Here you can find our tutorial videos on upload/import and various other features in detail.

Detailed tutorial videos are included below –

• Upload/Import + Embed overview

Dashboard features & video setting details

• Multi-User addition to account & permission levels
• Adding more accounts/projects to same dashboard
• Get all videos data in csv (title, id, status, time added)
• Generating video page url to share directly to user (not embedding)
• Video settings overview (Thumbnail, title, tags, subtitles, replace video)
• Thumbnail & title change: Tutorial
• Subtitle addition (Multiple Language supported)
• Replace/Swap/Update Videos
• Video Files & Thumbnails Generated data & total storage for a video
• Api key generation (Client Secret key for your account)
• Webhooks to fetch video status via API

We have developed several features as part of our dashboard and as part of our API so that users can manage their videos. This blog covers all stages of a video-based workflow, from uploading video to using advanced analytics to assess video performance.

Upload

It is vital for our users the the time between video upload and when video being ready is minimized. Optimizing the time to encode and encrypt videos is an engineering challenge that remains top priority for our developer team.

The green Upload button can be used to directly upload videos from your device. You may alternatively import videos from URLs of MP4 or FLV files, from either HTTP or FTP.You can also import video files frmo Cloud Service Providers such as Dropbox and Google Drive, and from video service providers Wistia and Vimeo. If you require to bulk import videos from other sources please communicate to us at support@vdocipher.com.

Directly importing videos from URLs saves your device’s bandwidth usage and allows video file transfers to happen completely behind the scenes. There is a progress bar that shows the relative completeness of upload process. Once the video is uploaded, it shows in dashboard with any of the following status, which reflects the status of the video upload process:

You can check the video status by making an API call as well. If the video you uploaded is in Queued status for a long time, drop us a message at site chat or support@vdocipher.com, Generally a 15 min video should be encoded in 20 minutes time and be ready for release. However if you have uploaded multiple videos at once – say 50 or more then video upload may take more time.

Many of our enterprise customers have their customers or partners actually providing videos to them. In such cases, it becomes quite useful if the video transferred by them to your website or app directly reaches your account on Vdocipher. VdoCipher enables this functionality through upload APIs. To automate your upload process you can visit the following blog on Video Upload Using API.

We have optimized our encoding configurations to generate best quality videos at lowest bitrates. If you have any particular request with regard to resolution/ bitrates please let us know at support@vdocipher.com.

Integration into site or app

There are mainly three means of integrating VdoCipher to your website:

• Plugins – WordPress, Joomla!, Moodle, Drupal
• Player Embed Code with Dynamic OTP Generation
• Quick Embed via iFrame

To see the embed options videos please click on the Embed button for the respective video in the Dashboard.

Plugins – WordPress, Joomla!, Moodle, Drupal

The simplest way to embed secure videos through your CMS-based website is by using our plugin. The plugins for WordPress, Joomla!, Moodle and Drupal generate dynamic OTPs in the backend and send them to the front-end. The OTP generation and authentication happens completely under the hood of the plugin, and to embed the video you only require to add a shortcode, having the following format:

[vdo id= '1234567890']

Please visit Protect Videos on WordPress for more details on using our WordPress plugin. While WordPress remains the most popular Content Management System, our plugins for Joomla!, Moodle and Drupal continue to be very popular with content creators looking to protect their premium videos. Plugins for Joomla!, Moodle and Drupal have the same means of embedding video through the shortcode.

The following blogs give details on using VdoCipher plugin for the respective CMS:

• Protect Videos on WordPress
• VdoCipher plugin on WordPress directory
• Moodle Video Embed and Upload Solution
• Secure Videos in Joomla with VdoCipher plugin
• VdoCipher Joomla Extension

Player Embed Code with OTP Generation at Backend

VdoCipher’s secure video streaming requires backend authentication via unique tokens. For this your site backend has to make an HTTP request to VdoCipher API, which returns an OTP to authenticate playback session. This OTP is to be then appended to the player embed code on the site front-end.

The embed code would require the API Secret Key (also called API Key), which you can get from the Config section of the Dashboard.

Please note that the OTP call should always be made from the site backend (controller in MVC architecture). The received OTP (and playbackInfo) are then appended to the player embed code in the frontend (view in MVC architecture). This division across site backend and frontend is critical for ensuring maximum security. We have deliberately blocked OTP requests from site front-end, as this would expose your API Secret key to site visitors.

