Now is the right time to consider how your organization manages its video.

As video becomes more integral to how businesses communicate, how teachers teach, and how we all share ideas and information, many organizations are finding that today it’s time to review how they’ve managed video content in the past and how they plan to manage it in the future.

That’s because video is unlike any other content:

• Different video recorders often produce different types of video files, many of which cannot be played back on other devices
• Video files are significantly larger than text documents and can quickly exceed maximum file size restrictions on common content management systems
• And video files are traditionally impossible to search, limiting the value of any recording to anyone looking for specific content

But even in the face of these challenges, the popularity of video is exploding. Academic institutions are individually recording 80,000 hours of video every year. 76% of executives already watch a business video at least weekly, and Gartner Research predicts by 2018, every employee in every company will interact with video at work three times every day.

The growing prevalence of video has prompted Forrester Research to recommend organizations “Plan for video content, not just video conferencing.” Doing so offers a variety of rewards, from reducing the cost of meetings and events, and improving training and executive communications, to enhancing remote employee engagement and encouraging internal social learning.

Delivering those returns starts with finding the right video platform.

For many organizations, however, this is a no small task. The video platform market is young by enterprise IT standards, meaning feature-for-feature comparisons may be difficult to research. And details crucial to successful implementation are all too often obfuscated by video technology standards and industry jargon.

Finding your next video platform doesn’t have to be complicated. All you need are the right questions in your next Request For Proposal (RFP). A sharp video platform RFP will make it easy to sort out the contenders and spot the options that can actually meet your organization’s video needs, both now and for the future.

So what are the right questions to ask in a video platform RFP? Here are our top ten recommended (jargon-free!) inquiries to include.

1. Video Search: What content is automatically indexed?
2. Production Steps: How does a user record and share a video?
3. Required Hardware: Itemize required hardware.
4. Streaming: How does a user create and share a live video stream?
5. Multi-Camera: How many video inputs can be recorded simultaneously?
6. Developer API: Summarize and document any available platform API.
7. Add-Ons: Itemize what is/isn’t included in the core license.
8. Disaster Recovery: List protections against outages and system failures.
9. Scale: Document ability to support growth and spikes in demand.
10. Mobile: List native apps that provide support for searching and viewing.
11. BONUS – Network Support: Describe support for modern streaming protocols?