Brightcove Blog - Corporate Blog

Video Cloud Scores Role in BAFTA Awards

Chris Nicholson — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 20:39:09 +0000

Like all great films - and awards ceremonies honoring those films - there are plenty of behind-the-scenes players contributing to their success. In the case of the 2012 Orange British Academy Film Awards, one of those players was of the more literal variety: Brightcove’s Video Cloud Smart Player, which the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) used to display a wide-ranging assortment of video content leading up to and following its annual awards ceremony in London.

Since 2009 BAFTA has been using the Video Cloud online video platform to make its content library of long- and short-form footage, awards ceremonies, lectures, and sample clips from more than 200 annual events available to BAFTA.org viewers on any device, including smartphones, tablets, PCs and connected TVs. In the case of the BAFTA awards, the organization creates video libraries featuring winners and red carpet interviews, as well as a wealth of overview and educational content building up to the high-profile occasion.

BAFTA creates a wealth of online video content in support of its annual awards programs.

In a case study documenting BAFTA’s use of the Video Cloud platform, BAFTA online editor Pippa Irvine noted that the ability to quickly post red carpet video content and behind-the-scenes interviews at the time they’re happening is critical. “Efficiency is key,” Irvine said. “We want to be there first with all the backstage goodies for viewers to check out online via their laptops, iPads or mobile devices.”

Brightcove extends its congratulations to all of the 2012 BAFTA Award winners and nominees for their efforts that were so clearly on display both in front of and behind the camera.

Notes from the Field - Business Video Expo, Miami

Shiri Friedman — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 21:42:05 +0000

I recently had the opportunity to participate on a panel at the Business Video Expo (BVE) in Miami Beach. The topic, Video in the Cloud: Leveraging Hosted Solutions for Enhanced Communications, allowed me to share some best practices for online video strategies with an audience that was clearly eager to amplify their own initiatives. It was a fun, informative session and I enjoyed exchanging ideas with attendees along with my two co-panelists and Brightcove Technology Partners, Michael Kolowich of KnowledgeVision, and Ralph Pelamourgues from Mixmoov. (Mixmoov announced the integration of its Video Editor with the Brightcove Video Cloud online video platform during BVE.)

One of the nice things about conferences like this is that you’re able to learn a lot from the conversations you have between the educational sessions, not just during them. That was the case at BVE, where I picked up on three predominant themes that were very much top of mind amongst the marketing, IT, and communications professionals in attendance.

One of the most frequent conversations I had was along the lines of monetization. There’s a fairly common school of thought that monetization equals advertising, and there are plenty of instances where including advertising in your organization’s online video isn’t an option. I always try to impart that advertising is just one of numerous monetization strategies. Just by adding video to a website, you’re content starts working for you thanks to the additional traffic it generates and the extra time that it will keep audiences engaged on your site.

In-player calls to action, like these opportunities to read more or act now, offer an effective means of content monetization.

While advertising might not be an option, in-player calls to action could very well be. This gives organizations the opportunity to cross-promote other items or services, or simply invite viewers to learn more and make their way deeper into the site. Calls to action can very effectively convert viewers into buyers or qualified leads.

Another hot topic was analytics. I spent a good deal of time talking about analytics in general, and how businesses can use the incredibly valuable and insightful information available to them in order to formulate their online video strategies and drive better results. This also gave me the chance to discuss Video Cloud’s out-of-the box analytics, which include audience metrics like unique viewers, new viewers, and geographic distribution of views, as well as endpoint profile reports with details about users bandwidth consumption, operating systems and browsers.

It’s also worth noting that Brightcove integrates with third-party Web analytics platforms such as Google Analytics and Ominture. This allows users to access site metrics and video analytics all in one convenient place while demonstrating how video affects time on site, engagement and conversion.

The other point that came up was a blended YouTube strategy, something that Brightcove has espoused for some time. Essentially, we suggest using YouTube as a good “front door” into your site and environment. YouTube is great for building awareness and promoting viral sharing and awareness. Once engaged, the key is to drive traffic to your site for a fully branded experience that drives deeper engagement and conversion.