You can consult the following resources for website integration in different web scripting langugages

• VdoCipher API Page
• Protect Videos using Watermark
• Sample VdoCipher API Implementation for PHP
• Sample VdoCipher API Implementation for ASP.NET
• Sample VdoCipher API Implementation for Node.js

Quick Embed via iFrame

The Quick Embed option via iFrame is the fastest way to embed videos to your site. This is the best option when you are using ready-made website builder platforms such as Wix, Weebly or Squarespace. The following blog provides details on VdoCipher integration with ready-to-build site platforms

The quick embed code can be customized, with three features:

• You can set the embed code to expire for a period of time. By default the embed code expiry is set to 30 years.
• IP and Geo – You can limit access to certain IP addresses and to certain geographical locations only.
• URL Whitelisting – Video will play only if the video player is embedded to the main website. This ensures that piracy through URL sharing is avoided

Note that public embed code & URL whitelisting are less secure than integration through APIs or plugins. Also watermarking is not possible in that case. However even then the stream is fully encrypted and therefore piracy is still prevented from downloaders. Overall our security offerings are much more complete than our competition.

Please make sure that you only embed videos after you have edited all the required settings. We highly recommend that you opt for security through plugin or API, but if not possible we have simplified the process of Public embed code and URL whitelisting option.

Video detail management

You can manage video details, including title, description, tags, poster image and subtitles by clicking the Edit button for each video.

Add Tags

We have enabled a tag-based video management system, which makes it easier for users to categorize and manage their videos. You can easily add/ remove tags from the Edit menu.

Alternatively you may use the tagging API to update tags in your videos.

Thumbnail

By default, a random frame in the video is set as thumbnail. You can customize the poster image to capture your viewer’s attention and enhance click-through rates for your video. To set any other image, you can upload the image in the Edit section.

You may alternatively use the Poster image API to upload the new poster image.

Add captions to Videos

You can upload subtitles for any language that is part of the ISO 639-1 system, as a VTT file. Subtitles are really useful to reach out to newer audiences, as well as to help native speakers follow the video content better.

Filter and Search

Specific videos can be searched using ID, Title or associated tags using the Filter and Search option available in the dashboard. The complete details (id, title, status) of all videos can be downloaded at one go by selecting the Download CSV option.

You can alternatively use the Search API to search for videos based on tags, video ID or title.

Analytics – Usage details

You can see your account bandwidth and storage usage on a daily basis in the Analytics section of the Dashboard.

This data is received from CDN endpoints that accurately reflect the daily bandwidth usage. You can export this bandwidth data as a .csv file for any date range.

We also provide advanced video analytics about how viewers watch your videos. These analytics collect anonymized information about the most popular videos on your platform. These analytics are designed to provide you information about the relative performance of your videos, so you can see how best to improve your library of video content.

Please note that the measurement of video analytics is different from measurement of bandwidth usage, and may not track 100% of user sessions.

Testing for Secure Streaming

Once your video is ready you test secure video playback on any device. You can log into the Dashboard and simply click the play button to start video playback. You are welcome to test out downloader plugins or any hack your best developer can think of to try and download our videos.

Normally our video encoding settings have been optimized to stream highest quality videos at lowest possible bitrates. Indeed we often delight our users by streaming HD videos at 400kbps bitrates.

However if you find any issues with video streaming, it may be for either of the following reasons:

• For the first time of playback, the video is not cached in nearest CDN servers, and the streaming is therefore a little slow. Once video is cached to the server, after second playback video quality and streaming improves quite a lot.
• It is possible that the available video bitrates are high when compared to your network connections. While adaptive streaming ensures that the best resolution is displayed for user’s network conditions, in such a case you may require custom encoding settings. Please communicate your issue to us at support@vdocipher.com, and we’ll ensure that optimized encoding settings are applied for your videos.

We have implemented many optimizations in our encoding settings to ensure the best user experience. These optimizations have enabled our customers to reach users across the world, including in corners of India and the African continent where internet connectivity is comparatively poor.

– Blogs & Site chat – There is lot of documentation on how to use, and what are the benefits and standards for various technologies at our blog. (vdocipher.com/blog), Search the blog for your required keyword to see related articles.

