Secure Video Hosting: Why It’s Vital To Your Video Success
With more great advice for your business videos, our friends at vzaar take a look at video security.
You’ve scripted it, storyboarded it and finally made it. Your video masterpiece is complete – nice work! But now what?
Time after time people believe that once video production is complete, the hard work is over. The vital part of actually making your video work to achieve your business goals is overlooked. Have you, for instance, thought about video security?
Your video is valuable. A lot of thought went into that content, so make sure you protect your assets. There are a few different ways to secure your video, depending on the objective you are trying to achieve. Take a look at three different type of videos, with three very different goals.
Product Videos
If you have a video showcasing your product the aim is most likely to garner sales! Your goal here is to convert video viewers into customers. Now, you might think it’s a good idea to make your product videos freely available across the Internet. After all, the more people who see your product the more potential customers you are reaching, right?
Not exactly. You need to think much more strategically than that. Ideally, you want a targeted audience to see your video. Otherwise, all you’re doing is racking up high view counts that don’t translate into revenue.
You need to be targeting people who are actively interested in your product (or one like it). And where do you find such people? Search engines! Getting video results in the search engines will mean it gets in front of the right people, at the right time – and you can’t get much more targeted than that.
When someone clicks on your video you want them to be taken straight to YOUR product page to buy the product. If you don’t take steps to secure your video it may crop up on other websites and drive traffic to those instead. It’s a bit like a competitor poaching your top sales person after your spent time and money training them; someone else might embed your precious video and take the traffic and conversions that should be yours.
Now, there’s a bit of a catch-22 situation here. You don’t want to restrict access to your video – the idea is for people watch it and then purchase – but you also need it to be secure so that you can control which websites it appears on. Isn’t that a little like having your cake and eating it? Eat away my friend – there is a solution to this conundrum. It’s called Domain Control. Domain control locks the video down to your specific domain. People can watch it, but if they try to embed it elsewhere it won’t play.
Remember: if your video is being used to drive people to any website that ISN’T yours you can kiss goodbye all those conversions. Domain control makes sure your video works for you, and only you.
Video Lectures / Internal Training
Obviously internal videos are meant for staff eyes only. You probably don’t want Joe Public to see a board update or your fire safety training. Equally, if you’re a college or eLearning company you’ll need to make sure that only the people who signed up to your course have access to the video.
It’s vital that you prevent unauthorized downloads, particularly if you’re selling your video lectures. The last thing you want is for those to become freely available to all. So throw the whole security gamut at it.
First, it’s important to say that if you’re publishing training or internal materials online you’ll want to secure those materials from a website level – put them behind a paywall or login portal of some kind. Once you’ve got the website security in place, you’ll then need to turn your attention to the video stream itself. We’ve already talked about Domain Control but there’s a few bits of extra security which are very worthwhile in this instance:
RTMPe Streaming
RTMPe streaming delivers your video in encrypted chunks – the whole video is never downloaded to the machine all at once so it’s harder to steal the entire video file.
HTTPS Video Embed Code
If you are asking viewers to access your videos via a secure login portal (and if you’re not doing this for training videos you really should be!) then you will have an HTTPS website. Since your website is HTTPS, you also need an HTTPS video embed code, otherwise you’ll run into compatibility and playback issues.
Video Scheduling
Video scheduling is the equivalent of the self-destruct mission tapes used in Mission Impossible. You know the ones, “This message will self destruct in 5, 4, 3…” And if it’s good enough for Ethan Hunt…
In a nutshell you set the time and date you want your video to appear and disappear. No one will be able to access the video outside the time frame you set – maybe you’ve got a course available for a limited time only or a deadline by which staff must have completed their health and safety training. Plus, you get to feel like a kickass spy which is always fun!
Brand Awareness
We have focused a lot on making sure only the right people see your content – whether that is a particular target audience or a class of knowledge-thirsty students – but there is a time when you’ll want to throw caution to the wind. That is when you’re using video to raise brand awareness.
Brand awareness is less about selling a specific product and more about getting your brand in front of anyone and everyone. Video can be avery effective way of raising brand awareness. Last year saw 18 million shares for the top 3 pieces of video content alone. Only do this if you have genuinely compelling content to share. Something that’s humorous, inspiring or novel works best.
Though this has been a bit of a whirlwind introduction to video security, we hope you now understand why security matters and the situations where it pays to keep control of your content. Of course, every use case will vary somewhat. The level of security you need depends on what you are hoping to do with your video.
If you take away one thing, it’s this: think strategically. Getting business videos right requires more than just a witty script or killer visuals (although they do help). Think about how you will use your video and make sure you’ve got the technical implementation you need to achieve your goals.
Hayley Dixon heads up marketing at vzaar, the video hosting platform for business. Find out how vzaar’s video security features can help your business or register for a free 30 day trial.