Business Video Expo proved itself to be a good event with a great turnout of attendees. There was a solid cross-section of businesses represented, from small and medium operations to global enterprises, all who were attending with the shared goal of learning more about and improving their online video initiatives.

If you’re just starting to pull together your online video strategy or are looking for ways to improve, a good place to start is Brightcove’s free “Video Strategy Framework” whitepaper. And of course, don’t ever hesitate to get in touch with a Brightcove expert. We’re always glad to help.

Registration for Brightcove PLAY 2012 is Now Open

Kristin Cronin — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 19:07:43 +0000

We are very excited to announce that registration for Brightcove PLAY 2012 is now open! Visit play.brightcove.com to learn more about the event and to register today. If you register before May 1st, you can take advantage of our early bird pricing rate and save $500, so make sure you act fast!

This year, Brightcove PLAY will take place from June 25 - 27th at the InterContinental Boston hotel. The event will bring together Brightcove customers, partners and industry leaders at the forefront of the digital media revolution. At the event, hundreds of media companies, marketers and developers from around the world will convene for three days of in-depth strategy sessions, next-generation product demos, all-star keynotes and networking.

Brightcove PLAY 2012 will feature keynote presentations and expert-led breakout sessions for business decision makers and strategists, day-to-day users and non-technical programmers, Web developers, advertising operations professionals and more. Whether you are a large media organization looking to expand distribution and monetization options for your digital media, a brand marketer focused on increasing customer engagement and loyalty, or a crack developer looking to expand your skills, there is something for everyone at Brightcove PLAY.

New This Year

Submit session ideas - We excited to accept session proposal ideas from our customers and partners. Click here to submit an idea.
Nominate your organization for a Brightcove Innovation Award - Think you've got a killer Video Cloud or App Cloud implementation? Submit your company or project for the Innovation Awards and come see who takes home top prize at the awards ceremony at PLAY.

Brightcove PLAY 2011 was a sold out event with more than 500 attendees, so make sure you reserve your spot today! And stay tuned for lots of exciting updates on our flagship sponsors for this year and session topics and speakers in the weeks ahead.

Telecom Italia’s Digital Company Matrix Selects Brightcove Video Cloud for Online Video Initiatives

Kristin Cronin — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 19:38:01 +0000

Earlier today we announced that Matrix, the digital company of Telecom Italia, has chosen Brightcove Video Cloud to support its online video initiatives for the consumer news and entertainment website, Virgilio.it. Virgilio is one of the largest consumer sites in Italy with 15 million Web users per month, providing email, media sharing, news and location-based services to Italian-speaking users around the world.

Matrix will use Video Cloud to expand the new advertising-supported news and entertainment site, Vitv. Part of the Virgilio.it portal, Vitv aggregates video content from a variety of Italian news, television and cinema sites, allowing users to engage, view and share local language content.

Through Video Cloud, Virgilio is able to easily publish, distribute and monetize video content on Vitv across multiple devices, from PCs and smartphones to tablets and connected TVs. Video Cloud Smart Players also make it easy for Matrix to deliver video content simultaneously for Flash and HTML5 experiences. With a single embed code, the organization is able to operate multiple players that render automatically based on the viewer device.

The video aggregation site (currently in public beta) is also accessible through Android and iOS mobile devices with plans to launch apps for both platforms in the future.

This is yet another example of an exciting new Brightcove customer in Europe. Earlier this week, we announced that smartycontent in Spain is using Video Cloud to power its new multimedia player, and we look forward to showcasing other great European customers in the near future.

smartycontent Selects Brightcove Video Cloud to Power its i_smarty Multimedia Content Player

Kristin Cronin — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 18:15:10 +0000

We are happy to announce that smartycontent, a multimedia communication aggregator in Spain, has chosen Brightcove Video Cloud to power its i_smarty multimedia content player. smartycontent's service was launched with more than 7,000 video and has grown to reach an audience of 12 million unique users.

smartycontent's i_smarty service is aimed at both large organizations and SMEs and e-commerce companies. It also has business solutions designed to offer multimedia advertising, editorial content and online sales. Its main objective is to provide a new medium and business model aimed at a sustainable, free distribution and cost-effective audiovisual communication for all parties involved.

