Today’s unified communications technologies have become essential for enabling productive real-time collaboration and communication between colleagues and teams who can now virtually meet face-to-face from just about any location to get things done. Video conferencing tools like Zoom, WebEx, Skype, and GoToMeeting have soared in adoption over the past few years to support this need, also giving workers a new way to get even more from their meetings — just by pressing record.

Increasingly, people are using their video conferencing tools to record their conversations, training sessions, brainstorming meetings, project meetings, executive communications, and more. It’s an easy way to capture a complete record of the meeting to reference later if needed, whether someone was able to attend the meeting or not.

But what happens to all of those video conference recordings that frequently contain sensitive internal-facing discussions and information? Where are they stored? And how are they shared?

The Four Problems With Sharing Meeting Recordings

Making it possible to securely share meeting recordings with colleagues is something most conferencing solutions simply aren’t built to do. They’ve been created to facilitate activity, not to document and share it.

And that means the question of how and where to share video recordings is most often left up to the meeting owner themselves — and the answers they usually come up with are less than ideal.

Today, meeting recordings typically end up saved to individual laptops, stashed in folders on your corporate network with nothing more than a date or meeting subject as an identifier, or hosted only temporarily in the cloud. Or worse, a meeting owner will upload the video to consumer-oriented sharing sites like YouTube or Dropbox, where sensitive information may be available to any random person who manages to get their hands on a link.

Sound overblown? As of this writing, a quick YouTube search turns up more than 800,000 videos for “internal meeting,” 240,000 more for “product roadmap,” and another 170,000 for “confidential training”.

Hopefully none of those are yours.

And making video files available is only one part of the problem. When sharing meeting recordings with colleagues, your employees frequently encounter the following challenges — any of which may result in your organization losing the value these assets stand to offer.

Problem 1: You can’t simply send a video file.

Even short video files are often too large to send as email attachments. One single minute of video recorded on an iPhone at 1080p creates a 175MB file — that’s a full order of magnitude larger than the maximum attachment size most enterprise email servers allow for, and it’s only 60 seconds long. When email isn’t an option, people turn to uploading the recording to file sharing sites like Google Drive or Dropbox in order to share the link, but these aren’t optimized for easy video sharing either. Viewers typically have to download the entire video file to their device before they can play it, and none of the file sharing sites today make it possible to navigate through the video content or search inside videos to find specific, relevant moments.

Problem 2: Videos don’t automatically play properly on every device.

Video files aren’t like text documents. There are dozens of different video file types, and few that will reliably play on every PC, Mac, and smartphone used by all the people in your organization. Some video conferencing systems even record videos in proprietary file formats that can’t be played without first downloading and installing special software. It’s a problem that’s easy to overlook until someone tries to share a video and a colleague only receives an “Error: File Type Not Supported” message.

Problem 3: Searching for specific moments in meeting recordings is almost impossible.

Most meetings are scheduled for either 30 or 60 minutes. But when employees go back to review meeting recordings, they seldom intend to watch the full session — they want to revisit those 2 relevant minutes where some important detail was discussed. In a document, that’s easy — you just hit control+F, and a keyword search will help you sift through even the longest of memos. Video, however, has traditionally been a black box, with no means by which viewers can quickly jump to key moments. Instead, they’re left either clicking randomly through the playback timeline, or resigning themselves to watching the entire recording. In either case, the efficiency you gained by recording your meetings is lost because the information inside those recordings isn’t easily accessible.

Problem 4: Your meeting recordings may not be as secure as they really should be.

Whether you’re using your video conferencing tool’s cloud storage or a file sharing system like the aforementioned Google Drive or Dropbox, when “sharing a video” means “just sending someone a link to an unlisted file,” you run the risk of sensitive internal meeting recording ending up in the wrong hands. Most conferencing systems do not offer fine-grained controls for securing your video content at the administrative level. So if an employee chooses the “anyone with this link” can view option, then, indeed, anyone with the link will be able to view it whether they were meant to or not — and you may never even know that it was shared with the wrong person until it’s far too late. While the potential ramifications of such insecure sharing are obvious when it comes to making sensitive content public, the consequences can be just as bad or worse even if the video is only inadvertently open to the wrong internal audience. It’s not hard to imagine the blowback that could occur if employees were able to discover the meetings your executives hold to discuss changes to organizational strategies, budgets, and staffing.

 

So while people have the best intentions to enhance productivity by recording and sharing their meetings, without another solution to help them do just that they are often creating extra work, new frustrations, and potential security risks.

