The State of Corporate Video 2025
For the last couple of years, these annual State of Corporate Video articles have talked about the stalled growth in the video platform market and the fact that many years ago, analysts overestimated the size of that market. The pandemic underlined this by shifting the corporate sector’s focus to a combination of both live video calls and meetings and video platforms that can deliver both live and on-demand content.
Due to limited growth in the size of the market, the solution to increasing profitability in this space has been consolidation and cost-cutting. After some signs of movement in acquisitions in 2023, 2024 finally saw the larger companies in the space getting acquired or beginning to look for formal partnerships or acquisitions.
ACQUISITIONS AND CONSOLIDATION
Brightcove, one of the biggest video platforms, was acquired for $233 million by app developer Bending Spoons, which went on a bit of an acquisition splurge in 2024, acquiring six companies. Despite Brightcove having a reasonably high gross profit margin of 61%, it has faced challenges ever since floating in 2012. Growth has not been particularly strong, and in its last quarter before the acquisition, it reported a net loss of $3 million, with revenue dropping below the $200 million mark.
Ahead of the deal, Brightcove’s market cap had been about $144 million, with Bending Spoons offering around a 90% premium with its acquisition offer. This was still vastly below Brightcove’s initial market cap of roughly $600 million or its highest valuation of $980 million. Bending Spoons, which is based in Italy, made several acquisitions in 2024. The first, in January, was Meetup, a social network with 60 million members used to organise in-person and virtual events, followed by the acquisition of the digital assets of Mosaic Group, which makes apps for mobile phones.
Most interestingly, in April 2024, Bending Spoons acquired the leftover assets of Hopin—which sold the main virtual event component of its business to Ring Central in 2023—and its StreamYard, Streamable, and Superwave product lines. This gives Bending Spoons the opportunity to pull together a range of different streaming services into a unified whole, potentially offering customers both a unique and cost-effective service.
It will be interesting to see if WeTransfer and Issu—which were acquired in July 2024—will also play a role in this combined service offering.
Marc DeBevoise, Brightcove’s CEO since 2022, said at the time of the acquisition, “Today’s announcement will enable Brightcove to leverage the technology and market expertise of Bending Spoons and best position Brightcove to continue to thrive in the streaming and engagement technology market.”
Meanwhile, Calcalist, a technology site from one of Israel’s biggest financial newspapers, has reported that Kaltura is looking to merge or be acquired and is working with the investment bank Jefferies to try to secure a deal. Kaltura has a valuation of around $350 million but is looking at a valuation of between $400 million and $500 million for any merger or acquisition.
Like Brightcove, Kaltura’s target valuation represents a premium compared to its market value but remains significantly below the about $1.2 billion valuation from the company’s IPO. Kaltura’s results improved in 2024, with losses narrowing from $11 million and $10 million in Q1 and Q2 to only $3.6 million in Q3, exceeding analysts’ expectations. There was also a significant increase in the number of customers, which led to an accompanying bump in its share price (almost 95% from October to December 2024).
Despite the improving situation, the company has never made a profit, even after making 21% of the workforce redundant in 2022–2023 as a cost-cutting measure. This is also not the first time that acquisition rumours have involved Kaltura. In July 2022, Panopto offered $383 million—a 27% premium on Kaltura’s then-market value of $301 million—but the acquisition was rejected by the Kaltura board. There has also been speculation about approaches by other parties in the past, however, no deal has materialised.
At this time, Kaltura, has not commented on these reports, so we watch to see if a deal can finally be brokered.
PANOPTO TARGETS CORPORATE LEARNERS
Despite making the bid for Kaltura, Panopto is still a relatively small player in corporate streaming circles, with a revenue of about $35 million a year. The company’s focus remains strongly on educational institutions, but it continues to pitch itself as a viable player in the corporate learning space.
