Brightcove Blog - The Leading Online Video Hosting Platform

One Device to Rule Them All

Chris Johnston — Tue, 21 May 2013 21:42:30 +0000

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At a press event this afternoon, Microsoft unveiled the latest iteration of the Xbox, known as Xbox One. In their remarks, company executives referred to this as "the beginning of truly intelligent TV." So, is Xbox One the future of OTT? Here's my take:

Microsoft is doing a few notable things with Xbox One. First, the company is staking a more significant claim in the living room. Xbox One seems to be much more of a living room console than the current Xbox 360; it's more comprehensive than Roku, and it will come to market before Apple has made any major announcement in this space.

Second, while Microsoft is not eschewing the die-hard nature of their gaming customers, its executives are clearly positioning this as an "entertainment" console, and not a game console. Ultimately, Xbox One as a comprehensive entertainment solution could be awesome, or it could massively backfire. Nintendo did remarkably well with the Wii when it was first released by targeting casual gamers instead of die-hards. Conversely, SONY went the other way with the PS3, making a much more capable (and much more expensive) hard-core game console. Both are considered successful in terms of units shipped (roughly 100 million and 80 million, respectively). Microsoft on the other hand started Xbox as a game console, and learned along the way that it is a capable living room device (also selling about 80 million units); however, Microsoft also has a long history of failing in the living room, dating back to WebTV.

The thing I'm most curious about is the "HDMI in" capability which seemed to capture much attention. This is what lets you watch traditional pay TV (i.e., cable or satellite) without switching inputs. If it's done correctly, the Xbox can become the primary input to your TV, and this can really shift the tide in Microsoft's direction for ownership of the living room battle.

But, there are problems. On the Xbox One itself, it appears you will have access to a great set of entertainment apps: Netflix, Hulu, and custom apps from other content providers. When you "switch" to the cable box, though, where does the functionality lie? Am I using the cable company's DVR? If so, why? Doesn't the Xbox One have tons of storage space? Why would I pay that cable company another $10 per month? What about other cable company features such as on-demand? Who am I paying for that movie? Perhaps we'll start to see the advent of cable company "apps" for the Xbox -- where you're paying for the service from the operator, but it's all being delivered through Xbox, and the cable company set-top box goes away. Or maybe Microsoft becomes a virtual "cable operator" themselves, making content licensing deals with networks and owning the direct viewer relationship with you through your Xbox Live Gold account. They've taken a provocative step, but Microsoft has raised more questions than answers with this announcement.

Another area where I think Microsoft could potentially implode with the Xbox One is with the overall user experience. While gaming on the Xbox 360 is great, as are the handful of entertainment apps, the process of setting up and signing up is brutal. You need an email address to get a Microsoft account, and a Microsoft account to get an Xbox account, and then an Xbox account to get an Xbox Live account, and an Xbox Live account to get Xbox Gold--which is really the only way that you can do anything online. And if for some reason you need to change one of those accounts, you'll need to petition the U.S. Congress (kidding--kind of).

Lastly: voice control. This is an elusive one, and I don't think the capabilities are truly there yet (anywhere). I've not found a voice controlled system that is reliable enough to be useful. My car understands my son, but not me. Google Voice translates my voice messages into text--but not legibly. Even Siri is fairly fallible. With different accents, colloquialisms, tonal differences, inflections, and volumes, I can imagine the living room being a war zone, where people's "new relationship with their TV" has them screaming at it in frustration.

There's certainly more to come on this; as Microsoft consistently mentioned during the press event, the company will be sharing more details at E3.

Brightcove Powers DrupalCon Live Stream

Brenna Fitzgerald — Mon, 20 May 2013 21:12:51 +0000

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Can't make it to beautiful Portland, Oregon to participate in this year's DrupalCon? We've got you covered. Throughout this week, we will be bringing the conference keynotes to you live, with the help of Brightcove Video Cloud and the Zencoder Live Cloud Transcoding Service. Below is a schedule of the keynotes--simply look for a Brightcove Video Cloud player on the conference homepage (http://portland2013.drupal.org/live) and tune in!

Tuesday, May 21, 2013
The Current State of Drupal 8
11:30 a.m. - 12:45 p.m. PT

Wednesday, May 22, 2013
Thriving in a World of Change: Future-friendly Content with Drupal
9:00 a.m. - 10:15 a.m. PT

Thursday, May 23, 2013
The Engineer, the Designer, and the Dictator
9:00 a.m. - 10:15 a.m. PT

Closing session
3:45 p.m. - 4:45 p.m. PT

As part of the broader Drupal community--Drupal is a Brightcove technology partner--we are very excited to help Drupal enthusiasts from across the globe take part in this important, biannual event.

Brightcove Goes Behind the Scenes at the British Academy Television Craft Awards

Florentine Lemli — Mon, 20 May 2013 19:59:03 +0000

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Late last month, Sue Thexton, senior vice president for Brightcove EMEA, and I gathered with sound engineers, composers, editors, writers and TV personalities to honour the amazing British talent that works behind the scenes of some of TV's most exciting programmes. Hosted by Steve Mangan, star of Channel 4's Green Wing and the BBC comedy Episodes, the star-studded event was attended by the likes of Russell Tovey, Meera Syal, Jessica Hynes, Blake Harrison, Antonia Thomas, Grace Dent, Dawn O'Porter, Anne Reid and Julian Rhind-Tutt.

Long-standing partners of British Academy of Film and Television (BAFTA), Brightcove sponsored the Digital Creativity category, which saw the production teams behind Channel 4 Paralympics, The Great British Property Scandal, Embarrassing Bodies: Live from the Clinic and Foxes Live: Wild in the City all compete for the gold mask statuette. Presented by British journalist and author Grace Dent, these projects have all taken the traditional viewing experience and flipped it on its head, introducing new ways of interacting with the audience, all while making aiming to create a positive impact on society.

In the end, it was Channel 4 Paralympics that came out trumps in this highly competitive category, taking home the coveted award for its coverage of the global event. From live streams to smartphone apps, Channel 4 brought the Paralympic Games to life and made sure audiences paid as much attention to it as the Olympic games. Steve Boulton, creative director at Deltare, and Channel 4's multiplatform commissioning editor James Rutherford accepted the award, praising the industry and the Television Craft awards by saying "this where talent truly lies" (see the full speech here).

Sue Thexton (pictured with the winners above) speaking afterwards about the importance of this category and the awards, said: "Digital innovation and creativity has and will continue to change the way in which we watch and interact with television in the future. Everyone in this category pushed the boundaries of digital content and brought a global event or social issue to an even bigger stage. The Television Craft Awards are an important opportunity to recognise and reward the stars of this industry for the outstanding skills and expertise that they bring to making fantastic television."

The nominees and winners in the Digital Creativity category are only a small representation of the amazing work that's happening behind the scenes every day. With the innovations that many broadcasters, and digital vendors like ourselves, are spending time on, we will no doubt see continued advances in trends such as connected TV apps and second screen interactions changing the way we find and watch content.

To see highlights from the red carpet and interviews with the winners, please visit: http://www.bafta.org/television/craft-awards/

Congratulations again to all!

