Managing your Video Minutes

It's easy to permanently delete videos from your Community to keep your video minutes under control. Read on to find out how. 

Depending on your Community plan, you will have different storage limits for videos. To help you keep control of your video minutes, you have some analytics available to you and a tool to help you permanently delete videos you no longer need. 

Any video that is uploaded to your Community by yourself or your members, goes towards your video minutes. That includes videos added to a Folder, a Post, an Article, a Comment and a Course. 

In this article, we will take you through the different pieces of data available to you in your Analytics Dashboard, and how to manage your video minutes effectively. 

Understanding your Community Video Minutes:

Let's begin by navigating to your Console and selecting Home and then Analytics from the left hand menu. 

There are some fantastically insightful metrics here in your Analytics Dashboard, however, we're going to be focusing on the ones at the very bottom. 

Here you can see three individual pieces of data available to you:

• Total Video Minutes:
  
  • This is the total number of video minutes that have been uploaded to your Community. 
• Monthly Video Minutes:
  • This is the total number of video minutes that have been uploaded to your Community per month. 
• Monthly Video Minutes Viewed:
  • This is the total number of Video minutes that have been viewed in your Community per month. 

Managing your Community Videos:

If you have hit your plan's video minute limit or you simply want to do some pruning, there's only one to go about permanently deleting videos from your Community. 

Deleting a video from a Folder, Post, Comment, Article or Course, or deleting a whole Folder, Post, Comment, Article or Course with a video does not permanently delete the video itself. It essentially hides it from view in your Community for both you and your members. 

This video essentially becomes orphaned and unattached to any section of your Community. 

There is however a whole video deletion page available for you to manage your videos, even if they have been removed from your Folders already. 

Let's navigate back to the Analytics Dashboard in the Console, and head to the Total Video Minutes section. At the bottom right corner, you will see an option to Manage Videos let's press this link and see where it takes us. 

You will see that the link itself takes us to a section of the Console dedicated to reviewing and managing all of the videos in your Community. 

Do not feel daunted by it being shown as a list of all the available videos in your Community however. With the use of specific Filters and settings, you'll be able to narrow down the best videos to delete in no time! 

Filters:

There are five main filters available to help you narrow down what videos are best to remove. You can combine them to locate a specific video to delete or use them to give you a broad idea. 

Press the Filters button to the right of the search bar and let's go through what is available to you:

• Uploaded:
  
  • This filter allows you to narrow down when the video(s) you are looking for was uploaded. 
  • You can use either the before or after field or both to set the timeframe you're looking for. 
• Content Type:
  
  • This filter allows you to set whether the video can be found in an Article, Post or Comment. 
• Content Deleted:
  • This filter lets you decide if you want to only be shown videos associated to deleted content such as a deleted Post or Folder. 
• Groups:
  • As you might suspect, this filter will help you to narrow down a specific video in a particular Group. 
• Orphan:
  • Earlier on we mentioned that deleting a video from a Folder/Post/Comment/Article/Course or deleting the whole Folder/Post/Comment/Article/Course does not delete the video itself. Instead it makes it an orphaned video that is unattached to any section of your Community. 
  • Setting the orphaned filter to Yes, will show you all of these unattached videos and will often be the first place for you to head to reduce your video minutes. 
• Folders:
  • In the same way as the Groups filter, this filter will help you to narrow down a specific video to delete that is currently in a particular Folder. 

Sorting:

There are a few options available to also allow you to sort the videos in your Community in a specific order, to further help you narrow down the video(s) you're looking for to delete. 

Press the three dots icon to the right of the filters button and let's take you through the options:

• Newest:
  • Sorts all videos in your Community with the newest showing first. 
• Oldest:
  • Sorts all videos in your Community with the oldest showing first. 
• Longest:
  • Sorts all videos in your Community with the longest showing first.
• Shortest:
  • Sorts all videos in your Community with the shortest showing first.
• Actions:
  • Whilst not something you can sort your list with, this will show you the number of items that are currently selected.
• Delete:
  • Delete will allow you to delete all the selected videos.
  • This is a permanent action that cannot be reversed.

Deleting a Video:

You can either select specific individual videos to delete or delete all videos. 

Deleting specific individual videos:

By tapping on to the specific video(s) you wish to delete, you will see a tick appear at the right of the video. 

Once you have selected the video(s) you want to delete, you can then tap the three dots icon and select Delete. 

You will then be asked to confirm that you want to permanently delete the following videos before the action is taken. 

Deleting all videos:

If you have used a filter to narrow down a series of filters you wish to delete (all orphaned videos for example), you can then tap on the small checkbox icon to select all videos. 

You can then tap the three dots icon and select Delete, then finally confirm that you want to permanently delete all of the selected videos before the action is taken. 

Top Tips:

• Deleting a video here is not reversible. Please be certain that you are deleting the correct video before proceeding. 
• Be mindful that deleting videos attached to active content such as in a Post or Comment may cause confusion or frustration from your members. 
• If you have hit your video minutes limit but do not wish to delete any further videos, you can also increase your video minutes limit – you can see the options available here in the add-ons section of our Pricing page. 
• The ability to delete videos is available to the Manager, Community Host and Publisher console roles – which you can learn more about here.