SharePoint video solutions for corporates
Whats happening with Corporate Videos:
More and more companies are nowadays using short videos for various purposes like communication, training, collaboration. These video are often uploaded not only for public consumption but are also commonly shared within the company through the intranet.
If you are using SharePoint as your intranet platform, then there are many challenges with respect to hosting, bandwidth, search etc. Storage: Out of the box, SharePoint provides very basic video delivery capabilities. Asset libraries allow users to upload videos, which are stored as SQL BLOBs in content databases (just like any other file in SharePoint). Videos tend to be larger in size, which are both inefficient for BLOB storage and quickly grow content databases to maximum recommended capacity (200GB). Videos are also subject to the maximum file upload size in SharePoint, which is 50MB by default with a hard limit of 2GB.
Bandwidth: Videos that are uploaded into SharePoint can be consumed by “progressive download” in the exact same format and quality as the contributor uploaded. This means that a 1080P .wmv uploaded to SharePoint will only be consumable as a 1080P .wmv file. A progressive download also lacks intelligent fast-forward capabilities. If a user only cares about the end of a long video, they have to download the entire video to get to the end.
Search: Content of the video cannot be searched as it does not get indexed. In order for these to appear in search results, a more detailed metadata needs to be in place which can be indexed.
What options are out there?
Office 365 video portal
Microsoft is rolling out a video sharing feature to all Office 365 business customers, providing them with a new way to create, edit and share videos within their own organisations. The company has also released a separate app for iPhone users. There are certain drawbacks of this solution as of today but Microsoft will be coming up with solutions for these, over the coming months.
Drawbacks:
Cannot embed video outside of the portal like in an on-premise version of SharePoint 2010 or 2013.
Cannot include supporting documentation like transcripts, presentations etc.
Limited to a maximum size of 2 GB
Third Party Providers
There are some other third party providers like ramp.com, mediaplatform.com that provide video streaming capabilities in SharePoint.
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If you have a unique requirement for a corporate video solution, we have various options to give you solutions based on your requirements.
Custom solution (Windows Azure and SharePoint)
We can leverage the best of both SharePoint and Windows Azure for media contribution, consumption and mangement.
Features:
Video does not reside in SharePoint but in a SQL Azure database.
They can be security trimmed. Permission can be set to specific persons/groups to manage/upload videos and for consumption.
Different players can be used to display the video
Custom solution (YouTube and SharePoint)
YouTube is probably the most widely used platform by all means. We can leverage YouTube and SharePoint to create a solution.
Features:
YouTube video will not be available publicly
A web part will stream video in SharePoint using specific credentials set to access the video
Additional information (metadata) about the video can be maintained in a separate list
Authentication and authorization relies on SharePoint.
