Streaming Video Strategies

Chapter 3. A Critical Decision

If you’ve decided to incorporate video into your business, you have two options: you can take a DIY approach and build your own proprietary video platform by leveraging open source or commercial components, or you can work with an established third party specializing in video infrastructure. This decision will have a major impact on the cost to get your platform up and running, the time and labor you invest in the process, and the quality and reliability of the result.

Experienced video developers rarely recommend the DIY route, given the intense requirements involved. But each business also knows something an outside developer can’t possibly know: the specific, individual needs of its own organization and its audience. Only you and your team can make this decision for your organization. This chapter will help you determine your priorities, lay out some key advantages and disadvantages of each option, and provide some helpful questions to ask along the way.

Weighing Your Business Needs

Your video infrastructure solution needs to be scalable to handle surges in demand, and it needs to be future-proof to adapt as technologies change. It needs to be customizable to reflect the brand and its culture and values, as well as meeting needs that are specific to the company and how it interacts with users. And, of course, it should ultimately increase revenue. Those are big goals, and they involve complicated processes.

However, not all of these goals are ...