The Best Video Streaming Platforms in 2023

Why Use a B2B Streaming Video Provider?

To understand the need for a professional streaming platform, you must know the difference between B2C (business-to-consumer) and B2B (business-to-business) video streaming solutions.

Many amateur vloggers and content creators use B2C streaming services, such as Youtube, to broadcast their content. These platforms are typically free, but they come with many limitations. Free B2C streaming services typically acquire the rights to your video content and can monetize it themselves.

Most businesses and organizations won’t want to give up the distribution rights to their content if they don’t have to, which is why professional broadcasters opt for a B2B video platform.

Free B2C streaming video providers also typically display third-party ads and comments on your broadcasts, which serves as a distraction from your valuable video content. If you plan to stream live events like concerts, meetings, and religious events, you’ll want a B2B streaming platform that keeps the broadcasting process simple and professional.

Likewise, if you want to stream live video on your website, a B2B platform will give you more control over the look and feel of your live stream.

As you might expect, B2B streaming platforms aren’t free. But the small monthly fee is a worthwhile investment for anyone who plans to use live video as part of their business strategy or wants more control over how their broadcasts appear to viewers.

Next, we’ll dive deeper into specific features to look for depending on your needs and goals.

What to Consider When Comparing B2B Video Platforms

To compare enterprise streaming platforms on the market effectively, you should start by narrowing down what you want to achieve.

This process is not really about how to find the cheapest or the most popular platform. Instead, it’s about choosing the platform with the most significant number of beneficial attributes for you or your business.

The features that work well for you may not be necessary for other broadcasters. On the flip side, a feature essential to another broadcaster may be entirely unnecessary for you.

Here are some key factors to consider when looking at paid video streaming platforms:

Protecting Your Videos

How would you feel about a competitor downloading your video and sharing it as their own without you knowing? Or seeing one of your videos going viral with no way to link it back to you?

If making sure your videos don’t get shared without your consent is a big concern, this is one element to consider when weighing your options.

Many free B2C streaming solutions make it easy for people to download your videos.

On the other hand, B2B enterprise video platforms like Mslive offer various ways to prompt your videos:

• Watermarking: Watermarking allows you to add a watermark to your video whenever someone watches it, allowing users to see who created it. That’s a great way to add your branding to your content.

• Digital rights management: Digital rights management, or DRM, protects your VOD from anyone stealing, downloading, or copying your content. That’ll keep your content safe.

• Password protection: A great way to protect your content is with password protection if you’re using subscriptions or pay-per-view to generate revenue with your content.
• Geographical restrictions: If you only want to share your content in a specific country, you can achieve that with geographical restrictions.

On the other hand, B2B enterprise video platforms like Mslive have many features to make piracy much harder. When comparing the top video platforms, look for watermarking, digital rights management, and password protection features.

Keeping Your Viewers Engaged with Your Content

With many free video streaming platforms, when a potential customer watches one of your videos, be it a thought leadership video or a how-to video, once your video ends, “watch next” suggestions pop up.

However, with top video streaming platforms, like YouTube, the “watch-next” content is likely to be produced by a competitor.

You want to instead look for a video platform that allows you to host your content and keep viewers engaged with it. Look for a platform that offers a video gallery, playlist feature, or “watch-next” feature that suggests other videos to watch on your platform or website.

Ensuring Performance in Critical Moments

When looking for a video streaming solution, you want to ensure they offer tools to ensure the quality of your live streams and VOD content.

• Multi-CDN: A content delivery network shortens the distance between your content and your viewers, helping to provide your viewers with quality content. With multiple CDNs in place, if one content delivery network goes down, another will take its place, keeping your content rolling.
• Adaptive bitrate streaming: With adaptive bitrate streaming, the video player detects the end-users internet speed and device capabilities and shows them the best stream quality based on these factors. That helps ensure your viewers enjoy the best viewing experience possible.
• 24/7 Customer support: If you’re live streaming content or sharing a VOD for an important meeting or event, you need your video content to work. That’s why you want to look for a platform with 24/7 customer support so that when you need help, you can access it.

For example, if an organization relies on sales demos, a laggy sales demo video can stress out your salespeople and result in lost customers. That’s why you need the above features in a video streaming platform.

What if something goes wrong? How easy is it to connect to support? That’s one downfall of free consumer platforms like YouTube and Facebook. When something goes wrong, it’s impossible to reach support within a reasonable time.

That’s why customer support is so important when choosing a video delivery platform. The best platforms offer 24/7 customer support, so you can always reach someone if something goes wrong.