Video Conferencing And A Video Platform: Better Together

It’s absolutely necessary to intelligently manage your meeting recordings, to ensure they’re securely retained and shared only with the intended audiences, and to make sure that those audiences are able to consistently access and quickly search through the content of those videos that are shared with them.

Which is why a complete solution for managing internal meeting recordings does so much more than just record. It takes those recordings and makes searching, sharing, and watching those videos later easy, while keeping everything secure.

That solution is a video platform.

When connected with your in-room meeting recording systems or integrated directly with your video conferencing solution, a video platform will enable your organization to securely capture, manage and share meeting recordings at scale — helping you to unlock a wealth of searchable institutional knowledge and insight that would never before have been available.

It’s like having your own private, secure YouTube — but better.

A modern video platform like Panopto works in concert with your existing meeting technologies so you can easily turn your meeting recordings into reusable information assets. Here are 9 ways a video platform can help your teams get the most out of meetings:

1. Secure, flexible long-term storage.

With a video platform, you can centralize and store all of your meeting recordings in a searchable video library that sets recordings to private by default and saves all of your recordings until you decide you don’t need them anymore. Upload every video conference or conference room recording to your video platform — even add existing meeting recordings in bulk — and your video platform will automatically transcribe your recordings, make all the words spoken and shown in them searchable, and optimize them for seamless one-click streaming on any device.

2. Governance tools for managing meeting recordings at scale.

How do you ensure the right people have access to the right meeting recordings? And how do you keep confidential information under wraps until it’s ready to be shared more broadly? A modern video platform typically includes single sign-on (SSO) integration to give administrators complete control over who meeting recordings can be shared with, whether it’s at the company level, team level, or on an individual recording basis. Administrators can also typically manage video content retention and availability, with options to set videos to expire after a set amount of time, or to require specific approvals before new content can be made available or shared.

3. Search every detail in your meeting recordings.

Finding information stored in videos used to be so inefficient and challenging that few have ever even considered leveraging meeting recordings as knowledge assets. After all, most people have neither the time nor desire to sit through a 30-minute recording to find the specific information they need. But inside video search capabilities have come a long way in the past few years, and today, searching for details captured in a video is no more difficult than searching for words in a text document or email. Panopto’s video platform, for example, uses AI algorithms to identify and index every word spoken and every word shown on screen in a recording, enabling your employees to instantly find and fast-forward to the exact moment where a relevant subject is discussed.

4. Automatic transcription and captioning.

A modern video platform can automatically create a text transcript of every meeting you record, which can be downloaded, edited, and shared with colleagues who may just want to skim through the conversations. It’s a small addition that can make a big difference, enabling meeting attendees to participate more actively in every meeting without worrying about taking minutes or notes. Panopto’s video platform also creates machine-generated time-stamped closed captions for every recording, which can be toggled on and off by the viewer. These closed captions can make meeting recordings even more valuable, not only by making them more accessible for employees with hearing loss, but also making them more flexible as information resources — with captions enabled, your employees can still follow along with a recording even if they’re watching with the sound turned off.

5. Edit meeting recordings before sharing.

Over the course of the usual 30 or 60 minutes, most meetings aren’t 100 percent business. So whether your meetings begin with a little team bonding over kids, sports, weekends, and other casual conversations, or if a discussion gets off-track somewhere in the middle, you want to be able to trim out the moments that don’t need to be documented and stored in your archives. That’s why modern video platforms often include simple video editing tools designed to make it easy to remove unwanted or off-topic conversations from your meeting videos. You can also use these tools to splice together multiple meeting recordings, making it easy to seamlessly stitch together meetings that took a break for lunch, or to unify every conversation about an initiative into a single recording.

6. Enhance the video playback experience.

Meetings are dynamic, collaborative events that often include multiple people conversing while sharing screens, slides, and documents, and even writing on whiteboards — often from various locations. A video platform can enable the viewer to see everything side-by-side, putting them in control of their viewing experience and also extending collaboration beyond the real-time meeting. Panopto’s video platform, for example, features a unique interactive video player that not only shows viewers multiple video feeds, but also enables them to toggle between feeds and even change the video’s playback speed. Viewers can also quickly navigate the content within a meeting recording through video thumbnails that show a clickable preview of what’s coming up, as well as a transcript of the recording that you can scroll through and click to jump ahead.

7. Continue collaborating inside your videos.

When you start recording all your meetings, you can remove a significant amount of redundancy from people’s collaboration efforts. Instantly share knowledge and information that was surfaced during a meeting without requiring your experts to spend extra time producing explainer documents on top of what they already presented. And if someone does need to provide more information, they can quickly create and share a video presentation in a fraction of the time it takes to write up a formal document. Many modern video players also support in-video collaboration, pulling in live chats from your meetings and enabling viewers to add comments or have discussions inside the video after the meeting has ended.

