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Video streaming platforms have become game-changers in the industry, especially in the past few years. They provide broadcasters with the tools to reach a large audience worldwide and keep revenues going during these tough times. They also allow people to enjoy video-streamed content from the comfort of their homes.
Let’s look at why more and more sectors are venturing into the video streaming business.
Video streaming platforms offer a variety of features, including:
- Video API access
- Storage
- Secure video uploading
- Analytics
The platforms offer different monetization options, allowing broadcasters to generate live content revenue.
Whether you’re new to online video streaming or a seasoned professional, it’s essential to understand what a streaming solution can offer. That includes understanding how to compare platform features, such as reliability and price. Once you have a firm grasp, you can choose the right video streaming platform for your needs.
To help you figure out the best video delivery platform, we have created a list of the world’s 14 best video stream platforms. These platforms are all excellent choices for those looking for a reliable and affordable solution for their video streaming needs.
B2B Video Streaming: How Video has Broken into Business
According to streaming statistics, the enterprise video market size is expected to grow to USD $25.6 billion by 2025. That’s more than a $9 billion increase compared to 2020.
Today, video streaming-as-a-service solutions have become a primary way to engage with customers. Video content plays different roles in different industries, but the medium’s popularity is apparent across the board.
The demand for online video is growing exponentially. As a result, so do the number of business video hosting solutions designed to meet that demand.
Several free, consumer-grade platforms are available, but professional broadcasters need something specially designed to fit their needs. They need to use a B2B enterprise video platform.
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.
Comparison of the 14 Best Video Streaming Platforms in 2023
With those key features in mind, we’re ready to review the 14 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.
1. Mslive
Mslive is a unified streaming solution that offers a wide variety of professional features. We offer both live streaming and video-on-demand platforms.
This platform is designed for broadcasters from enterprises, schools, and other professional organizations. For you, that means a high-quality live-streaming experience for your viewers.
Basic Functionality:
Mslive provides comprehensive live streaming and online video hosting solutions. Users can embed videos on their websites while maintaining 100% content control. Mslive offers an integrated paywall, password protection, referrer restriction, and analytics dashboard, among other features.
A notable thing to consider is that Mslive is one of the few platforms that lets you monetize your videos in three different ways:
- subscriptions (weekly, monthly, or quarterly),
- pay-per-view, and
- ads.
Mslive also gives you the ability to generate promo codes.
Key Features:
- Secure, global content delivery, including industry-best video hosting
- 24/7 tech support with all plans, including email and live chat
- Video security features, including password protection and encryption
- RTMP (real-time messaging protocol), ingest, playback, and streaming support
- Low-latency HTML5 channels for video streaming
- Expo galleries video portal
- Live encoding support for the top video encoders
- Player API access for 3rd party player integration
- Video API access on premium plans (event and scale)
- Multi-bitrate streaming
- Annual transcoding data included
- Real-time analytics
- Ad-free streaming
New!
- AES encryption for secure video streaming
- Multi-user access on Scale and Custom plans
- Zoom live streaming integration for meetings and live events in real-time
- Expo 2.0 galleries video portal for immersive video experiences
Pros:
- Live streaming and VOD packages on all pricing plans
- RTMP encoder-enabled software
- Unlimited viewers and live channels
- Mobile streaming support
- White label and branding control
- Embeddable HTML5 video player
- SVOD, AVOD, and pay-per-view TVOD monetization options
- Mobile device support
- Live stream recording
- China Video Hosting
- Plans for every budget
Cons:
- Takes a little bit of time to learn all of the features
Pricing:
Streaming solution plans with Mslive come at three levels. The video streaming pricing plans include the following:
- Starter plan: ideal for newcomers with 1,000 TB of bandwidth and 50 GB of storage per month, at just $39 per month, billed annually.
- Scale plan: includes 24 TB of bandwidth per year, with 1 TB of storage for $188 per month billed annually. These Scale pricing plans add phone support, a monetization paywall, an M3U8 online player for live channels, ad insertion, white-label Cnames, and video API access.
- Event plan: for organizations who’d instead not sign a contract and want to purchase bandwidth separately to live stream an event. It offers 6 TB of bandwidth upfront, 50 GB of storage, and costs just $63 per month (or $750/year). Additional data and storage can be added as needed.
- Custom plan: if your enterprise business has high-volume streaming needs, you can contact Mslive for a custom plan tailored to your needs.
Read more here about live streaming pricing plans in more detail.
2. Twitch
Twitch.tv is a very popular application in video gaming. Streamers set up channels where viewers and supporters can follow them.
Basic Functionality:
This site is pretty niche, but it’s a tremendous live-streaming platform if you’re trying to reach an audience in the gaming, fantasy, or tech industry.
