Typical workplaces produce many digital assets every day, including photos, video, audio, documents, presentations, and more.
Digital Asset Management (DAM) allows users to store, organize, track and share all their digital assets in a centralized location.
The digital assets uploaded and managed in DAM solution are usually accessible on any device like desktop or mobile, at any time or from anywhere. What an organization should be asking is whether a digital asset management platform will cater to all their digital needs or does the organization need a powerful video hosting solution as well.
Video Hosting: A Powerful Tool for your Enterprise Website
Video has become an important organizational tool that’s not just used for marketing but for many other functions, too, such as onboarding, training, customer testimonials, communications, and sales.
Online video hosting refers to uploading and storing video content online for easy access and distribution.
While there are free video hosting platforms such as YouTube, they often come with restrictions on branding, monetization, and much more. An organization video hosting needs far exceed what a video hosting platform like YouTube can offer.
Private video hosting gives broadcasters full control over their video content and is the best option for businesses with advanced streaming and video needs.
Paid video hoisting solutions offer more speed, quality, consistency, analytics, and security. On top of that video hosting platforms also provide robust organizational and search capabilities for digital assets to enable businesses to monetize a vast library of video content.
Each online video hosting provider has unique features and price points, so it is important for organizations to find a combination that makes the most sense for their needs in term of their digital asset and video publishing needs.
Digital Assets Management (DAM)
Managing digital assets is crucial to any marketing efforts.
Fragmented and scattered digital asset storage, results in lost files and costly revisions and with crucial time of an organization being wasted looking for digital files that should be a click away.
DAM solutions keep all digital assets centrally organized in a searchable database.
A proper digital asset management results in a workflow that is streamlined with the core tasks being facilitated for easy sharing and distribution within the organization with DAM.
Files added to DAM’s are available to everyone within an organization, but it is also possible for users to give permission to certain employees and manage restrictions for files within DAM.
Organization can also share assets outside of the organization with digital asset management, as some DAMs make it possible to add licensing protocols and watermarks beforehand to the digital assets.
With a DAM solution, each asset has valuable information or metadata that can be added to help employees find what they need and prevents them from creating many redundant copies of the same digital file. It is also easy to track and see how assets are used and by whom on a DAM.
Most available systems integrate on a DAM with other tools, so remote teams of an organization don’t have to constantly download or upload files, email them to one another or switch apps. Users can annotate and edit assets without having to jump around different software.
Apart from easy access and control, digital asset management (DAM) also help brands to maintain brand consistency as everyone in the organization has access to the same digital assets within the organization.
Cincopa: A Robust and Popular DAM solution
The Digital Asset Management solution from Cincopa is more advanced than many of the legacy the DAM solutions while also offering features to users that many video hosting competitors do not provide.
Easiest way to manage your digital media with Cincopa DAM
Cincopa digital asset management allows you to upload, organize, store, manage and track your digital assets from one central location.
Users can access these digital assets at any time, on any device, and from anywhere. The DAM does backup and syncing regularly to ensure that all files are safe and protected.
Here are some of the few features on Cincopa’s Digital Asset Management:
Create media galleries
Cincopa multimedia platform allows you to create image and video galleries.
You can combine different media such as slideshows, podcasts and music players as well as add meta-tags, titles and descriptions to each digital asset item in a gallery for searchability and SEO purposes.
Use a media player with custom branding
Add your logo or a watermark to the media player to showcase your brand on the video. It is also possible to customize video player controls and behavior with a branded video player.
Easy navigation
Users can enjoy playlists, thumbnail galleries and search boxes to help them navigate within a digital asset management gallery.
Easy embedding and sharing
Embed digital media on any webpage just by copying and pasting the embed code generated automatically on Cincopa’s media platform.
Design templates
Cincopa’s DAM has ready-to-use design templates that support all types of media, including video, audio and photos as well as digital asset like PDF, presentations, etc.
Mobile app
You can upload photos, videos and digital assets directly from the comfort of your mobile device. Cincopa mobile app is available on both Apple and Android app stores.
Automatic conversions
Transcoding and resizing are performed automatically by the software and no coding is required.
Responsive players and galleries on the DAM help the digital assets work perfectly whether people are watching on a desktop or mobile Users get a great experience no matter what device they use.
Subtitles and Closed Captions (CC)
Give viewers the opportunity to watch videos in a noisy places. It also makes content accessible to consumers worldwide with subtitles and closed captions in different languages.