Personalizing the Video Experience with Data-driven Recommendations

Brenna Fitzgerald — Mon, 20 May 2013 18:21:07 +0000

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Brightcove PLAY 2013 came to an end last week, but the dialogue from the event will provide us with blog fodder for weeks and months to come. There was that much productive conversation and content created at the conference. One session that we weren't able to summarize during the event itself--with subject matter that is incredibly relevant to our customers--was entitled "Personalizing the Video Experience with Data-driven Recommendations." Now that we're back in the office and generally caught up, we wanted to revisit this compelling panel discussion. Moderated by Taboola founder and CEO Adam Singolda, the panel featured:

Kate Walters, senior director, video and photo products at Gannett Digital
Jeff Moriarty, vice president, digital and general manager at The Boston Globe and Boston.com
Peter Cherukuri, senior vice president, business development at POLITICO
J. Graeme Noseworthy, strategic messaging director at IBM Corporation

This group of digital media experts offered tremendous insight into their organizations' approaches to content and data. Here's a brief rundown of some of the session's key takeaways:

Personalization and Video are Interconnected: The panelists overwhelmingly agreed that, regardless of the size and focus of the organization creating video, the primary goal for video distribution should always be the same: deliver the right message to the right person at the right time. Like any content form, video will succeed only if it is tailored to its target audience and appropriately promoted. Recommendations matter--and you must know your audience. For instance, a local affiliate website should prioritize local content over national coverage. Their audience cares most about what's happening close to home.

Diversity in Video Offerings Matter: Particularly for traditional print outlets, convincing their existing audience (and new visitors) that they are now a video destination takes work. For example, Boston.com has cultivated a variety of genre-specific video content (i.e. musical performances or video chat with its popular bloggers) and places tremendous emphasis on live video, particularly for breaking news, in order to drive video traffic.

Web Properties Draw Inspiration from Traditional TV: The panelists referenced the importance of longer-form video content online, specifically from a monetization perspective. High-quality content--what they deemed as "Frontline-esque"--is key to audience engagement in the future. Content creators need to provide their audiences with unique material that keeps them (and thus advertisers) coming back for more.

Drive User Engagement with a Smarter Media Experience: The panelists noted that it can be challenging to capture data from video content in order to speak to people in a way where they feel as though they are being catered to as individuals. But, it is possible. And, truly investigating user behavior to create realistic personas is key. Additionally, content creators should work to maximize engagement at every step--from first click to last click. Finally, consistency of experience and quality across channels (Web, mobile and mobile app) is important in ensuring that content creators do not alienate their audience.

What Data Matters Most, Anyway?
The panelists also shared their thoughts on the metrics that are most important to track; they include:

Number of plays/video viewers
Amount of time video is watched
Video views per viewer
Location (i.e. zip code) of viewers

We again thank the panel moderator and all of the panelists for an engaging and thought-provoking session. Adam Singolda at Taboola also wrote a recap blog post; you can read his additional perspective here.

Driving Traffic with Optimized Players

Kyle Zapcic — Mon, 20 May 2013 15:07:15 +0000

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Many of my customers ask me about the best ways to publish their marketing videos in order to drive traffic to their website. This is because, as any digital strategist will tell you, traffic is a key success metric for any online marketing project. As a result, my customers' first question always is, "How do we drive traffic to our site?" And then, "Once we have an audience, how do we keep them?"

My response: video!

Video is naturally viral; people want to watch and share videos with friends, coworkers and their broader social network--but it is often an ignored tool when organizations are seeking to reenergize their Web properties in order to drive traffic and engagement. It shouldn't be that way! In fact, when using a feature-rich online video platform such as Brightcove Video Cloud, I recommend taking advantage of a few features available at any subscription level to support traffic growth. The following three methods for optimizing your Brightcove Video Cloud player will drive traffic and help you to also control the engagement and conversion experience:

Related link: For all videos you upload to your Video Cloud account, you should assign it a "related link." In the simplest terms, this means that you can attach any URL to the video and direct a viewer there. This is a great way to add more information to a video, push someone to a product page or prompt a trial or subscription sign-up.
Logo overlay: At the account level, you can overlay a watermark in any of the four corners of a video. And, beyond the overlay, you can make this logo a link! Not only does the watermark brand your content, your audience can click and be directed to your homepage, a landing page or another critical, sales-driving location.
Hosting on your URL: In my opinion, this is the best player feature for driving traffic. It's an underutilized but highly effective tool. Here's how it works: someone visits your website to watch a video and then shares it with a friend by copying the link in your player. This link can direct someone to a page on your website. The default looks something like this http://bcove.me/fua3gp51. Notice that this is a webpage with just the video in the top left corner. Instead, when you host on your URL, this link will redirect to a location of your choosing. Several of my customers drive people to their website's video portal or a landing page with the video embedded. And, you can accomplish this with just a few clicks.

I hope that you will consider taking advantage of these standard Video Cloud tools as you continue to publish your online videos. Some of you may be also be interested in video SEO, another highly effective way to drive traffic. Check out this great post recently shared on our blog to learn about SEO best practices. If you have other recommendations for optimizing videos for website traffic growth, I would love to hear them in the comments section.

Who Won a 2013 Brightcove Innovation Award?

Brenna Fitzgerald — Wed, 15 May 2013 16:40:32 +0000

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In today's closing keynote at the Brightcove PLAY conference, we unveiled the winners of this year's Brightcove Innovation Awards. We created these awards to honor the tremendous work of our customers--a group of brands, broadcasters and individual innovators that are leading the way in online video. At Brightcove, we're thrilled to be associated with the great work of our customers and commend them on their creativity and dedication.

Without further ado, the winners are:

Best Agency Campaign: Bank of America and Starcom MediaVest Group
Best Connected TV App: GaiamTV.com Roku App
Best Customized Player: JOYUS
Best Live Video Event: V8 Supercars - Clipsal 500
Best Mobile Video App: Rovio Angry Birds Toons
Best Mobile Web Video: Weather.com
Best Monetization Strategy: Recruit
Best Premium Video Initiative: NineMSN Catch-up TV
Best Video Marketing Initiative: Boeing Innovation Series

It's incredibly exciting to see how our customers are taking advantage of our technology. It is energizing to be a part of the work these customers--at the forefront of their industries--are conducting.

Turning Viewers into Customers: How Video is Changing the Game for Marketers

Brenna Fitzgerald — Tue, 14 May 2013 21:41:41 +0000

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One of today's strategy sessions at the PLAY conference revolved around video for marketers. Our own Steve Rotter, vice president of digital marketing solutions, moderated a panel discussion featuring:

Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute
Linda Crowe, director of digital media marketing at Oracle
Chris Gorell Barnes, CEO of Adjust Your Set

Joe, Linda and Chris each presented their unique perspective on video and the value of content marketing for effective brand storytelling.

