Content-as-a-Service Archives

Video Content-as-a-Service (VCaaS): The Key To Digital Video Transformation

Posted on March 11, 2020August 22, 2024 by Fiona Ashe

Key digital transformation challenges

Businesses need to keep changing and innovating in order to be competitive. Such transformation in the digital age involves the integration of digital technologies into all areas of an enterprise, fundamentally changing how that business works.

Video is one such fundamental: it provides many opportunities to improve how you communicate internally with staff and externally with partners and clients. But, even with the democratization of video, it’s still expensive and time-consuming. So, how can you future-proof your processes while enabling both speed and scale?

What is VCaaS?

The tech world is a world of acronyms and here’s another one for your collection: VCaaS. It stands for Video Content-as-a-Service and this is how it will revolutionise your video management processes:

What VCaaS will do for you

1. Improve collaboration

Collaboration, review and approvals are essential to the workflow, regardless of what kind of video/film content you are creating. But if your team members are spread out in different locations, getting approval from all stakeholders can takes ages, thus delaying time to market. So, facilitating collaboration, review and approvals remotely is the key to speed to market.

2. Ease the pain of legacy technology

Most businesses already have a digital asset management (DAM) platform (or its close relations: MAM, PAM, CMS or ECM*). But does it do what you need it to or is it slowing you down and costing you money?

Legacy technology that was adapted to work with the cloud rather than being “cloud-first” is definitely one of the biggest headaches for businesses. But if you integrate it with technology that will gradually replace it with a simpler, more effective platform that delivers video content to new channels from a “single point of truth”, you can scale to your heart’s content.

3. Support new channels of distribution

People want to consume video content on the platforms and devices of their choice…and the choice is extensive. New channels are coming on stream all the time; for example, TikTok has recently seen a surge in popularity as the go-to video app for young people.

Businesses need to be able to support all “tier 2” customer interactions, including sales, social, apps, partner networks, in-store experiences, immersive experiences like AR and VR, and much more.

4. Make video less complex through AI and Machine Learning

With the ever-increasing number of channels and ways to use video outlined above, it could be a nightmare trying to output a video in dozens of different formats due to compression, frame rates, pixels, codecs, etc. But recent developments mean AI can take care of the mundane technical tasks like transcoding. Yippee! This means that non-techies can execute such tasks, which will create efficiencies for your business.

In addition, AI and machine learning can analyse video content to allow the automatic creation of subtitles, image recognition, compliance and other solutions that make it easier to search and find content.

5. Happy developers and happy business users

Gone are the days (thank goodness!) when you had to have a masters degree in coding, technology or editing in order to be able to create, manage, collaborate on, or output video.

Now, developers can access APIs/services that facilitates them to maintain a “single point of truth” for the content; and — as an added bonus — it’s possible to easily develop new channels of distribution.

Business users don’t need specialist training or audio-visual qualifications: they’ll have easy access to a “single pane of glass” that allows them to easily manage content across multiple channels.

Transformation through VCaaS

So, to transform your business while embracing video as a business tool, why not request a demo of Overcast to see how Video Content-as-a-Service will work hand-in-hand with your DAM to save your business time and money, and will save you a bucketload of stress?

*Definitions:

DAM: digital asset management platform
MAM: media asset management platform
PAM: production asset management platform
CMS: content management system
ECM: enterprise content management system

Video Content-as-a-Service: Manage Video Content Better

Posted on February 25, 2020August 22, 2024 by Fiona Ashe

Managing video content

In 2018, the global Enterprise Video market size was US$3.68 billion and it is expected to reach US$10.4 billion by the end of 2025 (MarketWatch). Staggering, eh?

This continuing explosion in the popularity of video has made it a must-have tool for publishers, broadcasters, brands, creatives, agencies and, of course, video tech companies.

When teams in an organisation produce video content (and it really doesn’t matter how much), they need to be able to easily access it, re-use it, collaborate on it, and share it on various platforms in different formats. But video content is complex so existing content management systems don’t cope with it well and can be very problematic when you want to scale your operations.

