing problems behind the scenes and for your viewers as well. Therefore, an enterprise video platform should offer some sort of feature for multi-user management.
This ensures that only those users in your enterprise who are supposed to access the content or features will be able to. The rest will need to request access to it separately.
Dacast’s streaming solutions, for example, allow your enterprise to restrict specific users while giving certain users permissions to access:
Video-on-demand
Package management
Playlist management
Analytics
Account details
Preferences
The takeaway? Look for an enterprise video platform that offers multi-level access features that fit your business needs. That way, you can have multiple members of your team working on your videos.
4. APIs for Integration and Development
Enterprise video platform users often require custom-built applications and integrations for streamlined operations. This is enabled by video streaming APIs or Application Programming Interfaces. Make sure to choose a well-documented API, with clear code samples and sandbox.
APIs enable some excellent capabilities, such as becoming a video platform reseller, creating custom video portals, and building apps around your streaming or on-demand video content. APIs also ease integration with databases of all sorts and allow for custom development.
The takeaway? When selecting an enterprise video platform, make sure that a full-featured live video API is available and functional.
5. White-label Platform for Branding Put your brand in your video content. When you use an enterprise video platform, you have the ability to add your own brand to every video you stream.
Last but not least, a white-label service is a major key feature to look for in a video CMS platform. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, white-label refers to non-branded services. For an enterprise video platform, white-label service allows you to deliver video content completely free of outside branding.
You can then easily insert your own branding. Having your own branding available on the video allows new viewers to learn about your company or organization when the video is shared online.
This feature contrasts sharply with free platforms like YouTube or Facebook. These B2C platforms insert the logo of the respective host service on every single video—whether embedded or native.
The takeaway? White-label service is essential for corporate users who seek to maintain a highly professional, coherent appearance at all times. Any enterprise video solution you work with should offer white-label services.
This way, both your video and the player itself will have your business branding. It can help you appear more professional. At the same time, it can aid in boosting your brand awareness much more effectively than consumer-grade OVPs that are widely used by everyone.
Comparison of the 12 Best Enterprise Video Platforms in 2023
Now it’s time to compare the top 12 enterprise video streaming platforms. In this section, we’ll compare the following:
Overview and Company History
Basic Functionality
Key Features
Detailed Features
Pros and Cons
Pricing
Let’s dive into the comparison.
1. Brightcove Overview and Company History:
Brightcove is a Boston-based software company that produces an online video platform. It was founded in 2004 by Jeremy Allaire and Bob Mason. The company was named after a harbor the founder liked to kayak in. Brightcove recently acquired Ooyala and announced the end of life of the Ooyala video platform itself.
Basic Functionality:
Brightcove is an online video platform that targets large businesses. Brightcove divides its product offerings into several discrete categories. These include Video Player, OTT Flow, Video Marketing Suite, and a number of others. Among other offerings, Brightcove’s streaming and hosting platform is called Video Cloud. This platform includes an all-screen player and..