Content Marketing: Past and Present
Joe Pulizzi began his presentation with an eye toward the past--referencing some of the earliest forms of content marketing: John Deere's Furrow Magazine, the original Michelin guides, the Jell-o recipe book, Marvel's G.I. Joe coloring book. These useful, engaging and entertaining pieces of content represent the first purposeful shift from advertising to content marketing. Fast forward to 2001 and $20 billion was spent on content marketing annually, according to the Content Marketing Institute; by 2009, the average company spent $1.8 million on content marketing each year. So, while content marketing has been around for a long time, and budgets and attention have become more focused on the area, Joe noted that most brands are still not very good storytellers. While brands might be good at talking about themselves, more effort needs to be placed into creating useful and entertaining content. Joe also offered some data from a recent CMI and MarketingProfs report, which Brightcove sponsored. Here are some of the highlights:

91 percent of respondents use content marketing
Social media is now the most popular content marketing tactic
85 percent of corporate blogs have five or less posts (corporate marketing departments are often good at starting content marketing initiatives, but might not be good at consistently maintaining them)
Less than 10 percent of companies have a formal content marketing strategy, even though 36 percent believe content is effective

Joe noted that storytelling must be integral to content marketing to create any sort of influence. And what's the most powerful form of storytelling (in our view, at least)? Video.

Enterprise Video
Oracle's Linda Crowe offered some tremendous insight into how a major enterprise plans for and manages video assets. What was most interesting is that even though Oracle as a company has been producing video for 15 years, only recently did it embark on true storytelling as well as take a holistic approach to video's relationship to marketing and sales, marrying video production and strategy. Here are some data points about Oracle's video production that I found very interesting:

Oracle has three video studios around the world
The company produces roughly 2,500 video assets annually
The company produces 140 live video webcasts a year
Oracle's video content receives 8 million video views via both Brightcove Video Cloud and YouTube

Linda noted that it is imperative for brands to think about video as one driver toward campaign engagement--a catchy way to bring people into the marketing funnel and get them to take action that will ultimately result in sales and further brand engagement.

Linda also shared some of the video-driven challenges that she works to address with her team:

Balancing employee-generated, "self-serve" video with content management and standards--a delicate dance.
Syndication. Because not every platform allows for syndication, it creates a huge management challenge for reusing assets.
Performance measurement and engagement metrics. Is video accomplishing the goals set forth for it at the outset?

Speaking of metrics, Linda noted:

Decide what metrics you are going to measure as you begin the content creation process (i.e. video views, sales, etc.)
Plan for scale and for redundancy
Be really clear about what your workflow is and keep asset management as a priority
Ensure that your organization has enough storage to manage your growing collection of video assets

The Agency View
Chris Gorell Barnes, CEO and founder of content marketing agency Adjust Your Set offered his perspective that video is complicated, but it's incredibly powerful if you "get it right." He referenced iconic brands that his agency works with--such as U.K. retailer Marks & Spencer--that have been able to drive sales through video portals and highly targeted video content. Chris noted that "Content is king, but context is queen." And through a reliance on video, brands can blend both content and context for powerful messaging. Here's Chris' advice for brands just starting a video content marketing journey:

Create content that is useful, informative and engaging.
You can create content that people want to watch that also supports your brand principles (consider Red Bull as an example).
Plan what you want to do with content before it’s even created. Should it drive conversion, shares or sales? If so, create it with these purposes in mind.
Work with specialists who understand the power of video and how to use it to best advantage.

In Chris' view, brands should think more like a media company and publishers should think more like a marketer: always remember that the second click is the most important--what do they do after they press play?

This session was filmed and will appear on our blog and website in the near future. Stay tuned!

[In Pictures] Brightcove PLAY 2013 Day 2 Keynote

Brenna Fitzgerald — Tue, 14 May 2013 20:03:46 +0000

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Day 2 of Brightcove PLAY 2013 is well underway, and it has been an exciting and eventful series of sessions along with an energizing keynote address. During the keynote, our product management and engineering team members unveiled both new product announcements as well as enhancements to our existing product offerings. Here's a series of stills from the keynote, along with a "snapshot" into each product discussion:

Our chief marketing officer Jeff Whatcott opened the keynote with a nod to Brightcove's technology achievements in the past year and a preview of some of the announcements planned for later in the keynote.

Thomas Nielsen, our senior vice president of products, then took to the stage to outline how Brightcove has evolved as a company and as a technology provider. He highlighted how we have worked with our customers since our inception, and how those processes have evolved over time. Specifically: assemble, customize and configure--we work with our customers to ensure our solutions are helping them to effectively reach their audiences. Thomas discussed how Brightcove offers a platform, starting with Video Cloud, and then Zencoder. But, we can also break all of the underlying platform entities into components ensuring that we address our customers' very specific needs. We aim to provide our customers with the freedom to: grow and adapt, accelerate projects and solve new problems.

Jon Dahl, our vice president for encoding solutions and the co-founder of Zencoder, took to the stage following Thomas to discuss the evolution of our Zencoder product family and its integration with Video Cloud. Jon discussed that Zencoder's APIs are created for developers, but that we're also committed to making our technology easy and accessible regardless of whether or not you want to work directly with APIs. Zencoder Live Cloud Transcoding allows you to create and manage live experiences without worrying about a hardware encoder, but availability via API means that you're not bound to any specific workflow.

Cortney Jacobsen, senior product manager at Brightcove, unveiled our most exciting PLAY news: the launch of Video Cloud Live. See this post for more details (and a video!).

David Regan, senior product manager at Brightcove, and David LaPalomento, principal software engineer at Brightcove, discussed players and player technology with the group assembled for the keynote. David and David discussed a plethora of topics (some of which require separate blog posts), including:

HTML5 advertising refinements: configurations for desktop and mobile are uniform, enabling customer to set up their ad strategy only once across platforms and distribution channels.
TV Everywhere authentication: within the same Video Cloud account, you can have TVE-protected content or open content--we can configure settings to best suit your needs.
Closed captioning: close captioning functionality has continued to evolve; for instance, we've added the ability to include live captions in the past year.
Twitter card functionality: we now support this out-of-the-box; Video Cloud players instantly integrate with Twitter's Web or mobile apps. More to come on this topic soon!

Phil Costa concluded the product discussion with an overview of Video Cloud native player SDKs.

What a day! We can't wait to bring you further updates on all of these technology initiatives as they continue to develop. And don't forget to share your thoughts on the conference via the #BrightcovePLAY hashtag on Twitter--we'd love to hear your feedback.

Brightcove Launches Video Cloud Live: Start Streaming Live in Just a Few Clicks

Brenna Fitzgerald — Tue, 14 May 2013 14:02:21 +0000

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Today marks the second full day of our annual user conference, Brightcove PLAY. And, with so many customers and partners in attendance, we couldn't think of a better forum to announce our latest exciting product news.

Today, we officially launch Brightcove Video Cloud Live, a multi-bitrate live streaming module that allows marketers and media companies to deliver high-quality, live video events across desktops, smartphones, tablets and connected TVs. We believe that Video Cloud Live is a "game changer" for live event streaming because it allows content publishers with any degree of technical expertise to use a familiar Video Cloud environment to manage the entire lifecycle of a live video event. With an intuitive set up, access to real-time analytics, monetization opportunities through advertising integrations and the automatic population of live content into a video on-demand asset library, Video Cloud Live makes live event streaming simple and painless--as it should be.

