Video and live streaming are essential tools for businesses of all kinds. In the past year, live streaming experienced 99% growth in the number of hours watched. Use in digital marketing continues to increase with 85% of businesses saying they use video now, and twenty percent used it for the first time in 2019. If your business is looking to add, or to increase, your use of video, one of the first decisions you need to make is what platform you’ll use to stream and host your content. Many of the larger, most popular ones are free, which can be great for specific uses. There comes a point though, when you’ll want more options, control, bandwidth or storage than these services can provide. That’s when the benefits of white-label video platform become important.
Simply put, “white label” is a term that refers to something without branding. For example, videos posted or streamed from YouTube will have the YouTube logo on the player. The same goes for other free services. A white label video platform provides a blank player and the tools for you to add your own branding (if you choose). When people watch your content, they will associate your business with the content, and not the service you used to host or stream it.
Brand identity isn’t the only advantage. Every free service comes with some limitations, but not all of them are the same. Some offer unlimited cloud hosting, but you’re limited on the quality you can stream. Others limit how much storage you can use but support full 4K streaming. It’s a complicated landscape. The services may be free, but you’re likely spending time (and time is money) creating or converting video to meet their requirements. Switching away from these sites offers you the chance to save time and money. Below are some more reasons why.
If you haven’t heard the horror stories of live streams being shut down or video being taken down without warning, you can find them for yourself in any support forum of the major free services. We all realize copyrighted content can’t be used without permission and those pirated copies of the latest blockbuster deserve to be pulled down. But what if you own the copyright or follow fair use rules? You can still be taken down and all the work and planning you’ve put into a livestream can be thrown away in an instant. There is no warning and often no explanation given—when you finally find someone to ask. When you stream or host with free services they are obligated to “protect” content and do so using automated algorithms, sometimes followed by human review. If your content is taken down and is reviewed by a human you might have a chance to get it back, but your audience is already gone.
In addition, paid services generally don’t monitor the content in the same automated way because they are not social media platforms like most free services. They are companies offering a technological solution for streaming and hosting video content. It’s your responsibility to ensure your content meets all legal requirements. Likewise, what you do with your video is your prerogative (so long as it meets content standards spelled out in the terms of service). Your content is less likely to removed because there is usually a human involved in the review process. This stems from the fact you are a customer with the company, and not one of a billion accounts using a free service.
Like most things free, a free platform is too good to be true. Instead of a monthly fee, you pay for it by allowing advertising on your content. You have no control over what that advertising is either. It could be for your competitor, or something totally unrelated to your content. In the first case, you may lose customers. In the second case, you may still lose customers if the ads drive them away from watching. If you’ve spent any time watching sites like YouTube you’ll probably have noticed the ads come before the content and after, but now also will appear in the middle of a video with no attention paid to where a natural break might occur. Some ads are no longer skippable, so your audience might stop watching (if they ever started).
You’ve likely worked hard to produce the video you’re sharing or livestream you’re producing. Do you really want to give someone else the control to interrupt you and potentially affect your business?
With a white-label video platform, there are no limitations on where you place your video. If you want it on your website homepage, you can place it there. If you want to put it behind a paywall, you can do that too. The player you use is customizable so you can offer the exact viewer experience you want.
While many free services offer options for embedding video on external sites, they often only let you adjust a few aspects of the player like height and width. In addition, the service will probably display “related” videos at the end of yours to lure viewers away from your website. In other cases, the embedding technique is old and clunky and may not work at all. Some don’t let you embed the video anywhere.
One of the principle ways free services can support so much content is because they have limits on what you can upload or stream. For video hosting they can limit file size, bitrate, playing time, or support only certain video formats. For live streaming, they can limit resolution, bitrate, stream time or the number of viewers.
Business demands are always changing. Your video needs aren’t and won’t always be the same either. For example, a marketing company may want to show its latest creative effort in full 4k, but their quarterly video event only in standard HD. You can’t get this flexibility with a free service with limitations.
It’s clear that free services are not free, you just pay for them in less obvious ways. But if you’ve invested in creating video for your business, isn’t it worth using a white label video platform that lets you maintain control and ownership of your content? White label video streaming platforms, like Zidivo.com, can cost as little as £20/month. These affordable solutions are designed to offer businesses like yours all the options and support you need to be successful.
Without video engagement, your video content will essentially go to waste. Contrary to belief, video engagement isn’t solely measured by your viewer count; there is a vast range of factors to consider such as how long people watch for, how many times people share your video with their own audience, or how many likes or comments you receive. Here are some of the main ways to improve your video engagement and increase your average video engagement over time.
Cloud transcoding is taking over, leading the way by allowing businesses and individuals to offer a smooth and optimum playback experience for their entire audiences, without needing a huge team of staff or tons of equipment. Zidivo is here to clear up what cloud transcoding encompasses and who can benefit from it, as opposed to tackling all the encoding of your live streams in-house.