Key Features:
- Tools for tipping
- Primarily used to stream video games
- Live chat for viewer engagement
Pros:
- Mobile broadcasting
- Compatible with both iOS and Android devices
Cons:
- Mostly geared toward consumers
- No advanced video streaming tools
Pricing:
Twitch does not charge content providers to use their platform but allows them to profit from their users. This program is called Twitch Subscriptions, and it includes three tiers:
- Tier 1 subscription – $4.99/month
- Tier 2 subscription – $9.99/month
- Tier 3 subscription – $24.99/month
3. Flowplayer
Flowplayer has offices in the United States, Finland, and Sweden. Flowplayer was launched in 2013, but the site provides very little background information on the company’s history.
Basic Functionality:
Flowplayer is an online video platform that serves large media houses and small businesses. They’re primarily known for their white-label streaming services and top-of-the-line monetization solutions.
If you’re looking for a simple online video platform, Flowplayer could be an option for you.
Key Features:
- High-quality video player
- Live-streaming capabilities
- Award-winning monetization solutions
- Live-streaming and VOD hosting
- Real-time video analytics
- Android and iOS SDK for mobile app development
Pros:
- Mobile streaming
- Tools for marketing
- Multiple options for video monetization
- Dedicated customer support
Cons:
- No China video delivery
- Very basic platform
Pricing:
Flowplayer has two pricing plan plans, including
- Starter: $49/month; 500 GB of bandwidth; includes 50,000 monthly plays, custom player, video management, playlists, and analytics
- Enterprise: custom-pricing; custom-built to cater to advanced streaming needs
4. Livestream
Although Vimeo Livestream now serves a professional clientele, it began as a B2C platform similar to YouTube.
Vimeo offers a variety of features that support live streaming and VOD hosting.
Basic Functionality:
Vimeo is a professional video hosting platform built for everybody, from beginners to business pros.
Key Features:
- Pay for what you use
- Editing tools included
- Ad-free streaming
- Pay-per-view and subscriptions
- Professional-looking platform
- Easy-to-use API
- Analytics
Pros:
- User-friendly
- Monetization options
- Built-in transcoding software
- Customizable video players
- VOD and live streaming
Cons:
- Monetization costs up to 10% of revenue
- Gets expensive as you purchase add-ons
- No China video delivery
Pricing:
Vimeo Livestream offers three main pricing plans, including
Vimeo Premium:
- Premium pricing: $75/month
- Their Premium plan includes both live video streaming as a service and VOD. This plan is the way to go for professional broadcasting.
Vimeo Enterprise:
- Enterprise Pricing: Please contact Vimeo for custom pricing information
- The Enterprise plan includes white-label service, monetization, and video APIs. It also includes branding control and added security features.
Vimeo OTT:
- Starter Pricing: $1/subscriber per month
- Growth Pricing: starting at $500/month
- The OTT-specific pricing packages come with the Vimeo.com relationship. These plans include all the basics for starting your web-based OTT channel and growing your OTT business online.
For more details, check out our comprehensive guide to Vimeo Livestream pricing.
5. Youtube Live
YouTube is probably the most popular video streaming solution on the market. It was one of the first platforms to make online live streaming popular.
Basic Functionality:
This Google-owned website is one of the best options for consumer-grade broadcasting, but many businesses use it to dip their toes in video broadcasting.
As we mentioned, YouTube isn’t ideal for business hosting since the platform has limits on monetization, and it does not give users full ownership of their content.
Also, it’s common for platforms like Youtube to be blocked in organizations to increase workforce productivity and minimize distractions. So if your ideal customer works in a corporate building or school, that should be a big deal.
The biggest perk of using Youtube? It’s completely free to use and pretty easy to navigate.
Key Features:
- Ad-based monetization is limited to users with large followings and watch times
- No notable security features
- Popular among consumers
- Powered by Google
- Easy to share videos
- Videos can be embedded in other websites
- No white-label capabilities
Pros:
- Free to use
- Viewers are familiar with the site
- User-friendly
- Easy to embed the player on your website
- Live and VOD hosting
Cons:
- No white-labeling
- Only ad-based monetization (with limitations)
- Limitations on broadcasters’ ownership of content
- Off-brand third-party ads and logos
Pricing:
Youtube is free of charge.
6. Wowza
Wowza is one of the game’s oldest online video hosting platforms. Although some of Wowza’s plans are more expensive, it’s known for its budget-friendly options. This platform hosts live streams and video on demand.
The top feature of Wowza is its fantastic security features.
Basic Functionality:
Wowza is a video hosting platform for broadcasters with a wide range of budgets.
