The use of video in the enterprise is proliferating - and it’s not going to slow down any time soon. Back in 2017, Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, said “I see video as a megatrend, on the same order as mobile.”
Zuck was right.
Over half a billion people are now watching video on Facebook every day. And studies predict video will soon account for an unprecedented 82% of all internet traffic in 2020.
The video wave is indeed rising, and will soon grow into a tsunami that will smash through existing content management paradigms — threatening to drown unprepared creative and marketing departments.
What can organizations do to avoid this fate?
At Nuxeo, we’ve been managing huge video libraries for large companies from Hollywood to Madison Avenue for years. We’ve witnessed the video ‘megatrend’ shift from rhetoric to reality, and emerge as one of the most impactful and engaging formats for marketing, media, and advertising.
For example, one high profile global apparel customer is now centering their entire brand marketing strategy around video, with thousands of freelancer and agency partners producing original videos in locations around the world. And there’s the fast-growing travel website that commissions original content combining video, text, photography, and illustration about interesting people, places, and things – all as a way to inspire travelers.
Through this experience, we now know exactly what challenges and pain points enterprises face as they navigate the waters of a fast-changing, video-centric world - and the innovative technology that can be used to overcome them.
To help organizations become equipped to effectively handle the rise of video within the enterprise, here’s some common questions from our customers - along with insights on how our modern digital asset management (DAM) system can help.
How can we manage video alongside other content it’s related to?
Too often, video gets treated differently out of necessity because of the challenges its size and complexity present. The downside is video content (and the teams that produce video content) end up siloed and disconnected from the rest of the organization. If your company is moving toward a more omnichannel marketing approach and/or needs to manage video side by side with other content like documents, image files, 3D models, etc., requiring teams to manage all of this across multiple systems or coordinate production and delivery timetables across siloed teams is a recipe for disaster. You should read our omnichannel best practices here or our Digital Asset Management (DAM) best practices made for product companies.
Instead, make sure you have the Content Services Platform (CSP) backbone that can manage all your content, alongside all the video content and other data that drives your core business processes.
Do I need a dedicated Media Asset Management (MAM) solution?
A question we hear a lot: “Can I use a Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution for managing videos?” If you’re a broadcaster, Hollywood studio, or video production agency, you do need video-centric management tools that can seamlessly connect to editing bays, manage complex time-based processes like logging, and more. That’s MAM.
However, a DAM solution is an ideal tool for enterprises that produce and manage a substantial volume of video content, but that aren’t “in the video business” (movie studios, video production agencies, etc). Modern DAM solutions support video distribution and archiving use cases (discussed earlier), and make video management easier for your entire organization.
How can my distributed teams edit, review, and approve video footage faster?
You can speed up your video content workflows by reducing the frequency of moving large files over and over. The key to this is generating smaller renditions (or proxy files) from a large master file that let teams edit, review, and approve based on streamable file sizes. A modern enterprise DAM for video tool should automatically generate these content transformations, and allow you to configure additional ones to your desired specifications.
Additionally, the best DAMs will connect with video-focused commenting and annotation tools like Frame.io to enable video collaboration by distributed teams.
Finally, proxy-editing tools (IPV, for example) can help support remote editing on small renditions that are applied automatically to original master files, reducing the number of times a large file has to transit via a low-bandwidth connection.
How can my production teams stay in sync and on task as they work together?
A DAM with a native workflow and automation engine can keep your entire team humming by automating the flow of work, notifying distributed participants of action required from them, and automating basic tasks like creating a particular rendition at publishing time.
How can we best manage increasing storage costs as our libraries of video content becomes bigger and bigger?
Fortunately, there are many storage options, though they all boil down to a few simple principles:
- Only store files once. File proliferation can easily get out of hand, especially if users aren’t comfortable with distributed DAM workflows or don’t have strong trust in their systems to get content to them seamlessly. Interview your video experts to understand how and where they store content. You’ll probably discover a few common patterns and a long tail of individual approaches. But with the right DAM in place, users can sync files locally that they need, but only store them in the system once. And any DAM system you consider should automatically deduplicate the video files themselves (while maintaining multiple records and metadata schemas that point to the same file, as appropriate).
- Don’t move master files if you don’t have to. See the comments above about proxy editing and creating renditions.
- There is usually a tradeoff between retrieval speed and accessibility on the one hand, and cost on the other. Take advantage of hierarchical storage management (HSM) to store each file in the place that manages the tradeoff appropriately for your needs. Of course if you’re working with a cloud-native DAM, you may have access to storage services like Amazon’s S3 and Glacier and the ability to move files between them. But the devil is in the details: Glacier is great for deep archives but charges on retrieval, so if you’re storing TBs (not PBs) of content and expect to pull video from an archive for reuse more than once a year, the cost savings may be negligible or even upside down. And within S3, Glacier, and their equivalents - there are actually more fine-grained options. If you’re already a Nuxeo customer (or if we’re an option you’re considering), contact us to discuss your specific situation. Also, you may be able to take advantage of existing on-premises investments (see the next section).
How can we make video content accessible by those outside the video production teams (for example, marketing)?
As long as your video workflows require specific expertise, high-powered workstations, and gigabit connections to access, review, or use, a few select people in your organization will be a bottleneck to output. This environment results in brand managers, executives, and retail partners all becoming frustrated that the 30 second ad they need to review took three hours to download … and then it turned out to be the wrong version.
The right DAM tool can solve this challenge by enabling the pros to continue to use their pro tools and established processes, while also providing renditions that everyone can quickly and easily see, review, and use.
How can we best manage the global distribution of our video content?
Once a video is finalized, the last thing you want to do is load it onto a hard drive to send to your downstream users! The right DAM system will automatically take massive files and generate renditions appropriate for any downstream use, track who is downloading them, which systems a video has been published to, keep an eye on usage rights, and much, much more.
Video Management: the bottom line
Video is not a fad, but rather a new reality in today’s world. With the right tools in place, the potential for video to transform businesses is substantial. Organizations that leverage modern, cloud-based digital asset management tools are better positioned to catch the rising video wave, and win in the marketplace.
You might also like this recent article, written by Alan Porter for IHAF: https://www.ihaforum.org/blog/best-practices-for-handling-video-in-your-dam. In this article, Alan will cover some of the best practices to use a Digital Asset Management system for videos.
To talk about how Nuxeo can help you with your video challenges, contact us today!