With the continuing surge of video consumption and creation, businesses are increasingly turning to video libraries to manage their fast-growing collections. However, managing large video libraries is full of challenges.
Imagine you’re in the middle of a meeting, a crucial training session, or working on a project with a tight deadline and looking to pull up some data. Now, you find yourself juggling between your inbox and flash drives to find older video content while becoming increasingly frustrated. Employees from small to large companies have encountered this issue due to a lack of understanding of how to manage large video libraries. According to Wakefield Research, 54% of US office professionals surveyed agreed that they spend more time searching for documents and files they need than responding to emails and messages.
To fully grasp the complexities involved, it’s essential to understand the scale of video libraries and the challenges organizations face in managing large video libraries, followed by strategies for efficient video library management.
A video library is more than a folder as it encompasses videos with diverse formats, sizes, and lengths and requires repository organization. Various industries have vast amounts of video data to store. For example, corporations need to store training videos, corporate communications videos, and webinar recordings. Healthcare needs to store recorded surgical procedures, medical lectures, and patient consultations. Likewise, universities store lecture recordings, webinars, instructional videos, and video resources.
As the video data increases, video storage and content management challenges arise significantly. Even a small video file of 50 to 100MB makes its handling an overwhelming task. As a rule of thumb, the larger the company, the more video files it has.
What if the company doesn’t organize or create a video library at all? Data silos will create in that situation. A data silo refers to isolated data stored within the organization. According to the Forrester Research report, a knowledge worker spends an average of 12 hours a week chasing data.
A simple way to eliminate this is a centralized repository. All data in one place improves project efficiency because of easy searchability and accessibility. Moreover, you need to consider additional requirements, such as security and data sharing, need to be when storing internal data.
Imagine you have received a critical report in one email, a necessary file on Microsoft Teams, and meeting recordings from a hard drive. The constant influx of fragmented information leaves you juggling tasks, unable to focus, and feeling utterly overwhelmed.
Let’s analyze some challenges that come with videos and managing large video libraries.
A single video file can be several megabytes to terabytes. With more video media and bigger file sizes, companies nowadays have high storage requirements. Tens to hundreds of video files need proper storage. As we have seen above, various industries utilize videos for multiple purposes, increasing demand for scalable storage.
As the video library grows, scalability issues arise. The system doesn't scale to accommodate more files and meet the increasing demand for enterprise video content consumption. Search and retrieval become slow, performance degrades, and costs increase.
Efficient work management is not possible without a centralized location for data. With all the data, some challenges that arise are categorization, grouping, and consistent naming.
Dumping unorganized data makes retrieval time-consuming, hence impacting productivity. To make finding specific content easy-peasy, organize large video libraries by storing data in a structured, logical way.
With many videos in storage, searchability can take hours. You can open every video, check the subject of the video, and still not find the right material you were looking for, resulting in ultimate frustration.
The lack of accurate metadata, relevant tags, and any other custom attributes for each file makes indexing large volumes of content challenging.
The challenge with videos is that each file is in a different format and has a different resolution, so standardizing and ensuring consistency across the library becomes very hard. Users might face playback issues, compatibility issues, or degraded video quality without consistency.
Having every video in a separate format also makes filtration and maintenance harder. Using transcoding tools and ensuring quality levels become essential for a good viewing experience.
Security is at risk when storing data in random USB drives or fragmented storage solutions with little to no security measures. It does not ensure your content is secure through authentication or encryption.
Managing access control for different users within teams and in various geographies is a fundamental task to prevent unauthorized access and content leaks of internal data.
Without integration between various platforms, there is no centralized management to reduce task repetition, resulting in low operational efficiency. Integration enhances interoperability by consolidating data.
We have looked at the challenges, and it’s time to discuss the solutions and see some insider tips for effectively managing large video libraries.
Video content management systems are specifically designed to handle large video files with additional functionality like restricting unauthorized viewing, compliance with industry standards and analytics, and solving other challenges, making them the best option.
Storage comes with a question of deployment. A good VCMS like EnterpriseTube provides flexible deployment options like cloud storage, on-premises solutions, SaaS, and hybrid storage models. Choosing any option among these depends on your organizational requirements and needs. It gives you complete control over your data and provides scalable storage solutions while solving other security and cost challenges.
Search and retrieval are highly related to organization and categorization. You solve half the problem with proper categorization. Metadata creation and management can solve all the content organization and retrieval problems. Organizations can add relevant data fields such as description, creator, date, and other fields like team, SKU number, ID, department, etc., to make retrieval quick.