As with a lot of corporate service providers, Panopto has been considering how to deploy AI in the space for competitive advantage. In October 2024, it announced the acquisition of Elai, an AI text-to-video platform that generates video content for learning. Elai offers both custom avatars and voice-cloning options. This new capability adds a significant element to the workflow of the Panopto platform, enabling the company to claim that it provides the only secure video solution capable of supporting the video learning lifecycle from creation and management to sharing and measuring impact.
Panopto’s acquisition of AI text-to-video platform Elai bolsters its corporate learning offerings.
When Panopto’s CEO, Jason Beem, spoke to Middle Market Growth about the role Elai will play, he also discussed how AI could add significant value to the user in two key areas: AI-generated interactivity and recommendations. “That [interactivity] means AI-generated quizzes, flashcards, notes, things like that, so that the learner can watch the video then go back and review before they take the test, so they retain that information.” Learners, he continued, “can have AI look at how they’re testing. And where they’re not testing as well, AI can automatically recommend additional content on the same subject that is already available within that corporation or within that university, and start feeding the learner additional content so they can improve their knowledge retention.”
Although Panopto continues to operate in a clearly defined niche with smart bolt-on acquisitions, it can add value to its users and clients and potentially continue to deliver healthy growth with a cautious acquisition strategy.
VIMEO’S STRONG 2024
Vimeo operates in the same competitive space as Brightcove and Kaltura and had a relatively strong 2024 compared to its rivals. In April, it appointed new CEO Philip Moyer, who came from Google Cloud’s AI business. At the end of November, the company posted better-than-expected results for Q3.
Vimeo’s focus over the last couple of years has centred on becoming a leading platform for enterprise. Perhaps the most encouraging detail in the Q3 results was that its enterprise business unit saw a 39% year-on-year growth to more than $100 million in annualised bookings. For the quarter, the company posted total revenue of $105 million, ahead of forecasts. Still, it saw a decrease in bookings within the self-service and add-ons business units, but that is in line with the overall push to a more corporate client base.
Vimeo’s EBITDA for Q3 was around $16 million. All in all, with the stabilisation of costs, it looks like the company will continue to deliver growth in 2025, and with a CEO from an AI background, this could help drive innovation and differentiation of the platform.
To this end, in a similar way as Panopto, Vimeo has experimented with adding AI features that can learn and replicate a creator’s storytelling and on-camera personas to generate such elements as custom client-facing video messages and scenes in documentaries and films. What differentiates Vimeo is its ambition to position itself as being able to help clients and creators adhere to a growing number of complex AI regulations, Moyer said in an interview with Axios in August 2024. However, AI investment must be controlled to ensure it actually delivers ROI, as there are always concerns about potential over-investment not delivering significant or worthwhile returns.
AI-enabled audio and caption translation in Vimeo
CORPORATE MEETING PLATFORMS IN 2024
In the video meeting platform space, Meta is exiting from the sector with the winding down of Workplace by 2026, leaving two big players, Zoom and Microsoft Teams. Workvivo, an Irish company acquired by Zoom in 2023, got a big fillip in 2024 as it was named by Meta as its preferred replacement for Workplace. The revenue benefit for this is likely to become clearer as we reach the midpoint of 2025.
Workvivo, Zoom’s employee communication app
Zoom itself officially dropped “Video” from its name, suggesting that its efforts to diversify its services portfolio will continue. Craig Durr, chief analyst at the Collab Collective, says, “By removing ‘video’ from its formal name and focusing on expanding its work stack, Zoom is signalling a broader ambition that could redefine its market position in 2025.”
As part of this move, 2024 saw Zoom launch Zoom Docs and a revamped AI Companion. The company is also leveraging a significantly expanded tech stack to position it in the contact centre space.
Zoom’s AI Companion
Many companies have begun to change their hybrid working policies, with a push for more staff in the office. This gives Zoom an opportunity to expand its offering to clients while also being a significant threat to its core video meeting business. Zoom’s growing number of AI tools may give it the chance to deliver some genuinely unique and engaging solutions in the hybrid space. But with potential reduced usage from a return to work and the cost of AI development, Zoom may face a danger of costs going up while revenue falls.
