Use this guide to see where your video stands today, learn how leaders run their video operations, and get your Video Maturity Score with clear recommendations on what to do next.
Video is an important part of how brands reach their audiences, but it is extremely challenging to scale. The teams doing so have one thing in common: they’ve built the systems that let them move quickly, stay consistent, and reach every channel and market exactly as intended.
Our 2026 customer survey* found that while 92% of respondents plan to expand their video use, they acknowledged a myriad of constraints when it comes to doing so. This guide breaks down where those constraints typically show up and how to work through them by mapping your video operation against four maturity stages so you can see how close your current setup is to that benchmark.
Explore the four stages below, then take the Video Maturity Index assessment to get your Video Maturity Score and personalized recommendations on what to focus on next.
When you’re ready to go deeper, you can talk to a Cloudinary video expert to turn your results into a concrete plan for your team.
—Tali Rosman, Managing Director, Video, Cloudinary
You’re using video, and it’s working in places. But production costs are high, performance varies, and getting video live across every channel takes more effort than it should. You’re not alone — and there’s a clear path forward.
Video plays a role in your customer experience. But mobile performance, workflow handoffs, and the cost of creating variations for every channel are the friction points holding you back.
Your video performs well and your team operates efficiently. The next horizon is personalization, scale, and the kind of automation that frees your team for higher-value work.
Video is a strategic advantage, not just a channel. It’s woven into how your business operates — every device, every market, every format — and your infrastructure keeps pace without adding headcount.
—Tali Rosman, Managing Director, Video, Cloudinary
The difference between good video strategy and great video strategy isn’t one giant leap. It’s five areas where leaders are intentional, and where the right infrastructure makes the difference.
Three minutes to see where your video operation is strong, where it is slowing growth, and what to fix next.
You don’t have to solve everything at once. After you take our Video Maturity Index Assessment, it will classify you as a Video Starter, Builder, Leader, or Hero and surface a few strengths and focus areas. This section turns those stages into practical next moves, so you can start improving your video operation from wherever you are today.
Start with your worst-performing touchpoint, not your best.
Find the customer journey where video performance is slowest, lowest quality, or missing entirely, and make that your starting point. The biggest gains come from fixing what’s actively hurting the experience, not from optimizing what’s already working.
For Hydrow, that meant finding a single source of truth for all its video assets and letting delivery handle the rest.
—Reuben Kabel, SVP of Engineering, Hydrow
Map your video workflow before you automate it.
Automation makes your video workflow faster, which means you reduce the time to publish and increase revenue sooner. Map your video workflow from upload to publish before you invest in tooling. If more than a couple of steps happen in email, chat, or shared drives, that’s where you’re losing time.
Pick one step that happens on every video — approvals, crops, variants — and move it into a single system. Once that’s predictable, automate the repeatable work so your team isn’t stuck doing the same tasks over and over.
Make your best video journeys boringly reliable.
You’ve already proven video works. Key pages and campaigns perform reliably, and your team can ship assets quickly. The next move is to standardize what happens after a video is approved.
Pick the journeys where video clearly engages customers and lock in a simple rule set for going live: default aspect ratio, player placement and start behavior, which devices you test on, and when subtitles or translations are required.
Once those standards are in place, it’s easier to see which changes improve performance. This is the bridge between “we have good video” and “we have a high-quality video operation,” without jumping straight to global reuse and personalization.
Treat every video like a reusable asset, not a one-off.
At this stage, the question isn’t, “Can we ship video?” It’s, “How far can each asset go?” This is where personalization, localization, and automation start to compound.
Treat metadata as a first step, not an afterthought. Titles, tags, chapters, and descriptions make your video easier to find — for search engines today and for new discovery surfaces tomorrow.
Not sure where you land?
If you’re not sure which stage you’re at, start with our Video Maturity Index Assessment. You’ll get a score, a classification, and a short set of “you’re doing this well” and “think about this next” recommendations.
Cloudinary Video is the video platform behind some of the world’s most recognized brands. It handles the entire video workflow and delivery infrastructure so your team can create, manage, and deliver video experiences that perform at scale.
Deliver videos that perform everywhere.
Progressive auto-play videos, adaptive bitrate streaming, automatic format conversion, and
optimized delivery across every device and connection speed. Your customers get fast, consistent video wherever they are.
Set up workflows once. Let them run.
Tagging, cropping, transcoding, format conversion, video metadata generation — automated from upload to publish. Your team gets its time back.
Optimized, accessible, and ready to be found.
Auto transcription, captions, smart cropping, AI previews, and translations — your video is optimized, accessible, and discoverable before it goes live.
*Source: Cloudinary 2026 Customer Video Survey, n=59. Internal survey of existing customers; results reported in aggregate.