We ensure availability of our support team at the live site chat (bottom right of the vdocipher site). Please feel free to ping us to have a detailed conversation. Our support team would help you through most of your queries and problems.

For a full version 5 GB free trial of vdocipher secure video hosting & streaming , register at www.vdocipher.com

Siddhant Jain

CEO, VdoCipher. Writes about video tech, ed tech and media tech.

www.vdocipher.com/

The post Video Management details on VdoCipher Dashboard appeared first on VdoCipher Blog.

We see that in many cases, the first idea that comes to the video creator is to self-host videos. This means having an in-house team to handle video streaming & hosting technology. However, handling the video hosting on their own end is often not technically and economically feasible. A lot of businesses realize this only after spending valuable time and resources into developing an inefficient video hosting infrastructure. Many IT service companies that do not have video as a primary offering also come to this realization at some point.

Here we list the primary reasons as to why you should not self host videos.  Most of these recommendations apply to both high-budget and economy users, as both the service offerings and price points of premium online video platforms (OVPs) deliver better returns on investment than could be obtained from self-hosting videos.

What is Self Hosted Video?

In the context of video distribution, self-hosting video is the process of uploading and storing video files to your website or some other rented webspace.

Also, there are different ways to host videos on your website or blog. The most popular method is to use a video hosting service like YouTube or VdoCipher. These video hosting platforms allow you to upload your videos and embed them directly on your site. 

Self hosting videos is another way to host the videos on your own server. But it requires more technical work on your part but also gives you more control over the videos. You can choose how the videos are displayed. Finally, to host your videos, you can also use services like Amazon S3. It is a more expensive option but offers more flexibility and control.

Reasons Why Self Hosted Videos are Not a Good Choice

There are several reasons why self-hosted videos are not a good idea.

• One of the biggest reasons is that they are not as reliable as hosted videos on a trustworthy video hosting provider. If your video hosting goes down, so do your videos. This can be a major problem if you rely on your videos for your business and marketing.
• Another issue with self-hosted videos is that they can be costly. Hosting videos can be expensive, and if you’re not careful, you may spend more than you would on a professional video hosting provider. When you are self hosting video content, you will have to pay for the bandwidth (data transfer), which could be significant.
• Finally, self-hosted videos are prone to security risks. If your video is hacked, it could be illegally downloaded or may be used to spread malware or viruses. It could hamper your reputation and revenue generation and lead to low customer retention.

Server and CDN setup, Scaling, Automation for streaming

When hosting videos on static web pages, each time the webpage loads the video is loaded as well. Handling 100s of users loading your video player each minute would require multiple cores of servers and Content Delivery Network implementation. The video hosting infrastructure should have the capacity to serve users at peak times, when there are maximum users on the page.
It is a lot different doing these for static sites & video stuff. Handling multiple cores of servers, implementing CDN, ensuring it goes well during peaks and scales well, is a tough job. Here is an example to explain better.

Consider a webpage that hosts a 5-minute video, getting 100 pageviews in a minute. These 100 users who came within a minute on the web page were in real time loading the page and requesting objects from server. These server requests were being generated at different milliseconds – there were never 100 simultaneous users, they had loaded the page at different milliseconds. While all the other page elements are loaded at different times within the one minute window, in the case of video every user is simultaneously fetching content. For a 5 minute video all the users will be fetching content at same millisecond level from servers, overloading the server hosting your website. This can therefore overload the server, and lead to your website crashing. For this reason optimization of hosting infrastructure requires that your video hosting and website hosting be on separate servers. Setting up a separate server for handling videos would again require a whole new server setup process, adding to your responsibilities considerably.

Protecting Videos from Download and Piracy

If you choose to self host videos , you would most likely be providing a direct video video URL from your video hosting server to the site. This can make your video vulnerably to download from a lot of free downloaders and plugins such as IDM and Download Helper. These plugins are widely available on the web, which leads to loss of revenue from content owing to video piracy. Secure Online Video Platforms would safeguard your content from online video piracy.