Zoom CEO Eric Yuan expects AI to become a crucial part of the Zoom infrastructure. Soon, he says, the integration of AI into our daily work routines “will become a necessity—something people will begin to expect from their tools at work. The AI we have today will evolve into intelligent digital assistants that will be able to draft email responses, ready for you to send when you sign on to start your workday, help determine which meetings to join, and even assist in contract negotiations, reducing your overall workload.”
Furthermore. Yuan predicts that “[O]ver time, AI digital assistants will become fully customized, evolving into a ‘digital twin,’ equipped with your work history and institutional knowledge. This will not only maximize efficiency but also fundamentally change how we work, allowing us to prioritize the creative and strategic tasks that truly require the human touch.”
Zeus Kerravala of ZK Research sees a time when Zoom’s AI offering will be able to be spun off from the core products and be an entity in its own right. “Zoom will decouple AI Companion (AIC) from the workspace and make it a standalone app. Zoom AIC is one of the best AI engines for collaboration and by decoupling it, [it] makes it more valuable.”
Through decoupling, the Zoom tech could be used across every employee activity—not just calls and meetings—allowing for the product to become much more deeply embedded into organisations’ cultures. The AI development is obviously hugely strategically important in terms of the platform’s midterm development, but the creation of new applications, such as for call centres, is also key to growth.
In addition, Zoom will benefit from its interoperability with Microsoft Teams, as Microsoft, despite growth in user numbers, faces some difficult times with the platform in Europe. The legal headwinds confronting Microsoft in the EU are one reason for the Teams/Zoom interoperability.
With 320 million active users, Teams has shown significant growth, adding around 40 million users in FY2024. However, Microsoft faces a potentially hefty fine. In June, the European Commission said it was unhappy with the company’s response to the accusation that its bundling of Teams in Office 365 and Microsoft 365 subscriptions led to the platform having an unfair advantage in the market.
The investigation into Teams started in July 2020 after an anti-competitive complaint by Slack, which at the time said Microsoft had “illegally tied” Microsoft Teams to Office and was “force installing it for millions, blocking its removal and hiding the true cost to enterprise customers.”
Microsoft outlined a plan to unbundle Teams from Office subscriptions globally in April 2024. However, the European Commission said the actions were not sufficient to address its concerns, and more changes would be required.
Microsoft’s unbundling and allowing interoperability with other platforms were designed to avoid formal charges being laid, as the fine associated with being found in breach of the regulations would be up to 10% of its annual worldwide turnover, or around $21 billion. On top of that fine, the European Commission could also enforce changes to the products or the bundles available.
Microsoft president Brad Smith said, “Having unbundled Teams and taken initial interoperability steps, we appreciate the additional clarity provided today and will work to find solutions to address the Commission’s remaining concerns.”
Developing solutions that will appease the European Commission will be essential, as the threat of it imposing changes to Teams could impact the platform more than the substantial fine.
PREDICTIONS FOR 2025: MORE CONSOLIDATION IN THE COLLABORATION SPACE
2024 saw the long overdue start of consolidation in the video platform sector and in the video collaboration space. Zoom looks strong overall with the Workplace client-acquisition process. In addition, Microsoft had a strong year with sufficient user growth. Nonetheless, the possible fine and potential product changes required by the European Commission may not only deal a blow to its finances but derail Teams’ development and deployment.
In 2025, expect to see a Kaltura acquisition and possibly a Vimeo one as well. But companies such as Panopto that are exploiting specific and very clear niches with smart acquisition strategies may be able to thrive as the big players consolidate.
In the video collaboration space, expect Zoom to go from strength to strength despite the difficulties posed by a mass return to the office. Watch for Teams to continue to show growth despite its issues with the European Commission.
With the video collaboration space looking to have the highest potential for growth this year, it may actually end up being Zoom or Microsoft that acquires some of the video platforms to further build its strategic offerings.
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