Video has grown significant over the last few years. It’s currently at the center of a growing war between the largest corporations in the world. Facebook, Google, and Twitter all want a share of the kind of reach video has to offer. In the US, for example, users watch over 180 million hours watch of video content on TV screens every day. This accounts for 75% of people in the US who are connected to the internet. This number is projected to grow in the coming decades.

For that matter, all these videos must be managed somehow. Whether they are used for entertainment purposes or video marketing, the need for order will arise at some point. Once the size of your video library balloons to a certain extent, you’ll have to invest your time in picking the perfect video content management system.

What’s a Video Content Management System and Do You Need One?

Commonly referred to as video CMS, a video content management system is a software that eases the process of organizing all your videos. This is such that they are all centralized and easy to manage online.

Depending on the size of your video library, the answer to whether you need a video CMS will differ. People with relatively small video libraries won’t usually feel the same kind of pinch people with relatively larger amounts of videos will feel. A content management system is best adopted before everything gets too large, however.

Benefits of a good video content management system

Better support for larger HD video files.

It’s often been said that a video is worth a thousand blog posts and can encompass the same information as a bunch of documents. This comes at a price, however. Consider the average full-presentation slideshow. It’s around 50 MB, which is coincidentally the maximum upload size allowed by document hosts like SharePoint and SlideShare. On the other hand, an HD video recorded on an iPhone can be as large as 200 MB just for two minutes’ worth of video data.

Larger files are handled somewhat differently than their smaller counterparts before they reach the server. It’s the same reason services as Vimeo require a paid subscription for more than 500 MB worth of videos in a week. As you may have figured, this isn’t a lot for the average uploader and that is what makes private video hosting services like Cincopa popular where you get customized solutions. And yet, a proper CMS is one that saves you the hassle of having to mess around with server configuration files manually.

At the same time, lots of servers don’t support uploading more than one file by default. Getting such an idea up and running will require a bit of tinkering by a developer. Bulk uploading can be heavy on a server if not implemented properly. A right CMS will make video automation easier by providing an intuitive user interface and an API that developers can plug into.

Better video delivery to end consumers

If you don’t use a video CMS, all your videos are just hosted, and the method of delivery won’t necessarily optimal. Different devices need videos to be delivered in a certain way to ensure maximum compatibility. In the video marketing niche where videos have to reach the viewers as fast as possible, this is especially essential.
To maintain the kinds of video engagement, we marketers like to see; the process is achieved using various methods: video conversion, transcoding, and support for different streaming protocols.

The best method for optimizing both quality and delivery time is video transcoding. Different sources explain this differently, but video transcoding essentially refers to converting videos from one type to another. For instance, iPhones support the MP4 format far better than it does MKV.

Video content management systems should be able to figure this out and convert the video to the best-supported type on the fly. This way, you don’t have to worry about manual conversions or the more technical aspects of video delivery.

The last aspect of delivery that you may have noticed with mainstream sites like Youtube is how videos automatically change to lower quality videos. It may be annoying when your 1080p resolution video converts to 480p, but it’s a feature that’s crucial to ensuring videos are delivered with little to no buffering. To keep your video engagement levels sky-high, it’s important they don’t take forever to load.

Optimized search functionality

When you need to find a specific video from a collection of potentially thousands of videos, a search box is a go-to method of getting down to your specific video. How this is done depends on which CMS you are using. Some make your finding video campaigns easier by allowing you to add metadata that it can read later index and query. Depending on how accurate you want them to get, others can also perform searches inside the video itself.

For instance, you’re probably familiar with how Youtube can produce video subtitles from spoken words. The same way, some video CMSs can do this and indexes the words using speech recognition and word-recognition technologies. This way, all searches are incredibly accurate, even if you don’t remember the exact title of the video.

How to ensure your video collection is always organized

Even with the best video management system in the world, it cannot possibly do everything for you. As far as video automation has come, it can’t possibly crawl through the video and find the specific category the video belongs to, insert metadata by itself and deliver the video when required and how you require it. Some human legwork must be put into the process.

Categorize the videos

Before you get down to the important bits of managing your videos, you need to think about how you are going to group your videos. Since most videos can overlap in different categories, it’s important to know what category strategy will make the most sense for your business.

Commonly used categories include video type, specific video campaigns, product release, and update videos. It’s very likely your specific categories will be different, however. The most important thing to remember is the categories have to work for your team while making specific category analytics as simple as possible.

Use metadata

Adding metadata to your videos is an essential part of being able to find them more easily later on. Despite the most efficient CMSs today being able to see them quickly, the algorithms they work on top of aren’t perfect. They may not work as efficiently as you expect them to. Besides, it doesn’t cost you anything other than time to add metadata to your videos.

Some descriptive pieces of information you could add about the content of your video, other than the subject and title include keywords, names of people involved in the video, links to similar videos and when the video was approved.

Create an upload process

Once the structure of your library has been decided upon, another useful thing you could do is to create a checklist of sorts for before your videos reach the CMS. This is to ensure every relevant aspect of the video SEO that your team follows is done before the video gets uploaded. For example, your checklist might include adding a video call to action, tags and custom attributes. Afterward, it can be uploaded to the CMS for editing and further review.