Is your current enterprise DAM suitable for video?

We ask because pretty much all statistics point towards video growing ever larger in the near future. For example, in Cisco's annual internet report they estimated that 80% of all internet traffic would be video by today (2021). You think this might be an excessive estimation? We actually believe it might be even higher simply because the data from the study is based on numbers from 2016-2017. And we can assure you: they did not account for the covid-19 pandemic.
 

If you think this increase just boils down to people using Netflix and Amazon… you would be wrong. Today, enterprises create more videos in a day than Hollywood creates in a year. We’ve also seen an increase in a plethora of other industries now utilizing videos in their day-to-day work, such as gyms creating exercise video guides or streaming sessions to help their customers stay healthy in the comfort of their own home. 
 

So, is your current enterprise DAM suitable for the upcoming future of a video-dominated internet landscape? Continue reading to find out.

The growth of enterprise video is growing slowly but steadily due to several reasons. In the end, the use of video is not only in line with the current industry landscape, but it also brings a huge amount of value to an enterprise:

• More personal interaction within the enterprise
  Videos allow employees, executives, and everyone else within an organization to communicate and engage in a much more personal way regardless if they work on-premise or remotely. Compare a text-based mail explaining the new office policies compared to a colorful video of a person demonstrating them, what’s more engaging?
• Improved customer interactions
  Most everyone, including your clients, reacts well to video. Why? Because it’s impactful, and there is almost an endless amount of research pointing to how the recall of messaging with a video is significantly higher than without.
• Increased customer engagement
  Utilizing video in your marketing and on your website completely changes the way the public and your customers engage with your organization. Not only do they spend longer on the site, but your messaging will be more impactful and Google will rank your website significantly higher where it’s more likely to show up during search queries.

If you’ve only just started with video content, we’ve got good news for you: you are not too late. Just because more enterprise videos are being created in a day than Hollywood manages to create in a whole year, doesn't mean the game is over, it's only just begun. The leading factor that drives the growth of enterprise DAM is video.

Many enterprises who've just begun their journey into the video landscape often start by hiring some millennials who possess basic shooting and editing skills and then share the content on Dropbox or another file hosting service, or a simple memory stick/external hard drive. While this is a great starting point, most enterprise organizations soon find out that these consumer tools are neither efficient enough nor scaleable when it comes to video. 
 

And if you’ve already come to this realization, is your current enterprise DAM actually fit for video?
 

Enterprise digital asset management solutions need to do a few things well to be able to handle video. While some of them are taken straight from the enterprise DAM handbook, others are specific to video. Here’s our checklist of the DOs and DON’Ts you need to keep in mind when you’re planning to invest in enterprise DAM solutions and to evaluate your current enterprise DAM system:
 

• Don’t use an enterprise DAM that is not specifically designed for video. If the DAM does not take video seriously, start looking for one that does.
• Do invest in a solution that is easy to use. In the end, we’re all busy and have various levels of technical expertise. Since a lot of people, both within and outside of your organization, will use the system, the system needs to have an interface that is intuitive and can be deployed within a few minutes rather than hours.
• Don’t over-complicate things. If the enterprise digital asset management software is too complicated with too many functions, it will create an entry barrier for people within your organization, resulting in people getting lost in the system.
• Do look for a solution that is cloud-based. The key thing about video is that it needs to be shared, stored, and reviewed just as easily as any other document.
• Don’t look for an enterprise DAM that is only designed for editors. An enterprise DAM is a business tool where the same rules apply as for all business tools - invest in something that can satisfy both the least technical as well as the most technical person within your organization.
• Do make sure the solution allows for great collaboration and annotation functionalities. People need to collaborate on a video just as they do on a Word-document or PowerPoint-presentation. 
• Don’t let the technical aspects get in the way of a good platform. The UI/UX of the enterprise DAM needs to make the processing of a video as simple as for a Word-document. 
• Do think about the “normal employee” editor functionality of the solution. This is not about turning every single one of your employees into an editor. It’s about enabling them to perform simple tasks that make life easier and prevent bottlenecks from arising. 
• Do make sure the solution is capable of taking in all video formats and supports distributing to various platforms and devices. 
• Do make sure the solution can scale your video production in line with your business goals.