Detailed Features:
- Video content management
- Supports high-definition streaming
- Robust security features
- Video API
- Simulcasting capabilities
Pros:
- Powerful security
- Supports streaming on most devices
- Live-streaming and video-on-demand
- Connects with Google Analytics
- China video delivery
Cons:
- Monetization through integrations only
Pricing:
Wowza Streaming Cloud offers three distinct pricing plans and services. Within Live Event Pricing, monthly plans include:
- Pay As You Go: $29/month, with a 3-month minimum; flexible streaming with low startup costs
- Basic: $99/month and includes 20 hours of live streaming and 1,000 viewing hours based on a video resolution of 720p
- One Month Event: $149 one-time purchase and includes 20 hours of live streaming and 1,000 viewing hours also at 720p
- Plus: $499/month and includes 150 hours of live streaming and 7,000 viewing hours based on a video resolution of 720p
These Live Event plans include complete brand control, multi-bitrate streaming, and HD and UHD streaming.
The Wowza Streaming Engine has its pricing plan packages. These professional-grade streaming plans are billed annually and include the following:
- Basic: $175/month + $195/month for each additional instance and $125/month for each additional prepaid instance
- One Month Event: $295/month + $295/month for each additional instance
- Enterprise: Please get in touch with Wowza directly for access to their custom-tailored high-volume enterprise solutions
Check out Wowza’s pricing page for alternative plans and packages.
7. Facebook Live
Facebook offers both “Live” and “Watch,” which allows businesses and organizations to host on-demand content or broadcast live content.
Live streams can be hosted on personal profiles, pages, and groups, but on-demand “Facebook Watch” videos can only be published on Facebook Pages.
Facebook Live is commonly used by businesses and organizations just dipping their toes in live broadcasting. Since it’s a free platform, Facebook poses many challenges related to video ownership, time limits on videos, monetization, and more.
Aside from those few technical restrictions, live streaming with Facebook Live is valuable for connecting with existing audiences.
Basic Functionality:
It’s common for broadcasters who use premium streaming solutions to connect their accounts to multicast on Facebook and their websites. That allows users to tap into their existing Facebook audiences while accessing the professional tools of a video hosting solution.
Key Features:
- Facebook Live
- Facebook Watch
- Facebook Groups
- Facebook Pages
- Easy video sharing
- Live commenting and reacting
- Paid ads
- Some tools for business use
Pros:
- The app is free
- Viewers are familiar with the platform
- Live chat promotes engagement
- Taps into existing following
Cons:
- No monetization options
- Time limits on live videos
- Can’t remove Facebook’s branding
Pricing:
Facebook is free of charge.
Why Choose the Mslive Video Delivery Platform?
Mslive is a professional and feature-packed live video delivery platform for businesses and organizations looking to start broadcasting on a professional level.
Our use of an HTML5 video player means all Mslive streams are compatible with mobile, desktop, tablet, and any other device.
When you compare Mslive’s pricing plans to the top video streaming platforms above, we remain the only service to offer so many features in its Starter plan at only $39/month.
If you need API access, rapid phone support, video monetization, and paywall solutions, we recommend the popular Mslive Scale Plan at $188/month, which includes 2000 GB of streaming data per month and 1000 GB of storage.
Or, if you need to stream events once, occasionally, or on an irregular schedule, we have the Event plan at $63/month; this plan includes 6000 GB of streaming data per month and 10 GB of storage.
For more of our top-notch live streaming and on-demand video hosting features, check out our streaming pricing plans.
Choosing Between Video Streaming Platforms
When choosing the B2B video platform for your business, you’ll want to check what types of plans are available and what level of commitment is required. You’ll also want to consider this if you’re not techy or don’t have very techy employees. Pay attention to the complexity of the platform, the support they offer, and the number of support documents they have.
Ultimately you want to go with the platform that fits your streaming budget and meets your needs in terms of features and capabilities.
Live Stream to Multiple Platforms Simultaneously
In some cases, why limit yourself to one platform? Sometimes it can be a good idea to use multiple platforms if, for example, you want to multiply your reach and chance of attracting new audiences. In this case, you’ll want to look for a video stream platform that supports simulcasting.
Suppose you have an audience on Facebook or Youtube. You can use a platform like Mslive to stream your content on both platforms while also streaming on your website— all at the same time.
Our partnership with Switchboard Live allows you to stream to multiple live-streaming platforms easily. However, keep in mind their cheapest plan is $29 a month. Fortunately, Mslive offers other ways to stream to multiple platforms through share codes or your live stream encoding software, though it might be a bit more complex.
To learn more about the other options, we dive deeper on our blog on live streaming to multiple platforms simultaneously.
Conclusion
No matter which direction you go for top video streaming platforms; we hope this article has helped you to make a more informed decision.
Whatever your streaming goals, needs, and audience size, we’re here to help. Mslive offers an all-in-one professional streaming video hosting solution with no need to engage with intermediaries. In short, we guarantee our users an easy, seamless experience backed by our 24/7 streaming support service and a complete knowledge base.
Remember: take the time to compare price, reliability, and other important features you’ll need before committing to a streaming solution service. Also, take advantage of free trials whenever possible.
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