Video Cloud will enable smartycontent to broaden its product portfolio and create a variety of customized video experiences using the platform's APIs and SDKs. Video Cloud will also enable smartycontent to introduce new monetization opportunities for advertisers and partners.

We are excited to add another innovative organization to our arsenal of Video Cloud customers in Spain, which also includes Grupo Vocento, Grupo V, Conde Nast Digital Spain and Sony Music Spain.

Brightcove App Cloud Shortlisted for GSMA Global Mobile Award

Chris Nicholson — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 14:08:36 +0000

We’re thrilled to announce that Brightcove App Cloud has been shortlisted for a GSMA Global Mobile Award in the Best Cloud-Based Technology category. The awards, which honor excellence and innovation in mobile communications, will be presented at a ceremony during Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Tuesday, Feb. 28.

Introduced for general availability in Nov. 2011, App Cloud is a content app platform for building and operating engaging native apps for Apple iOS and Google Android smartphones and tablets. App Cloud combines an open HTML5 Web development model with intelligent cloud services to accelerate app development, continuously optimize performance, measure effectiveness, and enable dynamic updates to installed apps.

“Reflecting the intensity of competition and innovation across the mobile ecosystem, we saw a record 600 entries and an exceptionally high quality field of contenders vying for this year’s Global Mobile Awards,” said Michael O’Hara, Chief Marketing Officer, GSMA. “It is a significant achievement to have made the shortlist, and our warmest congratulations go to all the nominees announced today. We look forward to the unveiling of the winners at the Mobile World Congress next month.”

Brightcove will be demonstrating the power of App Cloud at Mobile World Congress in the App Planet exhibition in Hall 7 on stand 7G8, Feb. 27 - March 1, 2012. Demonstrations will show how App Cloud accelerates app development for iOS and Android while also lowering total cost of app ownership.

If you are attending Mobile World Congress and would like to arrange a demonstration, please contact us at email: mwc@brightcove.com

Video Cloud Shaping Up for Online Fitness Videos

Chris Nicholson — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 17:34:59 +0000

The ringing in of every new year brings with it emphatic resolutions from across the globe to exercise more, get in shape, eat better, lose weight, etc. It also ushers in a host of articles, newscasts and blog posts - like this one - addressing those often hollow proclamations. Interestingly, online video is quickly becoming a tool that can help people keep those resolutions.

CNN’s Jacque Wilson recently posted an interesting story on CNN.com discussing the nascent trend of online video streaming in the fitness industry. According to the story, fitness studios are increasingly making classes available via on demand or live streaming through their websites.

It’s a phenomenon that’s “just starting to blossom in the fitness industry,” IDEA Health and Fitness Association editor Sandy Todd Webster told CNN. “It seems like the next natural progression to home fitness DVDs. It's another way of making fitness more convenient for yourself.”

The story cites a range of factors that appear to be driving the rise in online video streaming of fitness videos, covering everything from laziness and not wanting to leave the house in inclement weather to lack of time and people who aren’t necessarily comfortable in or have access to gyms.

We’re pleased to report that numerous Brightcove customers are using the Video Cloud online video platform as part of the Internet fitness video streaming trend, from trainers to suppliers. Isolator Fitness, for example, providers of a range of training equipment, makes a wealth of informative videos available on their website documenting everything from product details to workouts.

Beachbody, the company that brought us P90X, INSANITY and a host of other popular in-home fitness and weight loss solutions, has created an extensive library of videos on its website. The content covers product information and demonstrations, training, health, and nutrition to actual customer success stories.