Cincopa’s robust subtitle and closed captioning technology also helps organizations use the power of videos to perform better on search engines like Google through proprietary SEO friendly and video enhancement technology.
Advanced video analytics
Real-time analytics on a video offers powerful brand insights.
Cincopa gives you detailed video analytics for all embedded videos for a time frame that you want to analyze. With video analytics you can get group statistics by domain, video file, country and web page.
Find out who and where the video was watched. View specific data such as an IP address, average engagement, first and last view date. On top of that video heatmaps also show you how viewer engagement changes throughout the duration of the video.
Advanced security
Your digital media is completely protected with Cincopa, thanks to its advanced security system.
Add password protection to prevent unauthorized users from accessing galleries. Decide on your own security settings and grant user permissions to make sure the right people have access to the assets that have been uploaded.
Integration
Cincopa’s DAM allows for easy integration with third-party apps for advanced marketing and sales management. Integrating a gallery with Google Analytics enables you to track engagement and more.
Cincopa supports integration with most of the major email marketing and marketing automation platforms. Easily add multimedia to your newsletters and email marketing campaigns. Cincopa also fully integrates with learning management systems (LMS) and makes it easy to embed any type of educational multimedia content.
Global media distribution (CDN)
Experience lightning-fast loading times from anywhere in the world. Video CDN enables multiple servers worldwide to cache video data and deliver video to viewers from a server closest to them resulting in no-lag and better quality videos.
With video CDN users don’t experience any crashing or lagging. No matter where they are or what device they’re using, users experience high speed and the best playback quality.
Limitations of DAM and why you need video solutions for your enterprise
Over the years, DAMs have evolved and many of them do a great job with handling rich media files. However, digital asset management platform were originally designed for file and content storage and sharing.
The amount of storage, resources and compute power required to manage video content is much greater than what is required for documents and images. Some DAMs have partnered with video specialists to enable them to better manage video content but for many of the DAM solution, it is not core of what they do.
Many legacy DAMs have limitations for teams who work on a daily basis with many large videos and other high-volume multimedia files.
Video files are complex and there are so many formats that make it tricky to create the right format for a chosen destination, whether it’s a website, social platform or mobile device.
It may be easy to upload and share a large batch of images but uploading and sharing an hour of raw video footage requires a completely different infrastructure to an image workflow that is used by DAM solutions.
For instance, it is likely to conclude that an organization must have a suitable infrastructure and cloud network if they want to optimize storage and upgrade their video management.
The following elements are necessary to support modern video workflows, which some legacy DAM solutions do not offer:
Encoding and transcoding
Brands shouldn’t be limited in terms of the types of video files they can upload and share. It should be easy and quick to add new videos to a video hosting platform without compromising safety.
Flexible video encoding and transcoding capabilities are essential for online video hosting.
Encoding is the process of converting video files into digital files suitable for streaming over the internet. While transcoding means converting all uploaded videos into various resolutions and formats to optimize them for best performance and good bandwidth consumption on any type of device and operating system.
All of the above require a lot of technical prowess that most digital asset management solution do not offer if they lack video hosting capabilities.
Quality Delivery
Rich digital media has a high cost in terms of file size. A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is usually necessary to reduce load times.
A powerful CDN places cached versions of video files on globally distributed servers with the end-users viewing the digital media version from the server closest to them. This robust CDN network provides a user with the highest quality delivery without any buffering or freezing.
Video hosting solutions like Cincopa have powerful CDN capability.
A customizable media player
A media player can influence user experience with a highly customizable video player making white-labeling of video straightforward for branding purposes.
A video media player today offers much more than just a framework to play a video on – customization, layout options, more controls etc.
A powerful video player helps brands to reach their audiences with ease.
An adaptive bitrate video player ensures that viewers have a good streaming experience even when there’s a poor network connection.
A simplified way to explain it is that the original video or digital file turns into multiple versions with different qualities. The system then monitors the strength of an internet connection and increases or decreases the quality depending upon the strength of the signal to optimize the user experience.
Easy thumbnail choice and editing options
When embedding videos, it is important to pay attention to thumbnails.
Good video hosting solutions should allow users to easily create thumbnails by choosing a perfect frame or replacing it with any image.
