Over just the last few years, the number of videos in the average business’s library has jumped. Companies that used to create a video or two per year now do so every month — or even every week. Seemingly overnight, business video collections that counted in tens now contain hundreds (if not more).
The driver behind this trend is straightforward — video is a simple way to support and scale a huge number of employee training activities, deliver impactful corporate communications, and enhance collaboration — but for many companies, it creates a new complication:
What should you do with all of the internal video content you’re producing?
Today if you’re like most businesses, you’re storing your corporate videos in a content management system (CMS) like SharePoint, in a learning management system (LMS) like Cornerstone or Saba, on your corporate LAN folders, “privately” on YouTube or Vimeo, or you have more than one solution with videos scattered about different locations.
And importantly, you’ve come to realize that there are all kinds of problems with your current system — or systems — when it comes to hosting videos:
- Video files are too big for your LMS or CMS, straining your network and causing buffering issues
- You have no way to search the content videos (at least, not without spending hours and hours manually tagging your recordings)
- You can’t get user-level analytics on which of your videos are most watched, and who specifically is watching what
- Those “private” settings on YouTube and Vimeo just aren’t secure enough
On that last point, the downsides to using YouTube for internal-facing video can be particularly frustrating. It’s so close to being a great business tool! After all, YouTube certainly makes it easy for people to upload, share, find and watch videos — so much so that whenever anyone thinks about video, they almost always immediately think of YouTube.
So why isn’t there a YouTube for businesses? Something that’s as easy and purpose-built for video as YouTube, but designed for enterprise use?
Good news: there is. And it’s actually a far better alternative to YouTube for sensitive internal video content.
The Secure YouTube Alternative: A Video CMS Built For Businesses
A video content management system, or video CMS, is built to be a simple, secure YouTube for your company’s internal videos.
With a video CMS, your organization can upload videos to a central library just like YouTube. There’s no limit to the number of videos your organization can upload to your video CMS and you have complete control over who can view your videos. Sharing videos is also as easy as it is on YouTube through a clickable link or a simple embed, and your video CMS will automatically do the backend production work to ensure all those videos stream well on your corporate network and play well on any device.
Related Reading: What Is a Video Content Management System (Video CMS) >
Here are 6 more reasons a video CMS is a better alternative to YouTube:
1. Security. While YouTube’s options for making videos private are limited at best, a video CMS helps you take greater care of all videos you upload. Unlike YouTube, here your videos will be private by default, while giving you simple controls to establish multi-tiered levels of private or public access to individual videos, live streams, and entire folders of content. Single sign-on (SSO) integration makes it easy to authenticate users within your organization and to manage viewing permissions at scale.
2. Search. When you search for videos on YouTube, you aren’t able to search the actual content presented in those videos. Instead, all you can search is the information about that video entered when the video was uploaded — “metadata” like titles and tags. Simply put, that’s doing things the old way.
A video CMS can help you search video content just like you can search a document by hitting control+F. Panopto in particular automatically makes every word spoken and shown on screen searchable for every video in your library, enabling your teams to instantly find and fast-forward to any relevant moment in your recordings (even the really long ones).
Forrester called it “the best support for video search” — you can see how it works here:
3. No Ads. Since YouTube is free, advertising is everywhere. But the last thing you want is advertising playing before a recording of your company’s most recent town hall meeting or distracting employees from a compliance training video. The alternative isn’t free, but a video CMS offers your employees a completely ad-free experience, whether they are watching in your video library or in a video player embedded in your LMS.
4. Fully Branded. Sure, you can add a profile picture and banner image to your YouTube channel, but it will still be crystal clear to anyone viewing your videos that they’re watching something on YouTube. A video CMS lets you truly customize the look of both your video library and embedded video players, so viewers never feel like they’ve left your company’s site.
5. Better Video Analytics. YouTube gives you a ton of interesting data about viewer engagement — but only in aggregate. It doesn’t offer data at the user-level like a video CMS can. User-level video analytics enable you to see who has viewed what and whether or not they finished watching, which means you can certify training and guarantee that important executive messages were watched.
6. Customer Support. Aside from a basic self-help content and community discussion forums, YouTube does not provide any support for technical video challenges you may encounter. Whether it’s playback problems on particular devices or accessibility troubleshooting, if you’re using YouTube to host important corporate video content, you’re on your own if something goes wrong. With the right video CMS, you’ll get access to 24/7 customer support from real engineers who can help you solve any video problem and answer just about any question.
Learn More About How A Video CMS Compares To YouTube
Video is increasingly the way businesses communicate and share valuable information. As organizations continue to find new value in video – creating online training videos, streaming live executive broadcasts, webcasting events, and offering on-demand presentations and product demos – the question of where to keep all this video has become critical.
Often, this question comes down to two hosting options:
- Video sharing sites, such as a branded YouTube channel; or
- The YouTube alternative: a video content management system.
Which solution offers the best mix of security, searchability, and shareability for your business videos?
Download our white paper to find out: Your YouTube Channel vs. The Corporate YouTube.
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