Key challenges

In Gartner’s report on how to use Content-as-a-Service (CaaS), it identifies the key challenges as:

New channels emerge and, to support them, we create new silos of content, causing fragmentation and increasing complexity;
Businesses looking to move away from monolithic architectures and large, single-vendor implementations must choose a home for their customer-facing content.

Content-as-a-Service vs DAM

These challenges may not be solvable through the digital asset management (DAM) system — in fact, your DAM may well be your biggest problem. So let’s take a look at five ways in which CaaS is fundamentally different from a DAM:

CaaS is in the cloud — DAM started on premise and is legacy technology;
CaaS provides micro-services — it’s not a monolith;
Easy to use — no need to be a librarian or highly trained;
Low cost — you only pay for what you need;
It’s a service — not a product. We describe Services in what they do. Whereas we describe Products by how they look.

Now here’s the techie stuff

Content-as-a-Service is the creation, management and delivery of content via a headless approach, usually, an API serving JSON, decoupled from presentation tiers. In digital commerce, this often also combines elements of PIM and WCM.

Er…thanks for that, Gartner. For those of us that don’t speak techie, could you draw us a picture?

Uses of Content-as-a-Service

Enhance and improve existing content channels without re-platforming.
Extend content to new channels while retaining consistency and continuity.
Consolidate multiple content silos into a single, cross-channel service.
Deliver part of an API-oriented architectural approach for new digital initiatives.

Solve the problem

CaaS provides an emerging solution to the problem of managing video content. Some include DAM capabilities and/or video integration. We’d be delighted to explain more about how Content-as-a-Service will work with your existing DAM to help you save time and money on video management. Just click here to start the conversation.

Exercising Your Inner Hollywood: How Video Content-as-a-Service Helps Organisations Scale

Posted on January 31, 2020August 22, 2024 by Fiona Ashe

A challenging remit

Video will account for 82% of Internet traffic by 2022 (Cisco). But such an explosion in video creation and distribution brings significant challenges in terms of managing it.

Is your video content stored on hard drives? How can teams collaborate on it? How much technical expertise is needed to manage it? How can you find the videos clips you need? Are the files sizes too big to handle? Are you duplicating clips unnecessarily? Can you distribute in lots of different formats? Does your video platform integrate with your other technologies? Is your video strategy scalable?

Solution: Video Content-as-a-Service (VCaaS)

The answer to all of the above — and the secret that will save you from major headaches — is VCaaS. Sounds like it could be a different type of ailment, just as debilitating as a migraine, doesn’t it?! Well, VCaaS stands for Video Content-as-a-Service and it has the Midas touch in terms of managing video.

So let’s look at what VCaaS is and how it can solve your problems.

In simple terms, Overcast — which is a VCaaS provider — facilitates you to manage video (and other digital content) from a single platform and allows you to easily integrate your existing technology.

No more silos

Up until recently, video was siloed in organizations and was managed by engineers and editors. Now, with advances in automation and artificial intelligence services, video can be managed across an organisation by employees with little or no technical knowledge.

The new distribution landscape

There are now so many channels through which video is delivered — broadcast, web, social, apps, affiliate networks, in-store, stadiums. Previously, when organizations introduced new distribution channels, they would also create new content pipelines. But this led to silos and file duplication, which is a costly way of working. Now we can work from a “single source of truth” and manage it with a “single pane of glass.”

Facing the challenge of scaling up

Nowadays, all businesses are exercising their inner Hollywood — financial institutions, multinationals, publishers, sports organisations and enterprises (to name but a few) are publishing more and more quality video content because consumers demand it. But the challenge is being able to easily access it, re-use it, collaborate on it, share it or sell it on different platforms. Video content is complex so it’s not surprising that existing content management systems struggle with it…and this impedes scalability.

Speed to market

The cloud has revolutionised the way we create, manage and distribute video. But legacy technologies are hampering progress. It can be difficult, expensive and time-consuming to swap out a legacy system. So the good news is that Overcast integrates with your existing partners and platforms, allowing you to get started quickly. Then, if you’d like to, you can replace those systems naturally over time.

We’d be delighted to show you how Video Content-as-a-Service will save you time, money and headaches, so click here to request a demo.