The ease with which organizations can create video is a godsend.
Completely revolutionizing how businesses and organizations communicate, video is used for internal messaging, marketing, training, human resources, you name it.
Of course, we’re not naïve enough to believe that a transcendent change such as prolific use of video communication won’t come with some business challenges.
Indeed, one of those challenges is the daunting task of managing robust video libraries while maximizing the return on investment in video by actually making it easy to deploy.
It’s not all that different from a common challenge many families have. Digital cameras and phones have made it easy to take limitless photos and videos.
However, most families will never revisit those recordings because they don’t have good organizational or presentation plans. Meanwhile, it becomes a storage nightmare.
Organizations similarly need to make sure that the time and budget they’ve invested in creating video content is properly leveraged.
“Some have figured out how to organize it, but many have not,” says Tim Matus, product manager and engineer for MediaFusion. “They have this content loaded in computers and different places, but the struggle is that they can’t use it quickly when they want to use it.”
There is an opportunity for integration firms to address these organizational needs, Matus says. By offering a managed service that helps organizations better manage their video libraries integration firms can provide great value to their customers and earn recurring revenue.
While many integration firms might not feel that video management is in their wheelhouse, Matus says MediaFusion can make it easy to ramp up their ability to solve those challenges. He lays out several ways that integration firms, when working with MediaFusion, can offer video management value to their customers:
Tackling Storage – Perhaps the most obvious need for organizations when it comes to managing copious video is to figure out where to put it. Through MediaFusion, integrators can offer cloud storage.
“Storage is a huge issue,” Matus says. “Video takes up a lot of room as we all know. We had a client put in a $160,000 server and set up IP to store its video. After they started working with us, they unplugged their system and just went with us to start all the media. It takes up a lot of room. But there are great ways and great solutions to store it today.”
One way is cloud storage and “one of the great things about cloud storage is it’s always there for you,” Matus says.
“We work from all kinds of different locations and our clients do as well. If you happen to be in California that day, or you happen to be sitting in Wisconsin getting ready for a football game you can find your content and see it quickly and send it to somebody or do what you need to with it. The content storage can be as big as it needs to be and as small as it needs to be. We work with our clients to help them manage that. If we have pieces that need to be done off the player or on the player, we will help them manage that as well. Sometimes they don’t want it accessible, they just want to store it and keep it there for a lifetime.”
Determining Content Delivery Method – To some organizations content delivery is perceived as a “black art,” Matus acknowledges. However, integrators can overcome skepticism by simply discussing their customers’ unique content distribution needs and matching them with MediaFusion’s myriad solutions.
MediaFusion has a network of 200,000 servers throughout the world.
“We allow the content to be used on those servers and to be delivered quickly to the client wherever they are,” Matus says. “There might be a need to block it from some countries or to show it in other places. We can do that all through the content delivery network.”
Every customer, of course, wants to be able to access and deliver content instantly. MediaFusion’s 200,000 worldwide servers help make that happen.
“When you click on your phone, even if it’s a big piece of video content, you want to see it more quickly,” Matus says. “The reason you can with MediaFusion is because there is a server not far from you that has the content on it.”
Meanwhile, each customer’s solution is customized, Matus adds. “We have programs that use heavy content delivery networks and some that are lighter. We will take care of the needs that are necessary to the client.”
Turning Video into Valuable Information – That wealth of video that many organizations have is often largely untapped when it comes to collecting valued data.
Through MediaFusion, integrators can help customers collect data on what their organizations are doing, how much video they’re producing and provide analytics that help them solve business issues.
“One of the great pieces of information that people get from using our system is pulling up the analytics, and this is something that the integrator can be involved in,” Matus says.
It’s as simple as looking at all the information for all of the players whether live or on-demand and understanding who is looking at the content.
“They can utilize that to help them in their process of determining what events are best to stream, how far they need to go with it, if they need to improve on it, continue it, grow it. Lots of data can help support those efforts, including marketing efforts,” Matus says.
