Brightcove, Vidyard, Kaltura beat out IBM, Ooyala on enterprise online video platform study

Online video platform providers Brightcove, Vidyard and Kaltura topped a study by Forrester Research that rated their ability to support sales and marketing efforts in the enterprise segment. The three companies were up against competitors in the same space including Adobe, IBM and Ooyala.

With online video increasingly playing a role in companies’ sales and marketing strategies, providers of online video platforms that are geared toward enterprise are increasingly gaining traction in the market.

“…more firms see video as a way to address their top challenges of using engaging content to connect with customers and prospects,” Forrester said in its report, “The Forrester Wave: Online Video Platforms for Sales and Marketing, Q4 2016.”

The research firm conducted the study in September, looking at nine of the most significant OVP providers – Adobe, Brightcove, IBM, Invodo, Kaltura, Ooyala, Qumu, uStudio and Vidyard – and applying 39 different criteria to each. Those criteria included the company’s presence in the online video market, whether it had a product in general release and whether it had strong integration with sales and marketing tools such as CRM and MAP.

The biggest factor in leading the rankings, according to Forrester, was an OVP’s ability to provide easy-to-use, easy-to-integrate tools for marketing, analytics and syndication.

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Further, more than one-third of software decision-makers at enterprises worldwide were dissatisfied with their current OVP, the research firm said, suggesting that many are ready to jump to a company that can provide those key requirements.

While Brightcove scored highest among the nine OVPs, Forrester noted that it still has room to improve. Its platform is great in terms of self-service capability, but the provider “needs to improve interactivity,” the report said. It also needs to boost deployment of its HTML5 player, “as some of its customers feel they are stuck using its old Flash-based player.”

Vidyard, in the meantime, came up short in the analytics department, despite doing well in optimizing for sales and marketing environments. “Because the platform separates videos from players, some customer references we spoke to said that analytics can get confusing when videos change inside of the players,” the report noted.

And Kaltura, the report said, needs to improve its targeting. While it has a robust, heavily customizable SDK and “excellent usability,” its CRM and MAP integrations need to improve so that videos can better target the right viewers.

Meantime, Adobe and uStudio were rated as “strong performers,” with uStudio needing to mature a bit. Adobe, the report said, has a robust video suite that can be distributed through its Adobe Experience Manager platform, but the tools lose a lot of their power when used outside of Adobe’s ecosystem.