And YogaToday includes a series of instructional videos from different yoga instructors. Viewers can choose a free weekly video, download videos a la carte, or subscribe for access to unlimited streaming of all videos on the site.

While Brightcove customers are making it easier than ever for their audiences to take advantage of a wealth of fitness video training, products and information, it’s still up to the viewer to do the exercise. But it’s a new year and maybe, just maybe this will be the year. Right?

The Lifecycle Cost of Developing and Managing Mobile Apps

Jay Liu — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 21:25:36 +0000

Mobile apps are proven to be effective in generating business value. But unless you are satisfied with a cookie cutter app from one of those app generators (I suspect that most reputable and respectful organizations won’t be), developing and managing your custom mobile apps could be very expensive and involve a lot of hidden costs. This is the case whether you are building an army of native app developers in-house or outsourcing the project to external development agencies.

Let’s say you start with the development of an iPhone app. You need to define the blueprint that lays out all the features, functions, and user interaction points; you need to design the UI that reflects you brand and style; and you need an iOS developer writing the Objective-C code for the front end of your iPhone app. Obviously cost varies depending on the level of sophistication of your app, but for this first stage of UI design and iOS front end development, the cost can go anywhere from $35K for a reasonably polished mid-range app, to well over $100K for a complex high-end custom app.

Then there is Android. With its leading market share driven by a plethora of OEMs pumping out new devices every week across all mobile carriers, you cannot ignore it in your mobile strategy. While you can leverage a portion of your early investment in blueprint and UI design, you need a separate team of Java developers writing code for the Android platform. For this step, the cost can go from $30K to over $80K.

As a next step, you have to invest in the backend. This involves integrating with your own CMS systems such as Drupal; integrating with your third-party content platforms such as Flickr or our Video Cloud; integrating with your advertising servers and networks such as DoubleClick and AdMob; integrating with your analytics engines such as Omniture; integrating with social networks such as Twitter and Facebook; and building your own push notification and in-app purchase infrastructure across two platforms. Be aware, because you are sending bits and bytes through an unreliable and very thin pipe of wireless bandwidth which could also be expensive to your end users, extra skills and efforts are needed to optimize and transcode your content for these devices. Conservatively speaking, this stage could cost from $8K to over $30K.

So far you have spent anywhere from $73K to over $210K to develop one app on two platforms. If you are able to accomplish all of these within six months and launch your apps, congratulations on a job exceptionally well done. Perhaps you should consider a future on America’s Got Talent! Most projects go far beyond this time frame and significantly exceed budgets, not only due to technical complexities and surprises, but also because of a cumbersome and time-consuming iteration and review cycle during the development process – you have to ask your developers to build an ad-hoc app and ship to you every time a change is made. Time is money, and this can turn into a lengthy and costly process.

Now you have launched the single app on two platforms, you have taken the first step – yes, the first step – of a long journey, a journey we call the App Lifecycle. After your app deployment, you need to fix bugs and release new editions, launch push notification campaigns to drive up user engagement, update and optimize your content portfolios, monitor, analyze and report the app performance, and fine-tune your mobile adverting policy, just to name a few operating tasks. By the way, don't forget to invest in operational monitoring to ensure that your apps and the back end that feeds them are available at least 99.9% of the time, which is the industry standard for enterprise grade SLA. For these ongoing operating tasks that are critical to the ROI of your app strategy, be prepared to spend anywhere from $20K to more than $60K per year.

3 Year Total Cost of Ownership for one mobile app across iOS and Android

Do you want to build your second app? Great, now you have to start the process all over again … from scratch.

Despite all the proven benefits of mobile apps, do you think you have the budget, time, and risk appetite to take this journey? I don’t blame you if you don’t. According to a new study, app development costs exceed earnings by three times.

I'm sorry to send you into depression, but the great news is that it doesn’t have to be this way. Innovators at Brightcove have been working on this problem for a few years and now with the newly released App Cloud, the end-to-end solution for app life cycle management across platforms, you can reduce the total cost of ownership by up to 90%.