Encoding for multiple devices & Bitrates

Currently the video codecs segment is highly fragmented. Apart from Chrome, which supports almost all the popularly used codecs (H.264, WebM, Ogg), none of the web browsers supports all the major codecs. For instance, Safari and Internet Explorer support only H.264 encoding and not WebM or Ogg, whereas Firefox, the next most popular browser after Chrome, does not support H.264 codecs. When self-hosting videos, you would need to transcode specifically in each of the codecs. Encoding is again a server + CPU intensive process. A different file is needed when viewing a video on a phone and when viewing the video on your PC or HD television. You would need to transcode videos for desktop, iOS and android separately. Also encoding is required for different bitrates, so that your viewers can watch your videos across all devices smoothly and seamlessly.

Video Player – Controls, Adaptive, Customization

Video.js is a JavaScript and CSS library that is used as an HTML5 video player. Using the Video.js library requires a great level of coding. For this reason it is recommended that you opt for a secure online video platform (OVP) over coding from scratch. Apart from the initial setup, additional customizations required are adding desired colors, themes, bitrates, sizes and adaptation to aspect ratio. This customization is required to allow video playback across multiple devices and browsers.

Costs of Large development team & Time to launch Video business

If you are willing to setup your own video infrastructure in-house, it is important that you look at the bottomline of costs and time of development. This includes spending on the development team, at which point you would need to understand salary costs of developers. Besides, in-house development would take months to launch, in which period you would need to bring together a team for setting up the video infrastructure and understanding the hosting requirements. Besides the one-time setup costs, you would need a dedicated team to troubleshoot problems. VdoCipher online video platform has the necessary video infrastructure, and our support ensures that your videos faces minimal downtime. You can get started with using VdoCipher in just about 10 minutes, and can integrate your website with our hosting service in 3 days, with full support from our customer experience team. VdoCipher uses AWS & Akamai at backend to ensure great cloud availability.

Still not convinced? Shawn Hesketh at WP101 has written a comprehensive post on why you should never host your own videos.

For a full version 30-day free trial of our secure and reliable streaming solution, register for a free demo at www.vdocipher.com

FAQs

What is the difference between self-video hosting and professional video hosting services?

Professional video hosting services usually offer more storage space and bandwidth, as well as better security and video player with added functionalities. They may also offer more advanced features, such as the ability to stream live videos or directly embed videos on your website.

On what factors does a video’s bandwidth consumption depend?

For a specific video, calculating the bandwidth usage mainly depends on the video’s resolution, bitrate, and length.

Why are self-hosted videos insecure compared to videos hosted on commercial hosting platforms?

Self-hosted videos may be more susceptible to unauthorized access and malware attacks, as they are often not as well-protected as those hosted by a third-party provider. They are highly prone to video piracy or illegal distribution as they are not securely encrypted. In case of the hosting server crashes, the self hosted videos are likely to be deleted or lost.

Siddhant Jain

CEO, VdoCipher. Writes about video tech, ed tech and media tech.

www.vdocipher.com/

The post Why Not to Host Your Own Videos? Challenges in Self-hosting videos appeared first on VdoCipher Blog.

What Are Video Hosting Sites?

Video Hosting Sites are service providers that enable you to host your videos for your eLearning, Media, and other online video platforms. By using a video hosting platform, you can easily upload videos and then embed them on your platform. These sites are widely used by eLearning, media, and other businesses to host their videos online. 

If you have tried building your online platform from scratch, then you would have encountered the logic behind the storage of media files. By default, a CMS, LMS, or framework starts storing your videos in the same server where your web files are stored. These uploaded files also get delivered from the same server and utilize its bandwidth. This creates an additional burden on the server of storage and bandwidth consumption. This is the reason why Video Hosting Sites that have a scalable infrastructure with bug-free storage, encryption, and delivery setup are a must to have for saving cost and better user experience.

You also get several important features such as a customizable player, which allows you to brand the player and decide what controls you want to show. On top of it, you also get a CDN which ensures that your users are able to access your content seamlessly regardless of their geographic location. Other important features can be video analytics and DRM protection among others.

Why Do You Need Video Hosting Sites?

Any video platform, you might have come across hosts their website on a video hosting solution. They usually upload the videos on the video hosting servers and then embed them on their own platform.

But then, you might be wondering why they host it on another platform and not their own server.

The answer is simple, video files are large in size and with megapixels increasing, they tend to become even larger. Hosting them on your own server would end up slowing your website a lot. This is due to the consumption of additional space and bandwidth capacity of your web server. A low-resource site will eventually slow down and might even crash. You would’ve come across a website with lots of images that take forever to load. Now imagine this with several videos, a web page would end up getting loaded forever.

