As internet usage has increased tremendously, so is video content, scaling every day. A simple example, YouTube! YouTube has more than 2.3 billion users logged in monthly. Another interesting stat says more than 90% of people prefer YouTube in the US alone for the digital video platform.
Here’s the question, the video content is rising by the day; how will it be managed? As an organization, you want your media to be managed, shared and protected from unauthorized access. How will you ensure that? Easy! Through video portals. The definition of Video portals have evolved through time, but in short,
A platform that manages and streams your content with a friendly GUI and user experience.
Video portal solutions are essentially software on the internet that enable you to create your own YouTube, where you can upload and stream videos.
You can not only stream but unleash the full potential of your video with a powerful yet flexible environment. Before we dive into what features does a good video portal has, let’s first look at the advantages.
Advantages of Video Portal
Following are the pros of video portals
- Unified workflows
- Videos are centrally managed and organized
- Can be sorted by a playlist or collection
- Make your video content accessible for the specific audience only
- Add interactivity
And much more within full security and privacy.
Types of Video Portals
Video portals can be used for multiple organizational needs. Video portals are classified into two categories.
External portals
These portals are mainly used for sharing and distribution of content with the public. This means that there is no limitation to sharing that ultimately leads to them being insecure. For instance, your organization uploads a training video only for its employees, but here is the catch, those with the link can view that video. However, if your organization uploads a product demo, it is safe to be watched by anyone.
Advanced paid external video portal solutions will provide you with the capabilities to brand them. This means including your logo, fonts and colors wherever needed. These also do not contain advertisements and also allow you to monetize your content through various plug-ins.
Internal portals
Taking the above scenario, you can easily and securely upload a training video without having to worry about it leaking outside the organization. These are much more secure as compared to external portals because it is focused on internal viewers that are authorized. It can be restricted to organization only or even to a certain group. Advanced video portals provide features such as integrations with your organization’s SSO or IAM system, to define for every video who can view them and who can’t.
What Features Does a Good Video Portal Have?
So, what video portal to choose based on the features and your organizational needs? Let’s have a look at it. A video portal such as YouTube can be simple and not that effective based on the business requirements. You need to see if it provides advanced features such as uploading, streaming live and on-demand videos, content library, webcasting and various integration for a seamless playback experience.
If you look at Panopto, their video portal does provide various features listed above and more. While Panopto is majorly focused on education, it falls short in external streaming capabilities. We got to have a platform for every use case, and that can cater to all audiences.
Let’s take VIDIZMO, a Gartner-recognized video hosting and streaming platform. This is for every use case, be it employee training, product demos or even brand awareness video for internal and external audiences.
Multi-tenancy
They have one system for different portals. You can manage your videos of various departments within one platform. For example, you have Videos of onboarding and training under the HR department and have a marketing strategy video under the content department. Rather than having a separate platform, VIDIZMO’s as a multitenant solution manages multiple autonomous portals in n effective way.
Video Content Library
Another thing to keep an eye out for is the content library. Panopto provides a content library to manage your video content, but as for VIDIZMO, it provides much more. The extensive features of a video library in terms of the latter include organizing in playlist, collection, and categories. You can search within the video library, narrow it down via custom fields, moderate and remove spam videos and much more. All within a single platform.
Summing it up
Apart from these two major features, analytics, live streaming, branding and integration also play a vital role in determining the right video portal. Having a video portal that can manage the upscaling of video content as well as swiftly manage and organize them with good security is the one to opt for.