Planning your video on demand

When planning out your video-on-demand (VOD) content, you'll need to think over a few questions:

1. What videos will be most valuable to your clients?
2. How can you produce those videos consistently?
3. Will you film the videos yourself or hire a professional team?
4. If making them yourself, what resources do you have available—audio equipment, cameras, friends or employees, etc.?

You’ll also want to think over whether VOD will be used in conjunction with live streaming.

Video on demand vs. Live streaming
Mindbody supports both VOD and live streaming. The primary benefit of VOD content is that it’s carefully planned, well shot, evergreen, and able to be viewed over and over again. Live streaming, on the other hand, is interactive and organic because it occurs in real time.

If you already have a live streaming program in place, then you can record those sessions and upload them later as VOD content. These videos can form the entirety of your VOD library, or be used as a supplement to your formal VOD recordings.

Traits of VOD content:

• High-quality production values
• Highly rewatchable and re-usable
• Scripting and planning required
• Additional time needed for recording and editing
• Often more costly

Traits of live streaming content:

• Low production values
• Interactive
• Minimal editing required
• Low time commitment
• Low cost

If you're interested in converting your live streams into VOD content, you may consider:

1. Uploading your best classes without making any changes.
2. Creating clips of the best parts of specific classes.
3. Piecing together the best parts of multiple classes into a compilation.
4. Use existing live stream footage, but add new narration (which means better sound and music quality) .
5. Augment the live stream with additional video content. For example, you can add footage before each exercise or insert updated graphics and audio at the beginning and end of the video.
6. Use successful segments from your live stream to build new VOD content. For instance, if you received a question from a client during a live stream, you can create an instructional video afterwards.

Next steps
The rest of this course will focus on producing video and audio content for a VOD program. If you've decided to simply upload live streams rather than create standalone VOD content, then you'll want to check out our live stream course.