Cost wise web hosting server is usually dearer than a media storage server. Additional cost includes CDN, transcoding, encryption, DRM licensing, integration, and much more. A secure video hosting site does all that for you at a highly affordable cost even when you compare that with a non-secure hosting provider.

Why Self-Hosting Videos is a bad idea

There are several reasons why you should not self-host videos and go for video hosting sites. A few of the important reasons have been listed below.

Server and CDN setup, Scaling, Automation for streaming

When hosting videos on static web pages, each time the webpage loads the video is loaded as well. Handling 100s of users loading your video player each minute would require multiple cores of servers and Content Delivery Network implementation. The video hosting infrastructure should have the capacity to serve users at peak times when there are maximum users on the page.

It is a lot different doing these for static sites & video stuff.

Protecting Videos from Download and Piracy

If you choose to self-host videos, you would most likely be providing a direct video URL from your video hosting server to the site. This can make your video vulnerable to download from a lot of free downloaders and plugins such as IDM and Download Helper. These plugins are widely available on the web, which leads to a loss of revenue from content owing to video piracy.

Encoding for multiple devices & Bitrates

When self-hosting videos, you would need to transcode and encode your videos in several different quality and formats so that it can run on different devices. Encoding is again a server + CPU-intensive process. A different file is needed when viewing a video on the phone and when viewing the video on your PC or HD television. You would need to transcode videos for desktop, iOS, and Android separately. Also, encoding is required for different bitrates, so that your viewers can watch your videos across all devices smoothly and seamlessly.

Video Player – Controls, Adaptive, Customization

Video.js is a JavaScript and CSS library that is used as an HTML5 video player. Using the Video.js library requires a great level of coding. For this reason, it is recommended that you opt for a secure online video platform (OVP) over coding from scratch. Apart from the initial setup, additional customizations required are adding desired colors, themes, bitrates, sizes, and adaptation to aspect ratio. This customization is required to allow video playback across multiple devices and browsers.

Costs of a Large development team & Time to launch a Video business

If you are willing to set up your own video infrastructure in-house, it is important that you look at the bottom line of costs and time of development. This includes spending on the development team, at which point you would need to understand the salary costs of developers. Besides, in-house development would take months to launch, in which period you would need to bring together a team for setting up the video infrastructure and understanding the hosting requirements. Besides the one-time setup costs, you would need a dedicated team to troubleshoot problems.

Features and Advantages of Video Hosting Sites

• multi-DRM protection – No video creator wants their premium content to be pirated. This is the reason why you need to have the best encryption and dynamic key exchange mechanism for your video protection. Google and Apple provide this technology with the help of video hosting partners like VdoCipher for piracy protection.
• Dynamic Watermarking – there are incidents when an authorized user tries to screen capture a video using a tool or camera. Preventing screen capture on some browsers is difficult and that is why the dynamic watermark feature having the details of authorized users acts as a deterrent.
• Video analytics – Key video analytics parameters include the number of visitors, traffic source, view time, and other engagement metrics. Based on the video analytics, you can tailor and improve the video performance.
• Content Delivery Network (CDN) – once your video file gets uploaded, its copies are made at multiple locations across the globe to provide the fastest connection with the end user. It improves latency and reduces the load on the main server, thus improving the overall delivery and user experience.
• Adaptive Bitrate Streaming – this technology automatically adjusts the video quality based on the viewer’s internet speed. Irrespective of low connectivity or remote locations, videos are delivered at the best possible resolution. For doing this multiple-size copies are made and delivered as per the required bitrate.
• Multi-device compatibility – a video hosting site must provide playback compatibility with various devices and browsers. HTML5 playback, iOS playback, and other device or browser playback should be bug-free.
• Multi-Language Video captioning – Proper captioning makes video accessibility much wider, covering those who are deaf or hard of hearing. As captions have written transcripts of the video, the level of comprehension is further improved. This leads to better engagement and availability of content to a global audience and non-native speakers. Dashboard, APIs and the player must have compatibility to add and switch the caption language.
• Plugins, APIs, and SDKs – for easy integration with open-source CMS, LMS, framework, and coding languages, a video hosting site also provides plugins, APIs, and SDKs to connect. For example, APIs can be used to automate various uploading and embedding tasks.

