How to Choose the Best OVP to Give You Freedom

Presidents Day reminds me of an experience from my youth. Twenty five years ago in the summer of 1989, I made a trip to Europe with a bunch of other teenagers. The trip included stops in Germany, Austria, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. To think that I was behind the Iron Curtain just a year before it came down, and to be there just two years after President Reagan’s famous “Tear Down This Wall” speech is quite amazing. But, what does that have to do with video management?

Its comparison is actually quite simple. Back then, traveling through secure borders was both difficult and painful. It took hours to get through and it wasn’t because of long lines. There were communications challenges, lengthy processing times, currency issues, tight security, etc. Compare that experience to traveling through open borders today and the experience is quite different: thousands of people pass through borders every hour with little effort and no fanfare.

Now let’s take a look at video management. If your process involves moving video from one team to another in different locations or geographies, or publishing video to multiple destinations, the process can be both difficult and painful. It can take hours to manage just one video. There are also communications challenges between teams, lengthy processing times to ready videos for their destinations, measurement issues, and security challenges. With modern technology, we think your experience should be much different. Video should flow between departments as needed. Even in mass quantity, you should be able to expose video at once in multiple places, including your websites, your business applications like Salesforce.com, 3rd party sites like YouTube, all with little effort and no fanfare.

When you are looking for an enterprise online video platform, make sure you don’t get locked into a single player ecosystem, forcing you to have disjointed workflows and multiple tools that don’t communicate. Make sure you can move video between teams, websites, business applications or 3rd party sites. You don’t want it to be like crossing through the Iron Curtain in 1989. Think modern, choose an OVP that will tear down those walls, and move your videos freely wherever they need to go!