Captions and subtitles
Video hosting platforms usually enable businesses to use captions and subtitles. Captions and subtitles can make videos accessible to more people, such as those who don’t speak the same language or the disabled.
Adding captions as well as subtitles can be extremely difficult without a video hosting solution in place to do this automatically.
Advanced search options to increase search ranking
Rich media files like videos have integrated metadata attached to the video. The more metadata there is in a video, the more robust search becomes.
Artificial intelligence technology of a video hosting solution helps the metadata shine by giving more power to search using video tags, metadata and much more.
Advanced Analytics
Metadata offers basic information but metrics and statistics indicate how well a video is performing. DAMs do provide some tracking of file use but video hosting platforms usually offer more granular video analytics.
Are viewers pausing and rewinding a lot? Do they drop off halfway through the video or go right to the end? How many times do they watch a video? When do they prefer to watch? Having this kind of video analytics data available on a dashboard makes it easy to analyze performance and make improvements.
Advanced security and privacy features
Video content is extremely valuable and businesses need to have the peace of mind that it won’t fall into the wrong hands. This means being able to control viewer access and ensuring that hackers can’t access sensitive information.
Video content should only be seen by viewers authorized to see it. Access control should be granular enough to distinguish between different roles and different types of content.
What an enterprise video solution offers on top of DAM
An enterprise video platform facilitates video communication within a corporation. Its most relevant features are to capture video content and stream it from a secure network location.
Users must be able to search for video content and view or play it from anywhere on any kind of device.
Integrating such a platform into the existing IT infrastructure must be flexible and simple.
Free video hosting platforms like YouTube do not have enterprise needs in mind. Creators often have to struggle and spend time on many platforms to manage video content and distribute it.
Within a corporate environment, any downtime or security breaches are undesirable, which is why many enterprises choose to use more reliable, versatile enterprise video solutions.
An eCDN
An enterprise video solution with a top-tier CDN ensures a good global content delivery experience, making delivery faster and more reliable.
Not only do CDNs bring video content to viewers faster but they provide organizations with better streams. Using an enterprise content delivery network (eCDN) means organizations can scale video delivery and reduce costs.
Live streaming
An enterprise video solution supports live streaming with CDNs that minimize latency and buffering. Bottlenecks disappear and security increases of the videos being broadcasted.
If servers of a website are attacked using common hacking methods, the content still remains online and is still secured. A CDN approach also allows enterprises to handle many concurrent viewers because they have many servers worldwide.
Businesses need live streaming solutions that can grow with them, whether this means that corporate users are creating and uploading more videos or whether their audience is increasing in size.
Live streaming solutions must be able to perform under high pressure and organization should also receive actionable insights from their live streaming partner.
Video-on-demand (VOD)
Many live streaming solutions are not as good at providing VOD. A video hosting solution has the required features of converting live stream into VODs that is searchable and accessible to users
When there are many live stream recordings, it is important to have a sustainable way to store, organize, manage and search for them and a video hosting platform provides all the features mentioned above.
API support
An enterprise video streaming solution should have Application Programming Interface (API) support. This enables brands to integrate the cloud video platform with their other essential business applications.
API basically allows people visiting a website to take action, like adding an event to a calendar without leaving the website.
Customizing a video platform with APIs also allows businesses greater control over the experience available to users.
Organizations can do things such as control live stream configurations and determine whether users can see other users watching at the same time. An API support also makes it possible to build apps around streaming or on-demand video content.
Security and privacy options
Enterprise video solutions offer a variety of tools for securing video in their network. The most basic method is password-protected streaming with only users who enter a specific password gain access to a live stream or video recording.
Geographic and domain restrictions are also an another security feature that can narrow down who is able to access the content.
HLS encryption offers another layer of security to streams and VOD. While HTTP live streaming security protects against eavesdropping and man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks while ensuring data integrity.
Conclusion
Businesses today have numerous digital assets making digital asset management (DAM) essential. DAM solutions allow users to store, organize, track and share digital assets from one centralized location. DAMs can handle the management of most digital assets effectively.
Video hosting platforms offer numerous benefits to those who handle large quantities of media-rich files like videos every day.
Ultimately organizations need to decide for themselves which solutions fit their individual requirements. Ideally, their choice should enable them to produce many different kinds of video use cases.
While also enabling an organization to share their videos internally and externally. Organization should also give a thought to utilizing a DAM and video hosting that offers digital customization and security features to keep video content on-brand and secure.
