Understanding Video Ingestion for your Business Video Library

Video ingestion is a blanket term for uploading video content into a digital system. This content can start out in a variety of formats, resolutions, and bit rates. What goes on during ingestion is more than just a simple 1:1 upload, however.

In its description of corporate video platforms, Gartner names ingestion as a mandatory feature, an absolutely required part of the software. Without an organized and consistent way to add files, streams, or other video signals, companies will struggle to build effective libraries.

Content ingestion should be user-friendly. It shouldn’t take extensive training to use a given platform’s video ingestion workflows, to make sure employees from all departments are comfortable going through the process to get content into the system, tagged, and ready for use.

Where does all this video content come from? It may surprise you to realize just how many videos your business generates, or how valuable they could be if ingested and tagged for easy access.

Potential sources for useful video content, internal and external, include:

• Meeting recordings from your internal teams.
• Informative videos from your partners and vendors.
• Companywide town hall recordings.
• Public-facing live streaming webinars from your subject matter experts.
• Product introductory videos.
• How-to videos and explainer videos.
• Customer testimonials.
• Customer service recordings and examples.
• Training sessions and custom training module content.

Each video file serves in a different niche role, and together they add up to a well-rounded video strategy that advances your major goals and objectives.

As media and telecom industry executive Anton Gavrailov explained, video ingestion is important because it’s the step when companies ensure all their varied files will be accessible in a secure location and a standardized format. The data that comes in, stemming from many sources, may vary in video format, resolution, and other technical details. In the video library, however, it should all be equally searchable and usable.

Effective video ingestion sets your company up for a positive video experience going forward. The tagging and categorization that go on at this early step will allow stakeholders to find what they’re looking for in the months and years ahead. This is especially important as media libraries grow over time and manual searches become more time-consuming and less helpful.

Building an effective video usage workflow starts with a solid first step. Ingestion is that step, creating a foundation for video access.

There are two facts shaping an effective video content ingestion program:

• Each video upload is a unique, one-time event, shaped by the content’s format, resolution, origin, and other details.
• The general process for those uploads should be standardized and repeatable, allowing that varied content to become pieces of a consistent video library.

Video ingestion solutions allow your team to add video data to the system en masse, whenever they need to, without encountering delays or putting in excessive manual work.

Ideally, the system you use to ingest your videos and build your media library will be part of the same video management platform you use for the rest of your video management workflow. This alignment ensures that there are no breaks in the pipeline and every piece of content is at employees’ fingertips when needed.

That platform can and should serve as a single point of access for all your company’s video content, across departments and functions such as internal vs. external use. Breaking down silos this way allows you to implement blanket policies such as governance rules to encourage secure, compliant storage.

Ingestion is the first step in building out a future-proof video library. When you first implement a modern video platform, you can ingest the existing content stored in each department’s existing storage system, then set up a repeatable workflow to process new uploads as they occur. With this workflow established, you won’t have to worry about video going forward; it will simply work.

When setting up a repeatable video ingestion workflow, it’s worth asking what kinds of results you want to achieve from this process. Adding the videos to the system isn’t just about moving data from one place to another, but rather about preparing that information for use in the months and years to come.

To that end, there are a few valuable best practices to build into your mass video ingestion process. These include:

• Compatibility: Employees should be able to upload content from many different sources and file formats. It’s important for your chosen solution to not only encompass all the formats your company currently uses, but more to ensure video ingestion will go on uninterrupted even if content comes in from a new source.

• Ease of use: If your video data ingestion service requires complex, manual work, there’s a chance that employees won’t use it, or will make mistakes. By contrast, a smooth and intuitive user experience allows your team to comprehensively upload content, with no need for extensive training.

• Centralization: Breaking down silos between content should be one of the major goals of modern video management. The easiest way to enable consistent video access is to store content in a centralized, secure location with strong governance.

Beyond those general values, there are specific actions that create a better video ingestion experience:

• Video format standardization: Ingested content may come from many different video encoding file formats, frame rate standards, and bit rates. Converting to a standard format during upload enables easy editing and playback by viewers throughout your company’s departments, on the device of their choice.

• Accurate, automated tagging, with appropriate metadata: Your ability to find video content in the future will determine the success of your video ingestion process and video storage platform as a whole. An automated tagging process can ensure every uploaded video in the system is easily discoverable.

• Summary generation: Sometimes, a summary for a video can help employees find the content they’re looking for quickly and effectively. Generating these summaries during ingestion ensures every video is more discoverable.

• Chapter creation: Longer videos and clips that cover multiple topics are more useful when the information within is clearly delineated by chapter divisions and timestamps. Setting these chapter divisions is another useful part of ingestion.

• Captioning and transcription: Auto-generated transcripts of videos make those videos easier to find and use later. When those transcripts are time-coded into the videos as captions and subtitles, they also drastically enhance the value.

• Translation: Effective video ingestion systems can generate transcripts in the original language. Truly next-generation offerings can then translate that content into multiple new languages to make videos easily accessible by audiences across regions.

Enabling a powerful video ingestion process is worthwhile for your business because it will determine the quality and usability of the resulting video content library.

An up-to-date enterprise video platform will offer a set of advanced features to make video ingestion easier and more effective for your organization. These solutions are consistently adding new functionality over time. Today, that includes the latest AI innovations, with large language models assisting in content tagging, transcription, summary generation, and translation.

The heavy use of automation in mass video ingestion processes allows companies to move more quickly without sacrificing the user-friendliness of their workflows or the accuracy of their data. The VBrick Enterprise Video Platform leads this category of AI-enabled video content tools, acting as a reliable pillar for your business’s media strategy.

The bulk video import and metadata generation features of VBrick, powered by the latest AI solutions, enable you to tag, summarize, transcribe, subtitle, and translate your content while cutting it into contextually relevant chapters. All of these processes occur as part of a smooth, user-friendly video ingestion workflow.

Your company needs an effective, easily accessible video library to serve as the heart of your internal and external media strategy. Using Vbrick solutions for not just ingestion, but also editing, distribution, analysis, and more allows you to achieve this level of control.

Vbrick’s AI metadata features enable a quick, effective ingestion workflow with minimal manual intervention. The end result is a highly usable and valuable video library, no matter how many sources you’re compiling it from or how many total videos you need to manage.

Schedule a demo to see the value Vbrick’s platform could add to your organization.