Learning and Development

When Not To Use YouTube or Vimeo For Sharing Videos

August 1, 2022

Today’s businesses are increasingly using video to share all types of internal and external information. For organizations of virtually all sizes, video is fast becoming the preferred medium for delivering employee training, live streamed events, product demonstrations, executive communications, and financial reports, to name just a few examples.

But as more and more companies are taking advantage of producing videos that support the business, many still don’t have a good system for securely sharing these videos for easy on-demand viewing.

YouTube and Vimeo are often the first video platforms that professionals look to for sharing video content. And there are certainly a few reasons why YouTube or Vimeo could be a reasonable place to start:

They’re free.
Employees are already accustomed to going to these sites for video content.
You don’t have to worry about hosting and streaming videos on your own IT networks.
They’re perfect for getting your public-facing videos in front of more people.

Free video platforms, however, are far from ideal for the vast majority of work-related video content most employees are sharing. After all, you wouldn’t trust YouTube to keep a video that held your personal credit card information — likewise, it is unwise to upload anything to a public video sharing site which may contain confidential or proprietary information that you don’t want seeping out to the general public.

Employee training videos, for example, probably shouldn’t be hosted and shared on YouTube, even privately.

When “Private” Isn’t Secure Enough

A quick search of YouTube for “internal meeting” returns a remarkable 883,000 results. Even if we assume that 95% of those are fairly benign, that would still leave some 44,000 videos that likely weren’t intended to be findable. One would hope that nothing confidential from your own company has been shared publicly, but the very real possibility should give every business pause.

“Undiscoverable” is all-too discoverable

Let’s say for example, you upload recordings of your daily scrum meetings to Vimeo and make them undiscoverable (so they won’t show up publicly in search). This setting lets you share a link to the video with people within your organization. If that link were to be inadvertently shared with someone outside of your company, though, that sensitive content would be easily accessible. Time and again, “undiscoverable” videos are accidentally shared due to simple oversight — one might be included in a long email chain that sees new recipients added along the way, or mistakenly pasted into a social network post.

Password protection and viewer permissions create new problems

You could, alternatively, make your video only visible to certain people by adding their email addresses within the privacy settings on YouTube (or set up password-protected access in Vimeo, since you can’t password protect YouTube videos), but doing so could make that video content difficult to share with more than just a few people in your company. It also opens up a different version of the same problem: anyone who wants to access private company videos on YouTube or Vimeo would then need to be given permission to view, and those permissions can just as easily be accidentally shared. When well executed, this strategy is more secure than simply providing an “undiscoverable” link, but it still doesn’t scale easily for larger teams or companies.

The terms of use aren’t on your side

Another privacy concern for companies currently or considering using YouTube or Vimeo for hosting business videos is the sites’ Terms of Use.

Both of these free video sharing sites require that you give them royalty-free license and right to copy when you upload your videos. This means that, legally, you do not have complete control over the video content your store on these sites. Generally, videos marked private will remain private, but the terms of service may make your business legally vulnerable or non-compliant with regulations depending on your industry.

You can read the full YouTube terms of service here, and the Vimeo terms of service here.

Other Reasons Not To Share Your Corporate Videos on YouTube or Vimeo

Privacy concerns aside, there are other reasons free online video sharing platforms may not be the best solution for business videos — both public-facing and internal videos.

YouTube is full of advertising. Whether someone is watching a video on YouTube or in an embedded player on one of your sites, they will most likely see a pre-roll ad or other promotional video content through YouTube that can distract from video training, executive communications, and other corporate videos.
They both lack options for branding and customization. Both YouTube and Vimeo only give you limited options for branding and customizing your video channels and players. This can impact the viewer’s experience, particularly if they feel like they’ve left your company sites.
Their video analytics don’t tell you enough. YouTube does offer video analytics, but it lacks user-level data that isn’t anonymous and it doesn’t provide enough data about engagement.
They lack customer support. Vimeo does offer support with their paid packages, which can be helpful for teams that lack video expertise. Good luck getting a response from anyone at YouTube, though.

So if YouTube and Vimeo aren’t the best video sharing platforms for businesses, what is?

There’s A Better Video Sharing Alternative To YouTube And Vimeo for Businesses

Enterprise video platforms (sometimes called “Corporate YouTubes”) were designed to support organizations that want to use video to improve learning, communications, and more, by offering a secure enterprise-focused alternative to consumer-facing platforms like YouTube or Vimeo.

What is an enterprise video platform?

An enterprise video platform enables professionals to record, manage, stream, and share both internal and external corporate videos. Enterprise video platforms include features to help create, edit and caption robust video presentations and video messages. They also include a searchable video content management system (video CMS) that makes video content easier for the right people to find and play on-demand. A video platform can be hosted securely in the cloud online, or on-premises.

Why is an enterprise video platform better for sharing videos at work?

There are a number of reasons an enterprise video platform is often the best solution for businesses looking to host and share internal on-demand videos. Of course, not all video platforms have the same abilities. Panopto is one of the industry’s leading video platforms, designed to give your business a private video hosting and sharing solution that’s as easy for employees to use as YouTube or Vimeo. And here’s why Panopto’s video platform, specifically, is one of the best solutions for hosting and sharing corporate videos:

It’s more secure. With a video platform, you are in control of your video content. Make videos public or private, individually or at the folder level for easier management. Private videos in Panopto require a viewers to login, keeping your videos secure and making it easy to manage viewing permissions.

It integrates with your existing business systems. Panopto’s video platform can integrate with single sign-on (SSO) ID management solutions like Google Apps, oAuth, and Active Directory, so your employees can log in to view videos with the same credentials they already use at work. Panopto also extends the video capabilities of the systems you currently use for learning and communicating, such as your LMS, Zoom, Webex Meetings, Slack, and other UC solutions.

It makes video content easier to find. Panopto’s innovative Smart Search technology takes video search to the next level. In Panopto, you can search not only the names of your videos, but also find any word spoken or shown on the screen inside the video.