With Videos becoming the new content, many companies and individuals talk to us about using Video for Internal Communication. One of the most commonly asked question is if they can use free and cheap options like YouTube and Vimeo for securely sharing their videos within their company. In this article, let me present a balanced view of when YouTube and Vimeo are great choices, and when they are not so good. Your additions and suggestions are welcome:
Pros of using YouTube & Vimeo
- YouTube is a free option and Vimeo is very cheap option for storing your videos. Nothing beats them in terms of price.
- Both of them have the option to make the videos private. Although the user experience of making a video private is very kludgy, it works if you have small team size and you don’t need multiple people managing your team videos. If you have a single person managing your videos, it works very well.
- Both are cloud based options, so you don’t have to worry about hosting your own infrastructure, dealing with support overhead, waiting for your IT folks availability etc
- Both are very well known video hosting options, so people don’t take long to get used to them
Cons of using YouTube & Vimeo
- By submitting your video to these services, you are giving them royalty free license and right to copy. Your videos are not just yours anymore. This is one of the biggest drawback of using these 2 free and cheap options. See the Vimeo Terms of service here and Youtube terms of service here.
- Although both give you the option to make your videos private, the user experience is very cumbersome. It doesn’t scale for large number of videos and big team sizes. I heard from the customers that they used Vimeo for password protecting their video files but they used to keep the passwords in another word document or notepad. Maintaining security this way is ok for small size team but very inconvenient for large teams. You run the risk of exposing your video files accidentally. Revoking permission from particular people is even bigger pain.
- Many companies block sites like YouTube because they are concerned about employees playing unnecessary videos and hogging the network bandwidth. In those places, videos hosted on these sites will not be available for target audience. See this Reddit thread for an example of this.
What’s your alternative?
If YouTube and Vimeo work for your scale and requirements, you should definitely use them and save money. Great for testing your initial ideas. However if above limitations are not acceptable for you because of security and scalability concerns, CircleHD is a great alternative. Think of CircleHD as a ready to use private YouTube for your company or organization.
Here is a 5 minute overview video. Below are the some highlights:
Your Branded Video Portal ready in just a few clicks
As soon as you sign up at CircleHD, you get your domain branded secure video portal ready to use. You can cname it to create your video website like yourcompany.tv.
Enterprise grade Security & Compliance. Secure Sharing & Collaboration
Very easy to grant permission and revoke permission for the entire website or for specific videos and specific channels.
Share a channel or selected Videos as playlist. Built for security and collaboration from ground up.
Very easy administration of Videos & Channels
All the authorized admins can very easily upload videos and organize them as channels. No technical training required.
Live Streaming & On-Demand Streaming on Any Mobile, Tablet and Desktop devices
CircleHD is a SaaS (software as a service) cloud product with built in capabilities for live streaming and on demand streaming of Video files. Live and On Demand Streaming works on any device — phones, tablets, desktop PC, Macs. No need to install any heavy or expensive softwareMobile Ready — Authorized Users can easily play video anywhere
Advanced Analytics & Call to Action
Get clear view of how people are using the videos, what’s working, what’s not working and also insert call to action to make your videos more effective.
Custom Tagging, Annotations and Transcriptions for Contextual Discovery of the Video Assets
With very easy to use administrative portal, any authorized user can add tags, annotations & transcriptions for making videos more useful and easily discoverable in the context.
Single Sign-On & Open APIs to connect to other Systems
Enterprises can easily connect to their directory system for single sign on and use Open APIs for connecting to other line of business systems.
Easy to use Multilingual & Dubbing Support
CircleHD SaaS product enables easy support of dubbing and multilingual capabilities in the same videos.
The language selection choice is available right on the video itself.
Free to get started
You can try CircleHD for free and see if it suits your requirement.
We are curious to hear your experience in using YouTube and Vimeo for securing sharing videos within your organization.