Need of Security in Video Hosting Sites

A platform having the requirement of secure video hosting usually has premium video content that they need to protect. It is important to understand the phases when a video is vulnerable to a leak. The first phase is when the media is uploaded and stored at a cloud location. The second phase is when the video is getting delivered for playback.

An unencrypted video stored in cloud storage is always prone to get copied and since it does not need any unlocking, it is protection free. Similarly, the downloader tools easily capture the URL of the video stream and download the whole file during the playback. Even if the file is encrypted, the key to decryption is usually getting passed through network headers to the browser or player. This is the reason why advanced downloader tools capture these keys and download the decrypted stream.

The solution for establishing a secure connection is only possible if the hardware or environment also provides a black box for key protection. That is the reason this technology is limited to the likes of Google and Apple who control the environment of video playback. As public access to the technology (DRM), they provide partnered secure video hosting options like VdoCipher. Using a multi-DRM security solution like VdoCipher also takes care of bug-free integrations, APIs, SDKs, plugins, dynamic watermarking, protection on rooted devices, and much more.

Although it is easily possible to import videos to a secure video hosting site at a later point, it is best to start looking for video security options in the planning stage only. This will help you save the migration cost when you switch to secure video hosting. Switching at a later stage might become a necessity due to the threat of your premium video content being leaked. 

Top 7 Video Hosting Sites in 2023

A summary table is included at the start with more details on each company following up after the table.

1. Youtube

Youtube is the most popular of all free video hosting sites.  Widely used for promotional videos and entertainment content, it is the foremost choice for new content creators. If piracy and earning direct revenues is not a major though for you, YouTube is one of the free video hosting sites and scalable solution for a market outreach.

2. Dailymotion

Dailymotion started as a video hosting platform parallel to YouTube but eventually lagged behind owing to massive google’s scale and innovation in the video infrastructure. It is still one of the major platforms to promote your video content. Some content producers might find YouTube content policies and restrictions too harsh, dailymotion is a good alternative for such video producers. 

3. Vdocipher

If you are a business owner who is looking to sell premium videos on a website or app, say online courses or movies or web series, or tutorials at a subscription or pay-per-view price, then VdoCipher is the ideal video hosting solution for you.  The main features are Hollywood-grade DRM encryption security and a user-specific dynamic watermarking feature to prevent video download and screen-capture. These all features in tandem work wonder for video protection, ensuring that your video can not be pirated in any manner. Plans are affordable for all sizes of businesses, whether it is small business or a large enterprises. 

4. Vimeo

Vimeo is a free video hosting site along with the paid plan options lets you upload videos, without any problems. It is one of the best video hosting sites that enable you to share your video content. Whether you are a business looking to host videos on your own site or an individual looking to promote content on a global platform, Vimeo provides options for both. Its main advantages are decent level of customisability over YouTube and affordable plans within reach of most of businesses. 

5. Wistia

Wistia has made a name in the field of marketing and product videos owing to its detailed in-video analytics and CTA features. Though there are other providers doing the same Wistia has been the longest in this field and provides good aesthetics. If you are looking to use videos as an option to convert customers on your site, Wistia should be a good option.

But a user should keep in mind that Wistia videos are non-secure as they are not DRM encrypted. So it is not a good solution for the course and movie businesses looking to sell videos online;

6. Vidyard

Vidyard is similar to Wistia in features but more catered in solutions and pricing to enterprises. It is not so affordable, but if you want to engage your clients with sales and marketing videos; you can look at Vidyard. 

7. Kaltura

Kaltura is a heavily funded VC  business video hosting startup providing a multitude of solutions to enterprises. It is not small-medium business friendly but offers an array of solutions for media, marketing, and education businesses looking to monetize online videos. 

Free 30 Day full version trial for secure video hosting at VdoCipher.com 

Video Hosting FAQ Summary

Siddhant Jain

CEO, VdoCipher. Writes about video tech, ed tech and media tech.

www.vdocipher.com/

The post Top 7 Video Hosting Sites In 2023[Free & Paid] appeared first on VdoCipher Blog.

