Providing the Right Video Content to All Devices While Gathering Valuable Analytics
The Limelight Orchestrate Video Platform
Spear Education (“Spear”) offers innovative dental education to dentists and their staff around the globe. Whether on-campus or online, every Spear experience is carefully designed to guide dentists to a higher level of skill and experience.
Since 2007, Spear has provided an on-campus learning facility in Scottsdale, Arizona. The Spear campus offers seminars and hands-on workshops led by dentistry’s most respected educators. Dentists from all over the world visit the Arizona campus for its innovative, hands-on offerings.
In 2010, Spear expanded its business by launching Spear Online, with over 1,300 research-driven educational videos that dentists and their staff can access in their own offices, on their own schedules. In just five years, Spear has grown its video customer base to more 5,000 dental professionals.
“Making our content available online opens us up to a wider variety of people across the world,” says Shane Walsh, Director of Video Production at Spear.
Spear needed to make sure their video content was interesting and valuable to their customers. “With our previous CDN, we were struggling to get any valuable analytics that could help us improve our video content,” says Walsh. “Without that data, it was nearly impossible for us to know which videos were working and which needed improvement.”
In addition, the video experience has to be consistent and reliable on all devices. “Three or four times a month, we had customers who could not access our content on various devices,” says Walsh. “Prior to Limelight, the format did not always work on specific devices.”
Spear Education (“Spear”) offers innovative dental education to dentists and their staff around the globe. Whether on-campus or online, every Spear experience is carefully designed to guide dentists to a higher level of skill and experience.
Education and Healthcare
“The move to Limelight has also ensured that videos play when and how they should, on all devices. Because Limelight does all the encoding on the back-end and provides all the formats for any device, we have had not a single complaint from a customer about not being able to play the video.”
Moving to the Limelight Orchestrate Video Platform has dramatically improved Spear’s data-mining capabilities. “With Limelight, we can set up and track a video and see how long people have watched it, how many unique plays it has, as well as total plays overall. We can then determine which videos are working and which are not. That is very useful information that allows us to improve our final product to our customers.”
With Limelight, Spear has experienced the following business benefits:
Limelight’s robust analytics means that Spear can track length of views, unique views, and ultimately allows them to understand which titles are consumed more than others. This is valuable information to help them drive their business.
With a small Video Production staff, Spear did not have the bandwidth to transcode all of their files. They required a solution that would handle this for them.
Customers want to consume the educational videos in a variety of ways, and at the time most convenient for them. Limelight enables consistent delivery of content at any time and to any device, across the world.
Limelight’s easy and efficient implementation meant that Spear could focus less time on learning a new system and more time on making more content.