Remote Team Friendliness

Do you have employees, partners, or collaborators working remotely?

Like most businesses in 2023, you likely have people you have to communicate with worldwide. Consider features that would make everyday events like onboarding and training much easier.

• Live streaming: Live streaming is a great way to bring employees together who are spread out geographically.
• Browser-based streaming: Not every live stream needs to be a big production. Browser-based streaming makes it easier for various team members to create live streams.
• Expo video galleries: Want to bring certain content together? With Expo video galleries, you can group similar content, such as training videos or product launch videos, making it easier for employees to find the content they need.
• Chapter markers: For VOD content, chapter markers make it easier to navigate your content.
• Screen sharing: Sometimes, a picture is worth a thousand words. With screen sharing, you can show presentations or web pages directly to your viewers without describing them in detail.

Also, consider security features like domain and geographic/IP restrictions, password protection, and tokenized security that would protect your users and sensitive company content.

Videos can be a great way to promote team togetherness and keep your remote team on the same page.

Monetization

There are three common ways to monetize video content.

• Pay-per-view: Viewers pay for access to specific content, usually for a predetermined time.

• Subscriptions: Allow viewers unlimited access to all your content with subscriptions. Standard subscription lengths include one-month, quarterly, and yearly subscriptions.
• Advertisements: Connect with an advertising network, bring in your ad partnerships, and make money via advertisements that run before, during, or after your content.

Do you plan to monetize your videos through ads, subscriptions, and/or pay-per-view?

It’s rare to find a video streaming platform that supports all three as Mslive does. If a platform provides monetization features, it’s usually one or two of the three.

That’s why you should know what type of monetization methods you want to utilize, so you can choose a platform that supports your monetization goals.

If you want to monetize your content via pay-per-view or subscriptions, there are some additional features you will want to look for:

• Integrated paywall: With an integrated paywall, you can easily accept payments without integrating a third-party app.
• Worldwide currency: If you have global viewers, you need a paywall that accepts global currency and automatically detects a viewer’s country, adjusting the currency.
• SSL Encryption: Keep your viewer’s data safe with SSL encryption.

Branding

Want to customize your video player to be more on-brand? Or want the ability to add your logo to the video in case it goes viral?

You’ll need to look for features like watermarking, player APIs, and an easily embeddable white-label video player.

Do you have a mobile app to which you want to add your video player? Look for mobile SDKs. They make adding your video player to native iOS and Android apps easy.

Marketing 

Video can be a crucial marketing tool. Look for tools that make it easier for you to integrate your videos with your marketing efforts.

• Marketing App Integrations: If you use popular marketing tools such as Sales Force or HubSpot, look for a video platform that allows you to integrate these tools. Integrating these tools with your video marketing platform can help improve sales and customer relationships.

• Rich analytics: Look at how advanced a platform’s analytics are. Rich analytics can provide insight into where your customers are located, how long they watch your content, and if they engage with any CTA or links within your video content. This information can help you drive future content creation and help with optimizing video content.

• Call to Action: With marketing videos, you want to spur your viewers to take action. A platform that includes the ability to add clickable calls to action can help increase your marketing efforts.
• Live captions: Keep your videos accessible to everyone with live captions.

Beyond these considerations, it’s important to consider reliability and price. Let’s cover that next.

Reliability

When comparing platforms for reliability, pay attention to the features that ensure smooth streaming every time. You can’t use a spotty streaming setup if you’re trying to live stream a significant event.

Look for a service that partners with a video CDN (content delivery network) to deliver broadcasts to viewers.

CDN-powered live streaming services allow you to stream content globally without reaching a viewer limit.

In addition to the reliable solution, you should ensure the streaming service comes with 24/7 customer support.

Price

Price is an equally important factor for many broadcasters. With close competition between live streaming platforms, broadcasters generally want the best quality and features for the lowest price.

The good news? This competition ultimately helps to keep prices lower while maximizing the impact of your budget.

Users who find high-quality online streaming platforms at a great price tend to commit immediately. However, we recommend comparing pricing plans to narrow down your options.

Despite the relatively competitive prices, these investments are still hefty. We recommend shopping around or taking advantage of free trials.

Comparison of the Best Video Streaming Platforms in 2023

With those key features in mind, we’re ready to review the top enterprise-grade video streaming platforms.

Take a moment to review the features that each of these platforms offers. Identify which features are most important for your live streaming goals.

Which are the non-negotiables? Are there features you could afford to do without?

Let’s dive in.