Marketers increasingly recognize the value of using online video to engage and inform consumers, create brand awareness, and even drive direct action. Similarly, corporate communications and business leaders are making greater use of live streaming and on-demand video to communicate more effectively with a distributed workforce. Video publishing capabilities are integral not only to traditional media providers today, but to the websites and intranets of many brands, companies, and organizations without a history of content creation. 

Today we released two Forrester Waves™ to help our clients select the right vendor for their video publishing needs. The Forrester Wave on online video platforms (OVPs) updates our previous evaluation of the market and includes five vendors: Adobe, Brightcove, Kaltura, Limelight, and Ooyala. The Forrester Wave on enterprise video platforms (EVPs) is our first evaluation of this important category and includes seven vendors: Cisco, Ignite Technologies, Kaltura, Kontiki, Polycom, Qumu, Sonic Foundry, and VBrick. We included these vendors because of their size in the market, experience serving enterprise customers, and frequent mention by Forrester clients in competitive scenarios. 

 
While both of these categories support video publishing, the OVP market is more mature. All OVPs have core content management features and have almost equivalent support for multiplatform delivery. Some OVPs differentiate with content targeting and personalization features. Some also differentiate by providing their own or having better support for integrating with third party web content management (WCM) and web analytics solutions. In contrast, EVP offerings vary greatly with different vendors offering end-to-end hardware or software-only solutions to publish video behind the firewall. Some have better support for recording and streaming videoconference meetings, for webcasting, or for turning SharePoint into a YouTube-like video portal. Every video platform vendor touts an "end-to-end" solution, but the definition really depends on what you're looking for.
 
I will be holding webinars to discuss the results of these evaluations, trends with video platforms, and best practices for vendor selection on April 17 for EVPs, and April 18 for OVPs.