One hack I like to use is making different types of tags, such as descriptive tags, including creator, author, and location; administrative tags, such as recording devices like Teams or Zoom; and structural tags, including department name, product name, and video type like meeting or internal communication.
This becomes possible with EnterpriseTube's advanced features. Its AI capabilities provide autogenerated tags, searchability within video through automatic speech recognition, faceted search of objects, people, etc., and advanced metadata features like custom fields to improve search and sorting ability. It saves extra work and time and makes navigation and discovery easy.
You need to make some key changes to existing business strategies, and it begins by ensuring all your videos are stored in a repository. You need to store videos in separate categories, and multiple sub-categories can be formed within each category.
For example, you can create a category for each department, such as marketing, finance, and HR. Within each category, multiple sub-categories can be created, such as training videos, corporate communication, meetings, and town halls. Within each sub-sub-category, like town hall, more categories can be made based on dates, such as 2022, 2023, and 2024.
Categorization depends on the organization's management style, but it requires unlimited category creation rights, which EnterpriseTube offers. You can create categories and control the access of each category by allowing required user groups. Additionally, you can store videos using descriptive titles.
Still holding on to old meeting records and videos? Don’t have time to sit and manually find tons of outdated videos to delete?
Invest in a video content management system with a video deletion policy. Often, we must meet legal or regulatory compliances. For example, some companies require meeting records to be saved for 1 to 7 years.
In this situation, you can set the time for any type of video, which will automatically delete after that time. Automating this process saves time and makes management easy. Using EnterpriseTube, you can set a deletion policy for each file or category to ease your work.
Regular quality checks and content reviews are good for maintaining large libraries. Internal documentation and standard operating procedures can be made to have standard practices of uploading files and setting permission and access.
With critical data stored, backup is a must. Backing up large video files is essential for effective management as it protects data against loss due to hardware failures or accidental deletions and ensures quick recovery in case of disasters. It also offers cost efficiency by preventing the need to recreate lost content and simplifies file management by automating the backup process.
A proper VCMS can do this. EnterpriseTube offers three backup options: RAID, Local redundancy, and Geo/ Cloud Redundancy. Most enterprises prefer Geo/ Cloud Redundancy because video files are replicated across different locations. If a disaster occurs at one data center, the data is backed up and safe in another faraway data center.
Content security is essential when maintaining video libraries. You can improve it by providing role-based access to users, setting permissions, and using multiple sharing options, such as a limited sharing link or a time-bound/view-bound link. Encryption is the fix for securing data at rest and in transit.
Advancements in AI and Machine Learning drive the future of video library management by automating tasks like content tagging and transcribing to search and categorize videos efficiently. A video CMS platform like EnterpriseTube bridges gaps through advanced features in video management, security, retention, archival, analytics, and integration.
Managing large video libraries is complex but achievable with the right technology and strategies. Proactive management supports adopting emerging technologies, such as AI, as it's essential for optimizing operations and staying ahead. Some key challenges include storage and scalability, organization and retrieval, quality and format management, security and access control, and integration. An Enterprise Video Content Management System can address these challenges.
EnterpriseTube solves these problems with its scalable storage, metadata and tagging capabilities, quality and format management, integration with other platforms, role-based access, and advanced security through SSO, encryption, and tokenized links.
If you are struggling with video library management and looking for solutions to organize your extensive video library, try EnterpriseTube's free 7-day trial.
What is a video library?
A video library is a centralized content collection of videos organized to be easily accessed, retrieved, and managed. It can include any type of video format, such as training videos, recorded meetings, webinars, educational materials, or other video assets.
How to overcome the challenges of managing large video libraries?
Video libraries can be managed by following these key strategies: implementing efficient storage solutions, utilizing advanced metadata and tagging systems, automating legal and regulatory compliances, reviewing content regularly, backing up, and ensuring security and access control.
Why do organizations need a video CMS to manage large video libraries?
Dealing with hundreds of gigabytes of hard disk space for storing videos is obsolete as VCMS are in the market. Managing video files presents unique challenges due to their large file sizes, the significant bandwidth required, the specialized search methods, the specific access protocols, and the detailed analytics often necessary for tracking and monitoring usage.
What are the essential features to look for in a Video Content Management System (VCMS)?
Some key features in a VCMS include a centralized library, ai-powered search, video analytics, adaptive bitrate streaming, interactivity and engagement, secure video sharing, device-agnostic and format-agnostic, security, third-party integrations, branding and player customization, automatic transcription and translation, category access rights, configurable retention, and metadata management. Read more in our blog 14 Key Features of VCMS to Look for In 2024.