Most organizations are surprised to learn their content management system (CMS) or learning management system (LMS) have poor video integration if they even support video at all. This is a growing problem for many organizations as video is increasingly becoming an important factor when it comes to training, teaching, and communications. With the advent of COVID-19, video needs within an organization have only increased but LMS and CMS solution providers have been slow to react and are unwilling to change their current systems to meet these growing needs. That is where Flixout comes in.

Why is that?

The challenges inherent in video engineering are the promises of the video itself. From the moment we hit record, we expect everything we do and say to be captured into an exact replica recording that can be played anywhere on any device at any time.

For a proper video solution, this becomes a technical problem that is much more complex than what a CMS or LMS was envisioned as solving, the need for presenting text and image-based content. Formatting differences in text or images across devices are something the human brain can adapt to making an LMS or CMS an easy solution. However, this cannot easily be overcome with video where technical challenges make it difficult to present the same content over a variety of different platforms and devices. This is where a CMS or LMS falls short.

Three Challenges Common To All Video Content

Video solves many of the learning challenges that a typical CMS or LMS falls short of but at the same time, integrating video into these solutions is full of challenges itself. The challenges faced with video content can be reduced to three demands, creating the content, processing the content, and delivering the content. A video management platform must perform all three of these challenges in absolute terms without the benefit of any widely adopted technical standard, this is not an easy feat and thus, left out of most CMS or LMS solutions.

Creating video content is the easiest to demonstrate the difficulties faced when creating a video management platform. There are thousands of different cameras available for recording content, from cameras that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars used by major movie studios to cameras that are available in almost every digital device we own. Each of these devices, from the most expensive to the cheapest models encode content to different codecs and respond differently to subsystem functions and CPU events. A video platform must be engineered to detect and resolve these different codecs and inherit errors in recording. This includes checking for errors to ensure video and audio are always in sync with one another. If a video system were to allow a 1-millisecond loss per minute, it would become noticeable to viewers in just a few minutes and make long recordings impossible to watch.

Codecs of course create their own challenges if out-of-sync video and audio weren't bad enough. There is no widely accepted industry standard for codecs which has created hundreds of different video and audio codecs that are governed independently, updated infrequently, and as with most technology, not free of bugs, errors, or short comings. Complicating video further is the need to support deprecated codecs (codecs that are no longer used with modern equipment) to ensure playability into the future for previously recorded content that still needs to be shared.

Increasing Video Quality Means Increasingly Complex Video Systems

We all remember when 1080p came out in the early 2000s and blew the old tube TVs away. Then came along 4K a decade later and made watching video even more realistic than the generation before. With increasingly better resolution, the systems that process video have become more complex and difficult to design. Couple this with the need for backwards compatibility for many years, if not decades, most can forgive the standard CMS or LMS for not bothering since the technology seems to change day-to-day. Assuring the playback of higher quality streams is difficult and falls upon the video solution to ensure that the video file on storage is capable of being played back on any device or platform. Given the number of variables going into the original video file, this is a very labor-intensive requirement under the best of circumstances.

Errors in playback arise on a regular basis and can come from a multitude of sources. During the Windows 2016 Anniversary Update, Logitech webcams were rendered incompatible with Windows. Apple famously decided to change the order in which video file metadata was processed which resulted in corruption of videos streamed to iOS devices. Finding the cause of playback issues is demanding, costly, and most importantly, out of reach of anyone without a technical background in understanding the root cause of the issue.

Building and Supporting An Enterprise-Grade Video Solution Is Not Easy

From an organizations point of view, getting video right requires precision and a dedicated team of experts that can navigate a labyrinth of technical challenges. For most organizations, this is cost prohibitive. This is where a video content management system platform such as Flixout can bridge the gap. Organizations wishing to tackle their video needs on their own can expect:

• Staffing a video team of 20 or more engineers with experience in video and then starting a multi-year process of designing a system from scratch
• Trying to stitch together a partial solution with an existing LMS/CMS with many setbacks along the way and foregoing many features Flixout supports out of the box
• Attempting to use YouTube but setting the channel to private only for the videos to wind up public due to search engines

Even with plenty of time and resources available, there is no guarantee that the in-house results will save money over the long run versus going with a solution such as Flixout from the beginning. Video solutions need constant upgrading and monitoring which can drain the budget of even the largest of corporations. Flixout focuses solely on our platform so you can focus on your core business.

Struggling With Your Organizations Video Content?

If your organization is relying on a homegrown solution or a platform implemented before the dawn of the modern video era, you might be surprised how easy and affordable a video platform like Flixout can be. Check out our plans and pricing or signup immediately for a free trial to see how Flixout can improve the deliverability, performance, and engagement of your current video collection. Unlike other platforms, Flixout lets you start working on getting your new video library online immediately, no need to talk to a salesperson or request a demo. All new organizations are automatically enrolled in our free trial on signup which has no limits so you can try out all of the features the Flixout platform has to offer, no credit card needed.