How? With App Cloud and the many cool capabilities it offers, you can leverage your internal web development team rather than building an expensive new iOS/Android development team, you can address multiple platforms with one single development process, you can dramatically shorten the development and review cycle, you can count on us to handle all those backend plumbing and value added cloud services, and you can build one custom template and reuse it for many apps. Also, rest assured that there is a 99.9% SLA behind the platform.

Together, let’s take the journey to help you capitalize on the power of mobile apps without breaking your budget.

Online Video Advertising - What You Need to Know

Kristin Cronin — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 20:36:59 +0000

Growing faster than any other segment of online advertising, online video advertising generates hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue each quarter for publishers from major media companies to special-interest websites. With this in mind, Brightcove is excited to launch a new Online Video Advertising page in the Brightcove Learning Center that is built to serve as a resource for video publishers at all levels who are looking to monetize their online video content.

The online video advertising ecosystem can seem daunting to many, as it encompasses ad serving platforms, ad management tools, ad networks and ad exchanges, not to mention the variety of ad formats, placements and standards available. The Online Video Advertising Learning Center addresses these issues to provide visitors with a thorough overview of the ecosystem and identifies key questions that publishers should address when trying to develop a successful online video advertising business. Key questions addressed include is your online video content suitable for advertising, where will your ads come from, what type of ads will you run and how you will run them.

To learn more about online video advertising -- including opportunities and strategies for monetizing your video content across non-PC devices like touchscreen smartphones, tablets, Connected TVs, and over-the-top devices -- we encourage you to download our free, in-depth whitepaper, "Online Video Monetization Made Simple." And keep checking back to the Online Video Advertising Learning Center page for the latest strategies, technologies, and best practices for your video advertising business.

Brightcove Video Cloud Solutions: Engage Audiences with the Power of Branded Online Video

Chris Nicholson — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 03:15:20 +0000

It’s no secret that the amount of online video being produced and consumed is skyrocketing, with hundreds of millions of Internet users watching billions of videos every month. Ironically, the popularity of online video creates both tremendous opportunities along with some challenges for marketers and communicators to attract and engage audiences. Brightcove’s own statistics show that video drives website traffic and increases time on site.

Many leading global brands are already leveraging deep integrations with Brightcove’s Video Cloud online video platform for their website and social media strategies. Kohler, for example, has created several video channels and an extensive content library dedicated to its various product lines. And Nestle Purina supported its Incredible Dog Challenge with a broad range of video content highlighting the canine and human participants in its annual series of regional sport dog events.

Brightcove recognizes the power of extending Video Cloud with comprehensive solutions that harness the power of major social destinations, video aggregators and consumer-driven video content. That's why Brightove offers turn-key solutions that bring together the power of the market-leading video platform with expert development resources and strategists to implement end-to-end offering for organizations and brands of all sizes to launching their own online video initiatives. Combining the proven features of the Brightcove Video Cloud online video platform – reliable hosting, multi-format encoding and delivery for viewing on any screen, and simple content management – with access to an expert professional services team, the four Video Cloud Solutions are:

YourBrand TV to establish branded video channels on corporate websites
YourBrand TV for Facebook to seamlessly publish video into Facebook pages and news feeds
YourTube UGC Portal to leverage user generated content campaigns to drive engagement and leverage customers as brand advocates
YourTube EGC Portal to leverage employee generated content for internal communications

Brightcove Professional Services
One of the benefits that comes with all Video Cloud Solutions is direct access to Brightcove Online Video Professional Services, a highly skilled group offering start-to-finish consulting, strategy, design and development services to bring your solution to reality in the shortest time possible. Consisting of dedicated Brightcove online video experts, the professional services group helps customers accelerate time to market, refine key strategies and tactics, and differentiate you from your competition.

Brightcove Video Cloud Solutions are available through Brightcove Professional Services in conjunction with Video Cloud Pro or Enterprise subscriptions. To get started or learn more contact Brightcove Sales.