Most university procurement for video production compares showreels. A showreel is the best work a vendor has ever done, usually for a client with a budget you do not have, and it tells you almost nothing about what arrives in week nine of a four-hundred-hour programme.
These are the questions we would ask instead. They are written to be used on any vendor, us included.
1. What is the unit of price, and what makes it go up?
Per finished hour, per video, per seat, per month, per effect? The unit determines what you can forecast. A per-finished-hour price lets you multiply by your programme and know the number before you commit. A per-seat licence tells you nothing about the cost of the work.
Follow up: what is metered separately, and what happens when we exceed it? Any vendor with a credit system, an overage rate or a fair-use clause has a second price list. Ask to see it before you sign, not after.
2. Who approves, and what happens if they say no?
Ask who signs off before a student sees a video, how many revision rounds are included, and what a rejected video costs. If revisions are billable, a vendor has an incentive you do not want them to have. If there is no named approval step at all, you have outsourced editorial control without noticing.
3. Who owns the output, and what happens to the source footage?
Three separate things, often conflated. Who owns the produced video. Whether the vendor retains a licence to it. And what happens to the raw recordings — retention period, deletion on request, and whether they are used to train anything. Get all three in writing. The third one is the one most contracts are silent on.
4. What is the turnaround, and what is it in your busiest week?
Every vendor quotes a turnaround. Ask for the one that applies in late August when every client is filing at once. Ask whether capacity is reserved or first-come. Ask what happened the last time they missed, and what the contract does about it.
A turnaround with no stated behaviour under load is a marketing number.
5. Show me the twentieth video, not the first.
The single most useful request in this whole list. Ask for videos 1 and 20 of the same course, from a real client, and watch them back to back. Look at whether the lower-third is in the same place, whether the caption style held, whether the title card font drifted, whether the pacing is the same.
Consistency across a course is the thing a student notices without being able to name, and it is precisely the thing a showreel is constructed to hide.
6. What will you refuse to do to my lecture?
A vendor who will do anything you ask has no product boundary, and a vendor with no boundary will eventually do something your academic council did not sanction. Ask specifically: will you synthesise a presenter? Clone a voice? Change what a lecture asserts? Remove a credit?
You are listening for whether the answer is immediate. A vendor who has thought about this has the list ready.
7. What does the evidence look like at audit?
For an Indian institution filing under the UGC Regulations, and for anyone facing an accessibility review, the deliverable is not only the video. It is the record: which effects were applied to which file, when, and who approved it. Ask to see a sample of that record from a real engagement. Most vendors have never been asked and do not produce one.
The question we answer badly
Since we wrote the list, it would be dishonest not to say where we come off worst.
Question 5, on our own showing
- We are early. We cannot hand you videos 1 and 20 from a five-year client relationship, because we do not have one yet. What we can show is a full 22-minute lecture produced end to end, and a free cut of your own footage inside 24 hours — which is a weaker proof than a long client history, and we would rather say so than dress it up.
- If you are running a risk-averse procurement for a flagship programme, that is a legitimate reason to prefer an established vendor. The mitigation we would accept in your position: start with one course, priced as a pilot, with no commitment beyond it.
A note on how to use this
Send the seven questions to every shortlisted vendor in writing and ask for written answers. The ones who answer in a paragraph each have thought about it. The ones who ask for a call first are managing the conversation, which is itself an answer.