Consider these recent statistics from Accenture: 29 percent of tablet owners watch live video content via their tablet devices; 53 percent of connected TV owners stream live content; and 21 percent of survey respondents enjoy live events on their mobile device or smartphone. These figures clearly indicate a heightened consumer demand--and expectation of--live stream content from broadcasters and brands of all sizes.

In discussions with our customers, we learned of the challenges they faced when working with traditional, multi-purpose live streaming tools--set up was difficult, management was cumbersome, monetization wasn't easy, analytics and performance monitoring weren't necessarily available and they didn't have the option to integrate their live stream content into their existing Video Cloud library. We knew that we could do better; we have vast experience helping major broadcasters stream content live, and we knew we could create an easy-to-use platform that would help any customer tap into the power of live streaming entirely in the cloud and without the expense of a hardware encoder. The result of our efforts? Video Cloud Live!

Tune in to the video below to hear Cortney Jacobsen, senior product manager at Brightcove, discuss the features and benefits of Video Cloud Live. In sum, they include:

A simple workflow; just enter basic metadata (title, descriptions, tags, date and time, duration), select a custom player from the Video Cloud publishing module and then select or adjust recommended encoding settings
Users need to provide only one high-quality RTMP stream of their event, which Video Cloud Live can then transcode into multiple renditions in varying bitrates--in both RTMP and HLS formats--through Brightcove's Zencoder Live Cloud Transcoding Service
Brightcove's powerful analytics engine can provide real-time traffic and performance information about users' live events
Every event streamed through Video Cloud Live may be saved instantly in a user's on-demand library
There's no limit to the events that users can stream simultaneously
Sample use cases: a music festival, an industry conference or a company meeting

What are you waiting for? It’s time to start streaming live! Sign up for our public beta today at http://go.brightcove.com/forms/video-cloud-live-module.

Brightcove PLAY 2013 Day 1 Keynote: The Proliferation of Screens

Brenna Fitzgerald — Mon, 13 May 2013 19:40:29 +0000

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After many months of waiting and much anticipation, our user conference Brightcove PLAY officially kicked off this morning. In our Day 1 keynote, our president and CEO David Mendels and our founder and executive chairman Jeremy Allaire offered their thoughts on the current state of the online video industry--how it has evolved in the past 12 months as well as the shifting trends that will influence video in the near future.

Mobile
So, let's break it down. David got things started by highlighting the immense and rapid changes that the online video industry has faced--changes that affect both digital media professionals and digital marketers. Specifically, David referenced the end of PC domination; now, mobile browsing accounts for 23 percent of all Web traffic. For instance, Weather.com receives one-and-a-half times the traffic via mobile than it does via traditional Web. But, mobile attention is being spent in apps. And, from a video perspective native apps are "winning."

Live
Consumer preferences are driving demand for live stream content. In fact, David noted that, "There are as many passions in the world as there are people." And, as a result, live video is a way to reach and engage with all of these audiences. Monetization of live content is now mainstream and possible as well. For example, Brightcove customer V8 Supercars has been able to sell subscriptions to its live races--providing a direct-to-consumer means for augmenting its distribution channels.

Monetization and DRM
Video advertising grew 21 percent between 2011 and 2012, but David noted that it could have grown even faster. In fact, pre-roll, mid-roll and post-roll monetization of long-form content on the mobile Web is now possible and prevalent. Additionally, integration with various DRM providers enables a multi-DRM approach to protecting and monetizing content. This, along with DRM-enhanced native video apps, has helped to close the gap in mobile video monetization.

High-quality Content Marketing
David also noted that there is a movement from paid media to owned media with the assistance of video--hence the widespread influence of content marketing. And, as the presentation progressed, Jeremy took the stage to articulate "what the future holds" for online video. He discussed how new content creators are emerging fostering large digital audiences through original, direct-to-consumer content (i.e. Rovio's Angry Birds Toons Video Channel).

The Connected Living Room
Jeremy also offered his thoughts on the next phase of the "connected living room." Who will win? Smart TVs, game consoles or connected/OTT devices? Jeremy noted that they all have tremendous potential, citing the rapid rise in Smart TV sales, Xbox's stature as a media consumption device and the convergence of apps, TV and gaming via consoles such as the Apple TV or Roku set top box.

Standards Matter
Jeremy also referenced the industry standards that are forcing attention and starting a dialogue in the online video space. H.265, VP9 and MPEG-DASH--all of these exist and are developing to help content creators ultimately reach more consumers on more platforms, at a lower cost and with a better user experience. At Brightcove, we're paying close attention to all of these in order to best support our customers.

The bottom line from today's opening keynote? We're faced with a proliferation of screens now--but it is only the beginning. The opportunities for video content from a digital media and digital marketing perspective will continue to grow.

Tune in to tomorrow's keynote beginning at 9:00 am ET; you can watch our livestream at play.brightcove.com.

Today's keynote is embedded below for on-demand viewing.

Brightcove PLAY 2013 Starts Today!

Brenna Fitzgerald — Mon, 13 May 2013 12:35:57 +0000

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If you follow us on Twitter or Facebook, then you know that today marks the beginning of our favorite event of the year: Brightcove PLAY (May 13-15). Our annual user conference, PLAY is a terrific time to connect and regroup with our customers and partners and also to engage in some thoughtful industry dialogue about what's in store for online video in the coming months. Through a series of keynotes and breakout sessions we cover a lot of digital media and digital marketing ground (you can check out the full schedule here), but we also manage to have some fun through networking events and a celebratory party. This year, over 500 customers, partners and sponsors are joining in all of the PLAY activity and excitement.

For those of you in Boston to participate, welcome! If you're unable to travel to Boston this year, you can still tune in for the keynotes. Our livestream will live on the homepage of play.brightcove.com; here's a schedule of the keynotes for your reference:

Monday, May 13th; 12:45pm-2:00pm: Opening keynote
Tuesday, May 14th; 9:00am-10:30am: Day 2 keynote
Wednesday, May 15th; 11:30am-12:30pm: Closing keynote/Brightcove Innovation Awards

And for those of you in town for PLAY--or those of you keeping track of the event from afar--please follow us on:

We'll be live tweeting keynotes and offering other conference insights via our @BrightcovePLAY handle
Conference participants will be marking their tweets with #BrightcovePLAY
We'll be updating photos from the conference sessions and events in real time to Brightcove PLAY on Facebook
Check in on our corporate blog; we'll be recapping keynotes and breaking down various sessions

Here's to the best PLAY yet!

The Making of TalkTalk X Factor TV Heads - a Case Study

Stephen Wilson — Thu, 09 May 2013 18:27:28 +0000

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Today's guest blog post was written by Stephen Wilson, the head of engineering for The App Business. The App Business is a specialist app software company based in London. They work with brands to help them create business-transforming technology experiences across smartphones, tablets, desktop, social media and even TVs - wherever the audience is.

