The enterprise video market has exploded in recent years, with growth projected to more than double by 2022. Analysts attribute this trend largely to knowledge management (KM), learning & development (L&D), and HR professionals who continue to find new applications for video that support training, knowledge sharing, and collaboration.

With so many different video tools on the market, each with its own unique set of capabilities — from web conferencing to eLearning authoring software to video content management — you probably have a lot of questions about which video tools are right for your organization.

In many cases, an end-to-end video platform will provide all of the features you need to better utilize video throughout your business. Recording, editing, hosting, streaming and searching video content is all made easy with a video platform designed for enterprise businesses. Create videos anywhere and access your videos, from any device, on-demand.

There are some uses for video in business, however, that may require different kinds of technology. And in most cases, having a video platform that works together with other tools will give you the greatest range of flexibility when it comes to putting video to work for your company.

Since every organization’s needs are different, we’ve summarized the top reasons to buy and reasons not to buy a video platform, which should help steer you in the right direction, depending on your business’ specific needs.

10 Reasons You Should Buy a Video Platform

1. You Need Secure Hosting For Corporate Videos

If your organization is like most, you’ve been using video in a multitude of ways for a while to help your business and employees succeed. And you’ve probably found creative ways to host and share videos within your organization. What you may not know is that a video platform does this for you — it makes managing video content easy. The video content management system (video CMS) that lives within your video platform lets you upload existing corporate video content to a secure, centralized video library, organize and manage access to videos, and playback optimized HD video content on any device.

2. You Need A Searchable Video Library

With all of its benefits, there is one thing when it comes to video that might make it seem inferior to text-based content: searchability. You’re probably used to hunting and pecking through a video to find the exact spot that something you want to revisit is discussed. Even finding a video in a regular content management system (CMS) or LAN can be a challenge.

Panopto’s video platform has revolutionized video search.

Panopto lets you search not only the video titles and descriptions in your library but also any words spoken or shown within the video content (we call it inside video search). Another search feature, called Open Search, lets you search your Panopto video library from your LMS, CMS and more.

3. You Need To Make Knowledge Sharing Easier

A video platform lets anyone in your organization record, edit, upload, share, and search video. Far faster than creating written documentation, capturing video-based tutorials, demonstrations, and other expert knowledge is as easy as clicking “record.” And when your video recordings are searchable in the cloud, you can begin to break down barriers to social learning across departments and across continents.

4. You Need To Improve The Employee Onboarding Experience

With a video platform, you can easily create employee training videos that introduce key company policies, communicate corporate culture, serve up quick-start job skills training, and more. Updating onboarding videos is simple, too — simply record over sections that need to change with your platform’s video editing tools or record a new video when older videos become outdated. Using video to support onboarding can help you establish a more consistent experience across your entire company, and give new-hires a flexible option that makes it easier to absorb and revisit important knowledge as they get up to speed.

5. You Need To Make Employee Training Scalable

A video platform can help you transition formal employee training from the classroom to the cloud. It provides the tools instructors need to teach in a virtual environment, and makes training content easy to find and watch again after the training is done. You’ll reduce your training costs — by 50-70% according to analyst estimates — while making employee training more accessible to all employees in your company.

6. You Need To Make Executive Communications More Engaging

Most companies today are experimenting with new ways to deliver important executive communications that unite employees and engage them in the business — and every organization has its own approach to company town halls or all-hands meetings. The challenge for many large companies is getting everyone in the room with senior leadership, or at least making them feel like they are there in the room.

An enterprise video platform makes it easy to live stream the experience of an executive town hall meeting in a way that web conferencing tools do not. You can show your audience the presenters, their slides, multimedia such as videos and music, as well as multiple camera and audio feeds that can capture the audience when it’s time for Q&A. You can stream the experience live to thousands of people online, securely. And you’ll have a recording to share with those who couldn’t attend live when the meeting is over.

7. You Need To Record And Share Internal Meetings

There are many reasons you might want to record and share internal business meetings, including working around scheduling conflicts and having the ability to reference meeting conversations later. Web conferencing tools like WebEx are capable of recording your meetings, but they don’t give you options for privately hosting and sharing your meeting recordings like a video platform does.

8. You Need To Stream Live Corporate Events

A video platform will let you take control over producing videos of live corporate events, without the need to hire expensive third-party companies. With simple multi-camera recording tools, distributed recording options, and one-click live streaming features, a video platform can help your business live stream professional-quality keynote or conference videos at a fraction of the cost.

9. You Need To Arm Your Sales Team With The Best Information Possible

There are numerous ways sales teams can use video tools to create a competitive advantage, and one of the most popular use cases for video is product training. There’s no better way to show and tell the newest features of a product than through video demonstrations and walkthroughs. Not only do product training videos offer salespeople an engaging, detailed view of the product, but a video platform lets busy sales reps watch training videos in the cloud at any time, from any location, on both desktop and mobile devices.

10. Your Mobile Fleet Needs Access To Troubleshooting Videos On-Demand

More and more businesses with mobile fleets are using technology to change the way they service customers in the field. Flipping through training manuals is a thing of the past — it’s much easier and faster for a service technician in the field to search troubleshooting content in the cloud and watch a video, or a section of a video that shows how to fix a problem. A video platform can let your service reps search your video library from their mobile devices. This means they can find solutions quickly, jump straight to the part of the video that addresses the issue, and play the video in full HD to see what they need to do — all from the field.

 

Reasons You Should Not Buy a Video Platform

If you’re trying to leverage video to make knowledge more ubiquitous and communication easier throughout your organization, nine times out of ten an enterprise video platform is the tool you need. There are other tools that may be a better fit for your company, though, if you need any of the following:

You Need To Support Real-Time Interactive Two-Way Communications

A video platform streams asynchronous video and is not ideal for real-time two-way video communications because of the slight delay even in live broadcasts. What you actually need is a synchronous video conferencing tool, such as Skype For Business, WebEx, Zoom, or GoToMeeting. Because video platforms and video conferencing tools do different things, most large businesses find that they need both.

You Need To Create Fully Interactive eLearning Videos and Assessments

When it comes to creating video-based training or eLearning materials a video platform will usually do everything you need it to do, while giving you some elements of interactivity. eLearning authoring tools, however, are better suited for creating fully interactive training videos and assessments. If you need to create more intensive training for software simulations and guided product demos, eLearning authoring tools like Adobe Captivate or Lectora Inspire will have more interactive capabilities.

You Only Want To Host and Share Video Publicly

This would be an unusual scenario for internal training and knowledge sharing, but not for marketing videos and public-facing corporate communications. If most of your video content will be public-facing then YouTube is really your best option for hosting and sharing video content. Again, most businesses use both a public-facing YouTube channel to share video content and a video platform for hosting and sharing internal video content securely.

You Need To Manage Non-Video-Based Knowledge Documents

For many businesses, a majority of knowledge lives in text-based documents like Word or PowerPoint, which are much smaller in size compared to video files. If you don’t expect to add much video content to your knowledge library, then a regular content management system (CMS), such as Sharepoint, will suffice in the short term. If you plan to grow your video knowledgebase over time, though, you will eventually need to invest in a CMS designed specifically for video content. 

 

Thinking About Investing In A Video Platform?

Panopto is an industry-leading enterprise video platform designed to help you take advantage of all the benefits video has to offer. See how video can work for you — contact our team today to request a free trial.