It’s estimated that the amount of data stored by businesses worldwide is doubling every 1.2 years, and video content represents a growing piece of that quickly growing big data pie. In the next two years, Gartner estimates that large businesses will stream 16 hours of video per employee per month. That’s 45 minutes of enterprise video watched per employee every business day.

For IT organizations and enterprise content management (ECM) teams, this means that video needs to be a core part of your ECM strategy. The challenge, however, is that video is fundamentally different from all other types of content stored and managed by enterprises. The way video is accessed by employees, the way it’s searched, the amount of bandwidth and storage it consumes, and the analytics requirements all make video unique in the world of enterprise content management.

Why is managing videos different from managing other types of content?

Video file size – Video files are massive compared to documents, forms, images, and other data managed within the enterprise. Even a short video can exceed the file size limits of leading ECM systems. For example, in SharePoint 2013, the default max file size is 50MB. A five-minute 1280×720 webcam video or screencast can take up 60-80MB on disk, and a 1-minute video recorded with an iPhone 5s can exceed 80MB. Even when SharePoint’s file size limit is raised to the maximum boundary of 2GB, it’s not enough to hold a 30-minute iPhone video.

How videos are accessed – Videos aren’t downloaded in the same way that documents and other file types are. Instead, videos are streamed in chunks, so that at any time, you only have a small portion of the video on your hard drive. In addition, different versions of a video may be streamed to various devices based on their constraints. For example, an employee watching a video in their desktop web browser may receive a 1080p HD video, while someone viewing from their smartphone may receive a lower-resolution version of that same video.

Searching Videos – Searching for video content has traditionally been much more challenging than searching other content such as documents, web pages and email, which are comprised of text. By contrast, video is effectively an opaque blob of bytes, and as a result, you need different technology such as automatic metadata extraction, speech-to-text, and optical character recognition to search inside videos.

Video Analytics – With video content, it often isn’t enough to simply know how many times a particular recording was accessed. Content owners may want to know who watched each video, and whether they watched to completion – this is particularly important for training and compliance videos.

What do these differences mean for organizations looking to manage an increasingly large library of video assets?

For most organizations, a traditional content management system won’t provide the functionality needed to store and manage video. Instead, organizations should look to video content management systems (video CMSs), which are specialized repositories optimized for the unique needs of video:

• Multi-gigabyte files and multi-terabyte libraries – A video CMS is built for storing tens of thousands of video files that may each consume hundreds of gigabytes of hard disk space.
• Delivering video content – Video content management systems automatically detect corporate network conditions and device capabilities, and stream videos in the highest quality, most efficient way possible given these constraints.
• Searching inside video content – Some video content management systems like Panopto include specialized search engines that allow users to search across entire libraries of video, and find any word spoken or shown in any of the videos.
• Video analytics – A video CMS includes reporting capabilities that enable analytics on collections of videos, individual videos, and the viewing behavior of individual users.
• Integrated video creation tools – This is a critical but often-overlooked part of enterprise video content management. If you don’t give users a consistent way to record video and screencasts using their laptops and mobile devices, they’ll capture less content. This reduces the amount of information being shared within your organization. Similarly, if the tools you provide users aren’t tightly integrated with the video CMS, it makes it less likely that the users will upload the content to this central repository.