TalkTalk X Factor - Redefining TV Sponsorship

We've all seen the show. And, love it or hate it, The X Factor continues to be the biggest series on Saturday night TV. Last year, in partnership with MPC, The App Business worked with CHI & Partners to produce the latest installment of U.K. teleco provider TalkTalk's three-year sponsorship of the show, and deliver their most technically challenging and innovative project to date. A Web and mobile experience that gave X Factor fans the chance to star in their very own music video. With all the tools provided, users could pick from a selection of hit tracks and music videos, bring them together and record their very own music production mash-up. The best of the productions could even star on TV’s biggest ad spot, during the X Factor itself.

Check-out the campaign video to see how it worked:

With CHI as the creative lead and MPC running the TV production, our challenge was to design and develop the Web platform, giving fans the opportunity to create their music video - via the Web, iOS or Facebook - and then view a high-quality video composition of it in real time.

...Oh, and we had the small matter of doing it all within 8 weeks.

Concepting, designing and building a product of this kind, in such a short turnaround, was never going to be easy, so we had to make sure our efforts were focused on the areas that mattered most.

Here are five benchmarks we set ourselves for success:

Performance at scale and speed: Saturday night viewers are super demanding, and rightly so. Making sure the system was lightning fast was our top priority. We developed a custom OpenGL video compositing pipeline, designed to run on Amazon's GPU compute instances. This allowed us to render HD compositions of user videos in real time, ready to be uploaded to Brightcove Video Cloud for transcoding. Brightcove Video Cloud played a key role in the scalability of our system. Hosted on a high performance CDN, we had the confidence that users would have a consistently flawless user experience, with no buffering on playback.
A high-quality content experience: User-generated content, while obviously a fantastic way to drive engagement, also comes with a quality challenge. We wanted to create a high-gloss final product that would give users something they were genuinely proud to share, and of course, something worthy of a primetime TV spot.The first step was to control the area in which the content was pushed (the TV screen head) and wrap that with a high-production value layer (the music video). Then with HD source content and adaptive bitrate HTML5 video playback, we ensured that users were always viewing the best quality content that they could support at any given time.
Quick Integration with multiple platforms: Given the time pressure, it was super important that we worked with trusted partners, to leverage their rich APIs and allow for easy integration. We used an API-centric architecture that integrated at its core, with APIs provided by Amazon Web Services, Facebook and New Relic. At the heart of our video creation workflow we utilized Brightcove’s high performance content creation API. This allowed us to create and upload new source video assets immediately after rendering was completed, ensuring that they would be transcoded to support multiple bit-rates and resolutions across desktop and mobile as soon as possible.
A scalable solution: We knew that we'd see big traffic spikes during the shows, but we could only guess on the volume. The system was designed with flexibility at the heart, having the ability to easily scale upwards of 1000 percent during peak periods but importantly coming back down just as quickly thereafter. Managing the service levels in this way meant that budgets could go that much further.
Effortless user experience: The X Factor audience is as broad as they come. We wanted the experience to be simple and intuitive for users, regardless of whether they were eight or eighty years old. With a platform sensitive strategy, we remained focused on the core features, we said no to the unnecessary and endeavored to make the creation process as straight forward as possible.

The results

After a few late nights and some very hard work from everyone involved, we launched on schedule and were pretty chuffed with the results.

Over half a million visits served, with 40,000 app downloads.
130,000 videos were submitted, and 300,000 video views.
That’s 67,000 minutes of earned viewing off the back of a TV sponsorship.

More interestingly still, we saw engagement levels more than four times higher on iOS vs. Web, giving further evidence to the stickiness of a well-considered mobile experience.

For more information on the project or what the The App Business do please feel free to get in touch with caroline@theappbusiness.com.

Video.js 4.0 is Now Available

Kristin Leighton — Thu, 09 May 2013 17:28:40 +0000

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We are very excited to announce the release of Video.js 4.0, now available for download, on Github and hosted for free on our CDN. As background, Video.js is an open source HTML5 video player created by the team at Zencoder, which Brightcove acquired last summer.

Video.js is disrupting the market for open source video player technology and has seen tremendous adoption and market share in just a few years. The free Video.js player is used by tens of thousands of organizations, including Montblanc, Dolce & Gabbana, Diesel, Illy, Applebee’s, Mattel, Kellogg’s, Les Echos, US Navy, Aetna, Transamerica, Washington State University, and many others.

Version 4.0 received the most community collaboration of any previous version, which speaks to the growing strength of the JavaScript community, the growing popularity of HTML5 video, and an increase in Video.js usage. Over the last year, the number of sites using Video.js has more than doubled, and each month there are more than 200 million hits to the CDN-hosted version alone.

There are many exciting new features in Video.js 4.0, including:

Improved performance through an 18% size reduction using Google Closure Compiler in advanced mode
Greater stability through an automated cross-browser/device test suite using TravisCI, Bunyip, and Browserstack.
New plugin interface and plugin listing for extending Video.js
New default skin design that uses font icons for greater customization
Responsive design and retina display support
Improved accessibility through better ARIA support
Moved to Apache 2.0 license
100% JavaScript development tool set including Grunt

You can read more about the features in version 4.0 on the Video.js blog. And stay tuned, as this will be an exciting year ahead for Video.js, with more improvements to performance, multi-platform stability and customizability through plugins and skins. Members of the community have already started work on plugins for some of the more requested features, like playlists, analytics, and advertising.

You can also follow @videojs on Twitter or sign up for the Video.js newsletter to stay up-to-date on new features and roadmap updates. And if you would like to get involved in the project, check out the contributing guide.

Social Media: Say Hello to the Biggest-ever "TV Room"

Luke Gaydon — Thu, 09 May 2013 14:43:08 +0000

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AT this year's MIPCube event in Cannes, Twitter's head of broadcast partnerships in the U.K. Dan Biddle asserted that with 40 percent of U.K. tweets during peak-time television hours focused on TV itself, "Twitter is now the room in which we're watching television."

The facts backing his case are highly compelling – recent research from TV Licensing in the U.K. shows that the increasing use of portable devices is actually driving up the amount of TV we're watching, and mobile multitasking is now something of a phenomenon with a significant 78 percent of smartphone users accessing the Web while watching TV. When we consider that mobile is also the chief means through which we're accessing Twitter (60 percent of users, according to Biddle), the scope of the social TV opportunity becomes instantly evident.

And broadcasters are beginning to really feel the benefits of how social media boosts their engagement with new and existing audiences, whilst maximising the reach of their content. At the recent Guardian Changing Media Summit, Darren Childs, CEO of broadcaster UKTV, revealed that ratings for its one if its flagship shows – "Dynamo" – grew as a direct result of Twitter – proof positive of how online conversation about a new piece of TV can swell viewership. Other, non-traditional broadcasters such as Netflix – which enables subscribers to share their viewing activity with Facebook friends – are also proving highly receptive to the social TV opportunity.

TV – especially live TV – is something inherently social and, coupled with the online conversation made possible by social media, it's more compelling than ever. As an open, dialogue-driven forum that brings together conversations via the power of hashtags, Twitter in particular lends itself to social TV. And with more than 10 million active Twitter users in the U.K., 60 percent of whom are tweeting while watching TV (40 percent tweeting about TV itself), there are essentially four million conversations that broadcasters could be tapping into.

