Problems using Zoom Cloud for Webinar Delivery

Recorded webinars are great for generating leads. Especially when people can’t attend a live webinar due to timing or sudden changes to their schedules and priorities.

One way of recapturing those leads is by sharing a link to the recorded webinar. The link is shared by email with the hope that the recipients watch the video and continue on to convert to a qualified lead.

To our surprise we found many companies are using Zoom Cloud to host their recorded webinars. Conversions from these links are low. Below, we’ll discuss why Zoom Cloud isn’t optimal and what the best practices are.

Zoom Cloud fails for webinar hosting in 235 seconds

Zoom Cloud isn't the answer

If you recorded your webinar using Zoom, Zoom Cloud may look like a viable solution for delivery. 

Just a heads up, Zoom’s Pro and Business plans only include a small 5 GB of cloud storage which translates into anywhere from 5 to 13 hours of video depending on the resolution and content. You’ll likely exceed that after a few webinars and need to pay for their relatively pricey additional storage. There is no quota that refreshes monthly or annually, so as your library of webinars grows, so will your monthly bill.

By default, any video recording delivered with Zoom requires a passcode to access. Although this may seem like the simplest form of protection, it’s kind of annoying that you have to always reference the email to get that passcode, and if you send multiple videos with Zoom, trying to manage all those passcodes starts to become a real mess.

In general, it’s actually more secure and less annoying to just require authentication to view something instead of a passcode. Zoom does have options to require authentication to view cloud recordings, but they make it so confusing, I’m not sure how they expect anyone to figure it out. First, you’ll notice they have a setting to allow only authenticated users to view. This may sound like exactly what you want, but this actually requires that the user viewing the content be added to your company account… which is not what you want.

There is also an option to enable “View recording on demand” in the share settings, which doesn’t make any sense since viewing anything that isn’t live is on-demand, but apparently when enabled this requires the viewer to register before viewing. This sounds like more of what we want, but in order to control who views the content and actually make it secure, you must change the settings to manually approve registrants. 

So if you think about that process:

1. you first send all the viewers the same link to the video.

2. Second, they register to view the video when they get around to it.

3. Third, you see that request come through in your email then you go approve it when you get around to it.

4. And last, the viewer can actually watch it. 

So just by trying to make it more secure and less annoying, you made it more annoying as now they have to wait for approval after registering. This shouldn’t be so complicated! I should just be able to deliver it to a list of email addresses and be done.

Another issue is that when a zoom video is sent to someone, it doesn’t get added to their zoom library. The viewer always has to dig through their email to find the link. And if you sent them multiple zoom recordings, or maybe they received zoom recordings from other sources as well, now that makes it increasingly difficult for them to remember just the right search terms in their email to locate the webinar they are looking for.

You are decreasing the chances of them successfully finding your webinar by delivering it in this way. Also, it’s just a link to the video. There are some download options and chat history which are nice, but no call to action, and no cohesive delivery of multiple videos.

And there’s no quality selector for the video, so hopefully their player picks the right one for you because you’re stuck with it. Not that it will make much of a difference though, since even their highest quality averages less than 1 Megabit per second, which is extremely low. 

So just to recap:

1. you’ll likely need more than the included 5 GB cloud storage and their additional storage pricing is somewhat pricey. 

2. Their default passcode protection of videos is a hassle to deal with from the viewer’s perspective. 

3. There’s no streamlined delivery process for their more secure and less annoying authenticated access. 

4. Videos do not get added to the user’s library, requiring them to go hunting through emails to view each time. 

5. There’s no cohesive delivery of multiple videos. 

6. And the encoding quality is super low.

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