8. Get deeper insights through video analytics.

With a video platform you can finally get answers to the questions you have about what’s happening in meetings at your organization. A modern video platform will typically include a comprehensive video analytics suite that, once you start capturing all your meetings, can help you daylight new insights such as how much time is being spent in meetings, how much of that content is being utilized after the meeting, and what topics are searched and viewed most. You can even find viewer-specific records down to which people are watching what, and whether or not an individual watched a given recording in its entirety.

9. Integrate your video library with other systems.

A video platform can integrate with more than just your video conferencing and in-room AV solutions. Increasingly, it can enable you to add and share meeting recordings in your other business portals, too. Modern video platforms today commonly include integrations for learning management systems (LMSs) such as Cornerstone, customer relationship management systems (CRMs) like Salesforce, and more. Many video platforms also include developer APIs, so you can customize the way you manage recordings and integrate video into your tech ecosystem to your specifications.

If your meeting is worth holding, it’s worth holding onto.

 

It’s easier than ever to record meetings. But those recordings don’t do anyone much good when they’re saved on a random colleague’s computer, buried in an impossible-to-search network folder, or, due to improper formatting or poor bandwidth, simply won’t play on some devices.

Ultimately, a video platform gives you the tools you need to manage an evergrowing archive of meeting recordings and to make the information captured in those videos easy to find on-demand. Video platforms can also include key features that further support collaboration and productivity such as multi-camera recording tools, interactive players, viewer analytics, and integrations to help you bring video-based knowledge and content into your other business systems.

Automatically Record Meetings At Scale

When your organization makes meeting capture automatic, your employees can count on having a searchable recording of the meeting to reference as needed any time they get on a call or sit down in a conference room. And that means everyone will be able to participate more actively in their meetings, confident in knowing they’ll be able to revisit the discussion on-demand whenever the need may arise.

And the good news? Recording every meeting automatically is actually easier than remembering to record each meeting ad-hoc.

Panopto’s industry-leading video platform gives you two options for automating meeting recordings at your organization.

First, for all those in-person meetings taking place in your conference rooms, Panopto’s unique Remote Recorder feature enables you to schedule recording in advance, both for recurring and one-off meetings. Once a meeting has been scheduled to be recorded, all of the cameras and microphones will begin recording at the designated time, enabling attendees to simply walk in and meet without having to think about pressing “record.”

And second, for all those meetings held online via video conference, Panopto comes complete with out-of-the box integrations for video conferencing systems like Zoom, Skype for Business, Bluejeans, and GoToMeeting. When you integrate Panopto with your video conferencing software, all of your meeting recordings will be uploaded to a secure video library, transcoded for optimized playback, and indexed for search, and securely shared according to your permissions — all automatically.

Learn more about Panopto’s integrations >>

Automatically recording your meetings is a smart, scalable way to preserve the information and ideas your people are exchanging. And using a video platform to manage and share your meeting recordings internally is even smarter.

Turning Meetings Into Information Assets

Nearly every organization today is looking for ways to improve meeting productivity and increase the value they get from all that time their people spend in meetings. Increasingly, businesses are realizing that much of the value derived from meetings is the actual information shared in those meetings. And as a result, a growing number of companies are now looking for ways to capture those important meeting moments and to retain them as on-demand resources of institutional expertise and information.

Far more complete than handwritten notes, and far more efficient than requiring meeting owners to draft up post-meeting summaries, video-based meeting capture has quickly proven to be an ideal means for documenting the full details of team discussions.

And with the right set of complementary video management tools, any organization can convert those meetings into searchable information assets, which not only helps improve focus and engagement during a meeting but also ensures that useful knowledge doesn’t fade away after the meeting ends.

A video platform ultimately enables your organization to manage and secure an ever-growing library of meeting videos. And regardless of your organization’s current investments in meeting solutions, a video platform will work with your existing systems so your employees get all the benefits of meeting capture without having to learn a new technology.

Your people are already holding meetings — 62 per person each month, in fact, on average. And more often than not, they’re already holding those discussions in a venue or through a device that’s already set up for video.

Just imagine how much more your teams could accomplish if someone only pressed “record” and all that information and expertise exchanged in those sessions was automatically preserved and shared for the benefit of everyone else on the team, too.

 

Ready for a video management solution that can help support productivity and collaboration at all levels of your organization? Contact the Panopto team today to set up a free trial.