Online video content has discovered its spot in the professional world. One study found that 51.9% of advertising professionals overall name video as the sort of content with the best ROI.
Likewise, the majority of individuals in another survey would prefer to watch live video from a brand than read their blog.
These numbers are on target to keep on increasing in the coming years. Indeed, even as of late as 10 years back, the experience of watching videos over the Internet was still to a great extent a hopeless one for numerous individuals across the world.
We will discuss what video hosting is, why it exists, and what to look for in an online video hosting platform.
What Are Video Hosting Platforms For Small Businesses?
At its center, video hosting is a term that depicts precisely what it seems like – a service that allows you to upload and share your videos on the internet. It depends upon the hosting solution you pick.
You can do this either with the help of your hosting provider’s application or through an API (Application Programming Interface). The video-uploading social network YouTube is an incredible model for this: you upload your video to one spot, and out of nowhere it's accessible in many countries all over the world.
So is there any valid reason why you wouldn't simply have all the videos all alone? For most businesses, the appropriate response is it would take too long and be excessively expensive.
Video hosting is somewhat similar to drop shipping in the e-commerce business. As opposed to hand-wrap each order yourself, you can send all your stock to an outsource supplier who does it for you. They profit by economies of scale: they have a stockroom and resources working nonstop.
Video hosting platforms offer comparable points of interest. They have virtual information warehousing, a smooth interface for uploading and tracking videos, and both the network and technology to convey it to numerous places all at once.
This implies that regardless of where somebody watches your video or the number of individuals watch immediately, it stacks rapidly and looks extraordinary.
Still, even organizations that are adapting to video content quicker are finding that they have one exceptionally large issue.
Their issue is this: How would you get the awesome videos you've worked to reach onto your target audience’s gadgets for watching? You can't email them—the files are excessively huge. Also, you can't have them all on your site—they'll just back things off.
Besides, how would you guarantee that any place they see it, the video is encoded, compressed, and accessible on multiple screens? The solution to all of the above is video hosting.
Advantages of Choosing Video Hosting Platforms
The most compelling advantage of picking on online video hosting is that it makes your videos accessible in loads of spots while controlling them from one dashboard. That implies you get the most ideal experience and can share them broadly while doing less work. That can set you free to make more videos and to improve results.
Here are some of the other advantages of choosing a video hosting platform:
- An incredible viewer experience: Hosting your video can make the video crisper (it'll also depend on the individuals' devices) and provide a video player with controls.
- Efficient tools: Video hosting platform can perform much of the hard work such as uploading videos by itself. Video hosting platforms compress the video if required making it accessible across different gadgets. Else, you have to keep in mind that which browser supports which codec. It just makes things simpler for you.
- Customization: One of the significant advantages to video hosting services is the customization capacities. You can modify your video in a variety of ways, for example, editing colors, allowing the user to enter an email address to watch the video, etc. These are only a couple of the other customization abilities that allow your video to be more customized and tailored to the viewer’s needs.
- Tracking: A significant number of the organizations use videos to advertise their products or discuss about their services. It's significant for them to know how compelling the videos are in terms of user engagement. Tracking your user’s engagement is simply one more way you can utilize a video hosting platform to perceive the number of people your video is being watched by and how they are responding to it.
- Save time with integrations: Hosting platforms can coordinate with different applications so you can upload your video to various channels. You can likewise edit your video even after it's been uploaded or rapidly bring it down (if necessary).
- Backup: Video hosting platforms offer automatic backup, so if your website suffers a technical failure, your video won't go down somewhere else.
What to Look For In a Video Hosting Platform? (Features)
The greatest differentiation you should draw between hosting platforms is between those that have a discovery feature and those that don't. The Discovery feature means they pull in your potential viewers to your video. Both types of platforms have their respective advantages.
YouTube, for example, has a discovery feature. It's the second-biggest internet search engine on the planet and recommends your videos to individuals who might like them. That can be extraordinary for top-of-funnel marketing. However, it also means that YouTube could suggest your competitor’s video next.
As we discussed, small businesses need various features from their video hosting platforms keeping the cost and usefulness in mind.
Experts suggest the following seven basic features look for in an online video hosting platform:
- A simple-to-use platform
- A detailed video analysis dashboard
- Incredible delivery using a "CDN" (Content Distribution Network)
- Monetization choices for promoting, memberships, or pay-per-view
- White-mark service (totally custom branding)
- Security and protection settings
- China video hosting, which is getting progressively key in our globalized world
Increasingly more media is being shared over the internet. This means picking an online video platform hosting that uses over-the-top (OTT) innovation to upload video content is an absolute necessity.
Why You Might Consider Private Video Hosting
With private video hosting, you're in charge of each part of your channel. You can make your own branded video channel. You can have a video channel completely dedicated to your employees, showing your organization's rules, a video for the business group, and training videos for recruits.
Best of all, you would be able to protect it with a password. It will ensure that these videos are not viewable to external viewers without your consent.
When utilizing social video platforms like YouTube and Facebook, you have no control/customization choices. You can't edit your videos too much after uploading and you're left with the traditional video player that the social platform offers.
While, with the utilization of video hosting platforms, you are getting a lot more customization options as per your requirements. Majority of these video hosting platforms enable you to customize your video as you see fit.
Plus, you have more customization choices for the video players you use too. You can change the tones on the player to make it more related to your branding rules.
You also have access to video controls of the player. You can create it so your viewers can autoloop, avoid certain segments of the video, and change the volume/size of the video.
The one thing that is exceptionally fascinating about private video hosting is that everything is in one spot as opposed to a social platform like YouTube.
Private hosting platforms provide you with a lot of highlights and advantages on a single place. You can use that centralized space for creating a marketing campaign with multiple channels, optimize your search engine optimization rankings, and a lot of other operations through a single place.
It's more significant now than earlier to appropriately optimize your videos to rank high in the search engine results. A lot of these private hosting solutions offer that.
When using these platforms, you'll discover a lot of SEO tools and settings to help you with increasing the metadata and more for your video. A few platforms even make it simple to update your site's sitemap for indexing purposes.
Video Hosting Platforms
You need to do the evaluation very carefully – as to what your requirements are. Audit all your business needs, and ask individuals on all the team who'll be involved throughout.
It's just through questions that you'll find each one of your necessities, just like the way that salespeople need to record, send, and track videos from their smartphones. It is going to be a game-changer while deciding on a video hosting platform for your business.
Ideally, video hosting platforms currently appear to be clearer. There's a lot to consider. Yet, settling on a careful solution and deploying a video hosting platform is a lot simpler than attempting to have it all by yourself.