The Washington Post since 2013 has started to aims towards expanding readership and subscription to their digital content. This is expected to offset loss of revenues from declining print subscriptions and advertising revenues. At the moment they are experimenting with various content strategies. The target is to attract newer viewers from across the globe, while retaining the quality of their journalism that have seen their staff win 47 Pulitzer Prizes. A key aspect of surviving in the digital landscape is to maintain focus on video as a central tool for journalistic coverage. In this blog I explore how video is emerging as a key component of the Washington Post’s content strategy.

Video in Content Marketing Strategy

Currently, Washington Post’s mix of video content stands at 40% original content and 60% aggregated content. The company’s near term target is to flip this statistic to 65% of their own original content to 35% sourced from other agencies.

The company currently has 40 people on their video staff, of which 32 are regularly involved in shooting and producing content. To expand their video offering, the company posted 30 new jobs to their video department. The objective of their video strategy is two-fold:

• To chalk out videos that are complementary to their content strategy
• To create videos that gain prominence on social media channels.

To get a glimpse of how Washington Post is rolling out its video strategy, I checked out the page of their video section. The main video on the page was a video report of the Oroville dam spillway, which at the time was in the risk of a massive collapse. A visual report in such a scenario adds considerable more value to the message, unlike the case of press briefings for which value addition by video over text is much less important.

This current video strategy of Washington Post is to:

1. Complement News Story – Roll out video content that complements the news story, increasing site engagement of visitors
2. To gain new viewers – Video has the potential to engage newer viewers much more easily. Increasing the number of casual visitors directly leads to an increase in their potential subscription figures.
3. Emerge as a Video destination – WaPo’s investment in video means that they no longer wish to be considered just a newspaper with a video section, but rather a video destination in their own right. Making video a central part of their content strategy requires that they leverage various forms of video delivery solutions – this includes social media and Over the Top video.

Leveraging different media – Facebook, YouTube and OTT

WaPo recognize that it is much easier to monetize videos that are on their own website. However, in order to attract new viewers they need to position themselves on social media, mainly Facebook, and video aggregator YouTube.

Facebook is emerging as an important player in the video segment. WaPo’s strategy for promoting video for Content Marketing for Facebook and YouTube is different, because of the different nature of the two technology platforms. Facebook users are much more passive, and are on that site for diverse and an unspecified range of content. For this reason content on Facebook has to be designed to be inherently able to appeal to new users, and to be inherently able to become viral. Besides content on Facebook should make minimal requirements on the viewer’s attention span. On the other hand users are on YouTube exclusively to watch video, which affords the company an opportunity to show longer videos that require greater attention span, and a greater engagement with their content. In the meantime, you can focus on other promotional strategies such as hiring an eCommerce PPC agency or using the help of a branding company.

Washington Post’s Over The Top (OTT) strategy is to promote themselves as a video destination on OTT services such as Apple TV, Roku and Fire TV. For OTT content the newspaper has hired video personalities, who will be producing longer and more scripted videos with studio quality production values.

Long Term Strategy at Washington Post – Jeff Bezos era

Jeff Bezos has a brought a long-term planning outlook at Washington Post. The desired result is to make WaPo bigger and more profitable, at the same time. Before his acquisition the newspaper had remained profitable amid declining subscriptions and revenue only by decreasing the size of their newsroom. Bezos has given the company considerable leeway to experiment with different strategies in the hope of coming up finally with a winning strategy, to emerge as a key destination in the digital landscape.

Preliminary metrics look promising. The Post beat New York Times in unique visitors in October 2015 – their 66.9 million unique visitors beating the 65.8 million for The Times. They also beat the popular content aggregator Buzzfeed in February 2016 in number of page views – their 890.1 million page views beating both the Times(721.3 million) and Buzzfeed (884 million). To monetize their content the company is offering discounted subscriptions to Amazon Prime subscribers. Their digital subscription membership is also considerably cheaper as compared to The New York Times, reflecting a strategy to gain a lot of subscribers at lower per person subscription prices, with volume making up for lower per unit price. This is just one of the many experiments that the company is carrying out at the moment.

References:

Jan Ozer, The Washington Post is focused on video. Here’s Why, Digital Content Next

Brian Stelter, Washington Post launches major expansion of video team, CNNMoney

Shan Wang, In Revamping its Video Strategy, The Washington Post steers clear of imitating TV, NiemanLab

Dan Kennedy, The Bezos Effect, Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy

Siddhant Jain

CEO, VdoCipher. Writes about video tech, ed tech and media tech.

www.vdocipher.com/

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