The social media platform means that both enjoying and mocking a TV show has become something of an art form. While one of the most tweeted about TV shows in the U.K. is reality TV show The Only Way is Essex, (often reaching up to 7,000 tweets a minute!), it's actually live events that still trigger some of the largest conversations. When British tennis star Andy Murray won a gold medal in the men’s tennis singles at last year's London Olympics, for example, the news generated a whopping 57,000+ tweets per minute. By its very nature, live TV provides a chance for people to share a common experience or spectacle, and being able to comment in real time on social media, with both friends and strangers, is an excellent enhancement. In some cases, the online conversation almost becomes an event in its own right!

The social media phenomenon is also great news for monetisation. We are becoming increasingly accustomed to seeing the inclusion of hashtags during broadcasts, especially during live TV, but ads themselves are also going social. In 2012, Thinkbox reported that 81 percent of viewers staying in the living room whilst ads are showing, and are multi-screening during this time, so social ads seem to be a natural next step for advertisers. Appealing to social networking is proving to be highly effective in helping brands steer conversation and drive engagement, and as much as 68 percent of brands are encouraging multi-screening by using a social networking mention, such as a Twitter logo, hashtag, or website URL within their TV advert.

So what's next? Increasingly we're seeing evidence of the ways in which social media is not only changing how media content is being consumed, distributed and promoted, but how it's starting to change the nature of programming itself. As Twitter's Biddle highlighted at MIPCube, broadcasters need to "think about programming Twitter as you programme your channel." We can undoubtedly expect to see more personalised viewing experiences such as live entertainment that integrates the second-screen experience and in which social media interactions, such as voting, form an integral part of programme formatting. This in turn will help to extend the reach and scope of the next generation of programming.

Check it out: with more than 26,000 Twitter followers, Bassmaster, the U.S. fishing membership organisation with more than half a million members, is using Brightcove’s Zencoder Live Cloud Transcoding service to live stream tournaments to multiple devices – opening up the event to its entire online community and promoting episodes via Twitter.
Like, Link, Share, Tweet: take a look at our free whitepaper on tapping the power of social media and video.
Check out this blog post on my takeaways from the Guardian Changing Media Summit and see my presentation here.

Video for Print Publishers - from Table Stakes to Profit Center

Greg Sokoloff — Wed, 08 May 2013 18:27:17 +0000

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I work closely with a number of print publishers (names you know and whose content you likely read frequently), and many of them are faced with similar business challenges. Essentially, as these print publishers continue their move from a print to a digital world, they recognize that video is a crucial way of storytelling. Video has become a medium that their audiences expect in addition to static text and images. Despite this shift in consumer expectations, many of the print publishers I work with are still struggling to ensure that they have enough relevant video content and that they are able to monetize that video content across platforms in a meaningful way.

I often see the classic "chicken and egg" situation where publishers indicate that they do not have enough video content to drive the traffic necessary to achieve a CPM high enough to make all of their video efforts worthwhile. It can be a frustrating, circular endeavor. This is especially true for publishers that are able to increase content production and traffic, but don't have an ad-sales team mobilized to sell video advertising.

While many print publishers look to Brightcove for technology solutions for delivering high-quality video experiences to their end users, Brightcove also has programs that will enable print publishers to add valuable content and increase monetization opportunities through video.

But, how?

Content Exchange
Through their Brightcove Video Cloud account, publishers can tap into our Content Exchange program allowing them to receive high-quality, relevant video content that they can then share with their audiences at no upfront cost. Major video content aggregators share their material with Brightcove Video Cloud. In turn, publishers can easily use the content--already in their Video Cloud account--on their own websites or in their own players. It's a simple, low-pressure means for adding to the video content publishers can share with their audiences, without the expense of creating and producing it themselves. And, as we know, more content equals more traffic. As a result, publishers' ad sales teams are armed with the statistics necessary to organically monetize their video content through traditional selling.

User-generated content
Brightcove also has partners that specialize in facilitating user-generated content (for example, Filemobile). When publishers make it simple and seamless for their audience members to contribute video content to their online properties, they again are providing themselves with a quick, effective way for ramping video content. Through Brightcove Video Cloud's integration with Filemobile technology, publishers can add widgets that will allow for easy upload and moderation of user-generated video submissions. Creative video production doesn't have to be expensive--particularly when engaged audience members are doing the majority of the heavy lifting.

Monetization Opportunities
Once publishers have a robust video portfolio that is generating traffic, Brightcove's relationship with numerous ad serving partners quickly allows publishers to get set up to monetize their video through pre, mid, and post roll video advertising. Additionally, once publishers have fulfilled all of the requirements from a specific ad campaign, they can tap into Brightcove's integration with ad networks--i.e. Tremor Video, YuMe and Adap.tv--to ensure they're receiving a guaranteed CPM.

Mobile matters
Because online traffic is shifting to mobile, my publisher contacts often lament that it is harder to advertise and monetize mobile video. But on the mobile Web, using our HTML5 Smart Players, Brightcove Video Cloud has existing plug-ins with multiple ad partners ensuring that customers' existing advertising relationships for Web or Web video translate into opportunities in mobile. And, through our new player SDKs for Android and iOS, we are able to incorporate ad network playback into native apps as well. I want to stress to publishers that simply because traffic is shifting to mobile devices, it does not mean that monetization opportunities cannot be capitalized upon. In fact, we excel at enabling publishers to monetize mobile video, whether it be mobile Web or in a native app experience.

While it's true that some print publishers are only thinking about integrating video into their content strategy because they recognize that it is "table stakes," Brightcove Video Cloud and related technology partnerships allow traditional print publishers to deliver video at scale and across multiple platforms. Print publishers can, and must, draw upon their tremendous brand identity and reputation to drive engagement via video efforts. Print publishers simply cannot use the excuse that video is just a cost center or something they haven't figured out how to monetize. Brightcove offers tools to build a high-quality library in a cost-effective manner and is with you every step of the way to ensure every video stream drives revenue.

Flipping Rocks, Building Starships and Connecting Cities: Brightcove Goes the Distance for Custom Solutions

David Lea — Wed, 08 May 2013 14:55:24 +0000

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Flipping rocks, building starships and connecting cities. At first glance, these items might not appear to be connected; but in this blog post, I intend to show how they are vital to the process of creating solutions for our customers.

And what do I mean by solutions, exactly? At Brightcove, we define a solution as something that is not out-of-the-box. A custom solution might entail a specialized publishing workflow, an app that allows customers to monetize video via a paywall, a branded website that displays a contextual video player from assets stored in Video Cloud or a myriad of other imagined concepts.

Flipping Rocks

I was a curious child. Have you seen those commercials where exasperated mothers are pestered by a small child asking "Why?" repeatedly? Yep; that was me.

Things haven't changed all that much. In fact, the first part of Brightcove's solution process involves a discovery phase and is where we in the solutions group get to channel our inner three-year-old, curious child. How so, you may ask?

We want to flip over as many proverbial rocks as we can--as early as possible in the project--to make sure there are as few surprises as possible during development. By engaging with our customers frequently, we validate assumptions and confirm that what we will be creating is precisely what the customer expects.

