“Video consumption grows 100%+ every year” — YouTube.

The global online video platform in media and entertainment market is projected to grow at an annual rate (CAGR) of 17.5% from 2018 to 2025 (— Allied Market Research). Businesses will ignore it at their peril.

In our last two blog posts, we explored search and collaboration, as well as management and video production. Once created, video needs a home to live in (storage) and a destination to go to (distribution). Today we are talking about one of the fundamental challenges — size of video files.

Size matters

How big is Big Video?

1 hour of 4k (cinema-resolution) video shot for a 30-second TV ad is equal to 300GB — this is more than can fit on the average computer! To put it in further perspective, 1 year of CCTV video for an average police department amounts to 1.5PB (which is approximately 80,000 Harry Potter movies in HD)! 

PB? What on earth is a PB? Well, a petabyte — or PB — is a crazy large chunk of data. You’re on first name terms with a gigabyte (GB), right? And you may have been introduced to the terabyte (TB). A TB is 1,024 times bigger than a GB. Sounds like a lot? Think about this: the Hubble Space Telescope generates about 10 terabytes of new data every year.

So, getting back to the question: what is a petabyte? A single PB is 1,024 TB — or more than 1 quadrillion bytes! That’s a heck of a lot of data. 

“1 PB is equivalent to over 4,000 digital photos per day over your entire life.” — Lifewire.

So if you’re generating a lot of video content, it’s easy to work out that you’re going to need a lot of storage space and the cloud might be your best option.

Cloud is the champion

Using a cloud-based platform provides more advantages than just storage. It facilitates you to share media across projects, groups or channels and to respond quickly to partners, distributors or clients.

No doubt you’ll be channeling a particular promotional campaign though your social profiles, website, email marketing software and you’ll want it to look amazing on mobile. So you need all of these to work off the same set of base assets for that campaign.

Getting your video out there

And then there’s outputting. How many versions of your video do you need? Disney has to create 234 versions of every film it produces to accommodate the aspect ratios of the various distribution channels (cinema, broadcast and streaming) and to supply versions in different languages for worldwide distribution.

Once you’ve decided on the number of versions you’d like to create, then there’s the quandary of formatting each one. How do you export your video file in formats optimised for YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook and all of the other different platforms without a degree in transcoding or bribing a highly-skilled technician? The secret is (shhh, don’t tell anyone): choose a platform that does all of this heavy lifting for you. And preferably one that automates it.

“81% of businesses say video increases sales.” — Optinmonster

Saving $$$

With the time saved on collaboration, reviews, approvals and outputting of your video assets — not to mention the cost savings on sending “urgent” DVDs/drives via FedEx or UPS — it’s a no-brainer to use a streamlined platform to manage your video projects. One login, one solution, one happy you!