Building a Starship

Ok, I admit. I could have easily sketched a house and then just shown the blueprint of a finished house design. But that doesn't illustrate the point, nor win any nerd points. Starships may well be the future; but we don't know (yet) how to build them.

Similarly, custom solutions address business problems that our customers have when software does not (yet) exist to solve those problems.

We start out by sketching a solution:

And then, through methodical discussions with the customer, we transform that sketch into a blueprint of sorts.

I say "of sorts" because the finished solution that is delivered is never exactly the same as the blueprint. It adapts throughout the course of the project as needs change and as we "flip" additional rocks.

In reality, these blueprints are called solution proposals and they can contain elements such as:

Overview and scope of project
Assumptions
Components and configuration
Architecture
Flow diagrams and workflows
Use cases
Deliverables

Connecting Cities

Within an organization that delivers custom solutions, there are usually many groups that need to take part in the project. Some may be involved in the design process while some will validate the solution. Others will build and QA the solution, while a final group might perform user-acceptance testing and deliver the final solution.

Within Brightcove, there are solution engineers within the sales group that are responsible for creating the solution proposal and validating it with the customer. It then becomes a living document that is normally passed to the consulting organization for transformation into a statement of work. In order to ensure project success, it is important to build a strong bridge without rotting planks resting on rusty rails.

As the team generates the solution proposal, it flows from one "city" to another. It is peer-reviewed and then proceeds through an internal process that guarantees that it contains:

Options – PERT analysis that includes solution alternatives
Alignment – Each solution is reviewed by a steering committee so that any dependencies on the product roadmap are identified and managed.
Risk assessment and a mitigation plan

This process ensures that the connection between all groups ultimately look like the solid bridge above and not the former.

In summary, by flipping rocks and creating solid blueprints and bridges between groups, we lay a strong foundation for a project before ever writing the first line of code.

Brightcove and PLYmedia Work Together to Ensure Videos Have Maximum Global Impact

Yoni Silberberg — Fri, 03 May 2013 17:13:45 +0000

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We're pleased to present a guest blog post from one of our technology partners, real-time multilingual translations, subtitles and closed captions provider PLYmedia. Brightcove and PLYmedia partner to enable enterprises, such as Oracle, to empower global viewers to experience live video events as they happen.

Oracle--one of the most well-known technology companies in the world--hosts a plethora of large conferences every year. Oracle Partner KickOff, JavaOne and Oracle OpenWorld are just a few of the events the company hosts annually to reach and connect with the thousands upon thousands of developers and partners that comprise their broader business ecosystem. Understandably, not everybody who would like to can travel to these events from afar. So, in order to help educate and evangelize their products to an audience beyond the group that is able attend in person, Oracle live streams these events, relying upon Brightcove Video Cloud for optimal online delivery and performance.

But even with live streaming, there are still limitations to who can consume the content. To mitigate these issues, Oracle searched for a technology solution that integrated with Brightcove Video Cloud and at the same time allowed the company to cater to accessibility needs and a global audience as well as viewers tuning in at their desks requiring muted volume.

Oracle turned to my company--Brightcove technology partner PLYmedia--to deliver live captioning and real-time automatic translations, solving many of the issues outlined above. To meet Oracle’s needs, we created professional English captions from the live stream and we utilized our cloud-based translation engine, which ensures that the translation results improve quality by "learning" with every translation. More specifically, by adding professionally created captions to segmented transcripts, the translation engine gathers statistical information and customer-specific translation requirements and improves quality over time. Our technology also enables Oracle's viewers to control the captions that they are viewing by toggling them on or off and navigating between available languages (such as Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, French and Russian). By utilizing Brightcove's Video Cloud smart plugin, Oracle is able to provide live captioning on Flash and HTML5 players without any additional work. Considering the popularity of mobile devices, and the wide platform-preference disparity globally, this smart player functionality is critically important. Most notably, the high quality of our real-time automated translations allows Oracle to economically take its video content to all users, regardless of their language, location or accessibility needs.

Additionally, we have expended tremendous effort analyzing video views and video completion rates to understand our customer ecosystem better. Our research has found that videos with subtitles or captions increases video completion rates by 38 percent (from 66 percent without captions or subtitles to 91 percent with captions or subtitles). I commend Oracle for working to ensure that everybody has an opportunity to participate in its wildly popular events, while at the same time understanding the value of live stream content for engagement purposes.

Are you taking advantage of closed captions and real-time translations as part of your own online video strategy? Let me know in the comments.

Also, if you won't be able to attend PLAY in person, be sure to check out PLYmedia's live captioning during the keynotes!

Yoni Silberberg is a co-founder and VP Business Development at PLYmedia, a leading provider of real-time, automated multi-lingual translations, subtitles and closed captions. PLYmedia seamlessly integrates with Brightcove's Video Cloud to create live video events which are heard and understood across the world.

Brand Storytelling: Connecting Consumer Wants and Needs with Products and Services

Brenna Fitzgerald — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 19:22:18 +0000

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Over the past few weeks, we've shared several videos from the recent Argyle Executive Forum in Chicago that our digital marketing team attended. Today, we're bringing you the video of the panel discussion that includes commentary from Brightcove vice president of digital marketing solutions Steve Rotter. Steve and his fellow panel members centered the conversation on the value of aligning deep customer and target market insight with brand marketing efforts. The consensus: storytelling, aided by uniform messaging, is critical to not only achieving content marketing success but also to driving sales. Here are some of the other key themes outlined by the panel:

Brands are increasingly morphing into publishers. Brands are focused on retaining customers through content and entertainment. For instance, the "gold standard" in this regard is Red Bull. Video is a critical component of the company's content strategy--but what's really key to Red Bull's success is the company's ability to sell products without focusing on the product. Instead, Red Bull uses content to promote lifestyle initiatives that the company knows resonates with its primary target consumers.
Rich media content isn't just for media companies. During his presentation, Steve discussed how Brightcove customers in industries not traditionally known for owned media resources (i.e. in the insurance industry) are taking video production seriously. Companies are creating in-house, state-of-the-art digital media studios so that they can rapidly create and produce their own video content. And, they're seeing the quick return on this investment.
Online and offline integration matters. Storytelling and brand strategy cannot exist in an online silo. As an example of artfully combining online and offline activity, Steve referenced PUMA's efforts at the “PUMA Yard” at the London Olympics. There, the company combined exciting live stream content with man-on-the-street brand building efforts.
Look for the celebrities in your own industry. Celebrity spokespeople and/or endorsements are always a hot topic. And, as much as all brands would love the budget to secure a "name brand" ambassador for their products or services, that's not always feasible. Steve recommended uncovering the customer "celebrities" within your own industry. A short video endorsement from a best-in-class company is invaluable for reputation building.

Tune in below for more tips and analysis:

Inbound Marketing: What to Expect in the Millennial Age

Brenna Fitzgerald — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 14:52:19 +0000

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Last week, HubSpot unveiled its "2013 State of Inbound Marketing Report," a treasure trove of insights derived from a survey of over 3,000 marketers. Overwhelmingly, the report indicates that inbound marketing is effective, growing and clearly linked to a boost in sales. Of course, we already knew that! Here are some of the most compelling statistics from the report, in our view:

60 percent of companies have inbound marketing plans for 2013
Marketers assign 11 percent more budget to inbound tactics than outbound
In 2013, 48 percent of respondents will grow their inbound marketing budget
Inbound marketing efforts add 54 percent more leads into the marketing funnel than outbound activities

From our perspective, video content should be an integral component of these inbound marketing plans. Consider the figures from comScore's "2013 U.S. Digital Future in Focus Report," which uncovered that "the U.S. online video market attracts an average of 75 million viewers every day and streams nearly 40 billion videos per month." With such high consumer demand for visual, video content, successful inbound marketing campaigns must incorporate video.

It's also interesting to consider how inbound marketing could--and will--shift in light of Millennial consumption habits and preferences. A recent survey from the University of Southern California (referenced in this post from Brafton) found that 51 percent of Millennials are comfortable with sharing information with brands or companies as long as they're getting something in return. With the reigning generation embracing this perspective, the possibilities for inbound are endless. Check out USC's infographic on the data below for further fun facts:

Making Live as Easy as 3-2-1

Albert Lai — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 19:17:25 +0000

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In the first half of the 2000s, independent filmmakers were empowered through the availability of affordable digital non-linear editing (NLE) software and workstations, mass storage solutions, and prosumer high-definition cameras. With these tools, telling a story became much more achievable from a cost perspective, making film a desirable--but not required--part of the filmmaking process. 35mm reels and cans were replaced by Canons, Sony decks, a suitcase of G-Tech drives and a MacBook Pro.

As many of us are well aware, though, the affordability and availability of powerful tools is no substitute for great stories, talented directors and actors, and the expertise of cinematographers, makeup artists, stunt coordinators, and other underappreciated hands that help guide the invisible wires.

Over the past several years, many publishers have focused on pre-recorded content as their primary or only type of programming. In many cases, the decision to prioritize pre-recorded content was due to content licensing restrictions (e.g., broadcast simulcast) or the inability to monetize the content (e.g., the online audience was not large enough to effectively sell this inventory as part of their digital offering or package it with a broader deal).

Considering technical capabilities and requirements, publishers face a number of challenges when considering event-based, on-premise events for live streaming:

Hardware encoders are powerful tools, but they often come at both a financial and physical cost. Not only can top-grade encoders hit publishers with a significant capex expenditure, the logistics of transport and storage is not to be underestimated. Remember the days of moving your desktop and CRT monitor to a new cubicle?
On-premise live steaming often means limited uplink bandwidth. While a 5Mbps uplink might seem sufficient, publishers need to support multi-screen ABR, which typically means encoding for RTMP and HLS protocols with rendition bitrates of 2500, 1800, 1200, 800, 500, 350, and 150. All of a sudden, that 5Mbps uplink begins to sound like the audio handshake from a Hayes modem.
In addition, in an on-premise setting, publishers need personnel that specialize in managing, configuring, and operating live streaming hardware and software. For broadcasters that do this 24/7, that skillset can likely be found within the organization. For other publishers, it's a non-starter.
To cap it off, some publishers have been able to put the pieces together for on-premise live streaming with the appropriate hardware and personnel, but it scales to just a single event. For multiple simultaneous events, publishers are often faced with making the difficult decision of forgoing an opportunity or incurring one-time costs that may not be recouped in the foreseeable future.

From the streets of the London Olympics to the bytes of CES to underwater cameras giving us a glimpse into the fabulous aquatic lives of penguins, publishers use Brightcove Video Cloud to support playback and monetization of their live events. And, in accordance with FCC regulations that went into effect earlier this year, Brightcove recently introduced support for closed captioning for live streaming.

But, we didn't think this was enough to move the needle for all of our publishers to help them to evaluate the value of live streaming as a viable content model for monetization and branding.

With the availability of Zencoder Live Cloud Transcoding, Brightcove has removed much of the friction with live streaming. Live streaming is now more cost-effective, more scalable, and more approachable for any publisher large or small. Some of the earliest live streaming content I witnessed many years ago was the prototypical postage-sized playback of fish swimming in an aquarium--not too exciting unless you were spinning your imaginary propeller hat like the rest of us. As an aside, my first use of the Brightcove APIs was live streaming my dog doing nothing more visually exciting than snoring--though it was certainly technically interesting. Those bits flowed from an MBP camera, to FMLE, to Zencoder, to Akamai, to Video Cloud before finally appearing back on my screen.

A publisher can now reduce the operational requirements for live streaming to a single uplink rendition from a single software encoder. Zencoder handles all of the multi-platform and multi-bitrate transcoding in the cloud. This means the publisher has more choice and more control. Here's what's needed:

A single software encoder--hardware decoders are optional
A single uplink rendition--just send the highest quality bitrate rendition and the cloud handles the rest. If a publisher only needs to support a single rendition via RTMP, that's no problem. If a publisher needs to support 10 RTMP renditions for Flash and 10 HLS renditions for iOS mobile Web, native apps, and Connected TVs, it's as simple as a configuration setting.
API integration--it all starts with the basics, and the first step is exposing a flexible API that can easily integrate with existing publisher systems and workflows.

With Brightcove's ecosystem of innovative partners, publishers will see even greater end-to-end efficiencies and value:

Monetization services from partners such as mDialog that enable server-side ad insertion for live streaming content for both manual and signal-based use cases
QoS measurement from partners such as Akamai and Conviva that enables fine-grained instrumentation of the playback experience to improve the viewing experience--and also improves consumption and engagement with content and advertising
Emerging platform experiences from partners to expand the live streaming experience from just desktop consumption to truly anytime, anywhere, and any device

Some of our publishers have already embraced these capabilities - from bass fishing to sled dog racing. The closest I've ever come to sled dog racing was being dragged across the lawn on a plastic sled by my half-Husky, half-German Shepherd during a typical snowfall in Northeastern Ohio; however, I am fairly certain that my experience paled in comparison to the multi-day 500 and 1000-kilometer sled dog races held each year in northern Norway. For a publisher such as Smartcom:tv to have the confidence that they could live stream over 600 hours of race footage captured on all-weather cameras and delivered to desktop and mobile audiences worldwide, that stands out as an incredible use case of marrying premium content with compelling technology to delight the viewer (certainly more compelling than live streaming the sounds and snores of my Boston Terrier).

It was only a little over three years ago that the iPad was introduced. There were many skeptics at that time, and many publishers were surprised to see how this new device (one on which I typed this post) would change the video consumption behavior of their audience and create new revenue and branding opportunities for themselves. Many publishers have already embraced live streaming as a compelling form of content programming (broadcast simulcasts, brand marketing events, reality programming, educational and spiritual programming, sport competitions, etc.). Every technological shift evolves in spurts, stutters, and shouts. With the reduced complexity and increased availability of more affordable and available technologies, this step function of live streaming capabilities will enable new and exciting content programming opportunities for all publishers.

Every publisher should consider how live streaming can be a cost-effective strategy for engaging with their audience, providing additional monetization options, augmenting their VOD content consumption, and delighting their audience.