Brightcove Blog - Brightcove Ecosystem

Guest Post: Video Marketing Just Got Easier

Guest — Fri, 13 May 2011 16:40:32 +0000

This guest post comes from our Technology Partner, Brainshark. Brainshark provides the leading cloud-based software for creating, sharing and tracking online and mobile video presentations. Thousands of companies – including a third of the Fortune 100 – rely on Brainshark to increase the impact and reduce the cost of their sales, marketing, training and HR communications. Here's how it works:

Publisher’s Brainshark administrator inserts all Brightcove credentials (Publisher Id, Player Id, Read With URL Access Token, Write Token) into their Administrative screen.
Once enabled, a new link (“Publish to Brightcove”) appears within your Brainshark account under “Things You Can Do” menu.
When Publisher’s Brainshark presentation is completed and ready for exporting to Brightcove, simply click the “Publish to Brightcove” link.

Let’s face it, it’s 2011 and in today’s digital marketplace, businesses and consumers alike understand the value of video. If you’re a Brightcove customer, there’s no doubt that you’ve already seen it pay dividends firsthand. Yet, while the benefits of video for your business are quite apparent, there are two elements of business-video production that aren’t always as obvious. One is where you can use videos and the other is how to create those videos within your various constraints.

These uncertainties exist because there are commonly two diverging misconceptions about business videos: a) production is an expensive and time-consuming process, making video a rare or completely unavailable weapon in your marketing arsenal; b) video production that you can actually afford results in very grainy and off-the-cuff content that’s hardly usable for anything but the buried catacombs of your YouTube channel.

First, marketers CAN produce visually appealing and effective content through a quick creation process that won’t break the bank. Secondly, there are a great variety of opportunities for using video. Consider:

an invitation to an event
an email marketing drop
your homepage or any other section of your website
a description of your company, product, or service
content marketing materials
customer testimonials
case studies
research findings
internal communications

The list can really go on and on and yet you’ll notice that all of these examples vary in terms of the level of video production required. But do they?

When video assets with high production value aren’t absolutely necessary (or even feasible), there are many video presentation tools available for a variety of businesses purposes. At the end of the day, combining audio to visuals is the backbone of what makes video so effective. Granted, you should be strategic and careful about how you combine these two features, but the result hardly needs to be next year’s Super Bowl commercial.

There are tools out there that will help you accomplish these tasks quickly and inexpensively without compromising effectiveness. For example, take a look at the video below:

With the Brainshark platform, Pedowitz Group created this presentation (specifically designed to play sharply on a mobile device) using just PowerPoint for the visuals.

Brainshark allows you to upload scores of different formats, including PowerPoint, PDF, Excel, Word, other videos, podcasts, even web pages and add your voice using the telephone, computer microphone, or mp3 files. All of a sudden, those stale marketing documents you had lying around can now easily be repurposed to create valuable video content. If you take a look at our homepage, you’ll notice that we used the very same method to produce the highlighting video presentation. Even if you don’t have a large storage of stock documents to convert into a video, your inevitable familiarity with at least some of these popular formats make them easy to create without requiring video production or editing skills. You can test just how easy it is here.

Remember, maintaining a successful video marketing strategy isn’t just based on how crisp your highlight video might be, but also on the frequency and consistency of your video output. If your company has committed to video, it’s easy to get stuck with a time-sensitive video communication project on your plate without really having the time, money, or people that it would normally require to get it completed. Brainshark makes it easy to get you up and running AND get you across the finish-line.

Omniture SiteCatalyst and Brightcove: Lights, camera, action…video measurement

Guest — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 14:12:50 +0000

This post originally appeared on Brightcove customer Tim Elleston's blog, Elephants and Analytics on February 27. Tim is the Senior Manager of Digital Media at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia. Thanks for sharing your success story with us, Tim!

Many of us use video on our sites these days for different communication reasons. And those videos generally take a fair amount of effort (and cost) to put together. Understanding video engagement is therefore quite important to know which videos are most engaging, which ones lead to most conversions and so on.

To date, we have generally used YouTube for our videos. But the problem is that we only get the basic information from YouTube, we aren’t able to see more insightful information.

There’s a number of ways of integrate video measurement data into SiteCatalyst, either by embedding the code into your own video player and then hosting the video on your site, or by using a third party source.

Personally I believe the third party source is better for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that the video is streamed from their content delivery network. You also don’t need to worry about your flash skills…mine are atrocious.

Brightcove

I was pleasantly surprised at how it easy it was to use Brightcove for video serving and integrating into Omniture. Not only that, but they are customer-focused. Their reps emailed and called me shortly after signing up for a trial, send me some useful information and worked with me to get it all working. They even solved a minor problem I had (all pre-purchase stuff).

While Brightcove has an excellent analytics section on videos available to you, the benefits of integrating the data with your existing SiteCatalyst data are obvious – you can see views, paths, conversions and so forth, and you can classify the videos just like you can for your campaigns or products.

Integrate and measure

There are only really 10 steps involved:

From your Omniture Reporting Suite admin, download the AppMeasurementExtension.swf file.
Edit your report suite settings to enable video measurement (basically tick the boxes).
Create a config file.
Host the AppMeasurementExtension.swf file and the config file on your server.
Update your crossdomain.xml file to allow brightcove.com.
Upload your video to Brightcove.
Add a setting for your AppMeasurementExtension to be called.
Attach the video to a player and generate the website code.
Add the code to your website.
Play the video through your site and you’re done.

How easy could that be. No flash programming. No fuss.

What you get are a whole suite of extra reports all dedicated to your videos.

We set ours to report every 10 seconds to see if it was still being viewed. The results are shown above for our test data. As you can see, there is a drop off of people abandoning the video as it plays. But, there looks to be an interesting segment between 35 and 55 seconds that some people are viewing more than once.

The other nice thing is that you can get all of your other conversion variables in the video reports. Here’ we’re showing some of the basic video measure, but also how many pages were viewed by someone who watched videos as well as the number products (courses) viewed.

In the above report, I’ve broken down the video report by products (courses) to see the actual courses that were viewed by people who also viewed the video.

So, to the nitty gritty

There’s only really one bit of code that you need to create…the config file, which is a simple XML file, located somewhere on your servers. This file looks like:

<config> <account>your-rsid</account> <debugtracking>true</debugtracking> <visitornamespace>your-namespace</visitornamespace> <dc>tracking-server-number</dc> <pagename>Brightcove Test</pagename> <media> <autotrack>true</autotrack> <trackwhileplaying>true</trackwhileplaying> <trackseconds>10</trackseconds> </media> </config>

When you’ve uploaded your video to Brightcove, you edit the player to include a custom plugin – which is the AppMeasurementExtension.swf.

The plugin needs to know where the App Extension and config file is. Ours is:

http://www.murdoch.edu.au/_flash/videos/AppMeasurementExtension.swf ?s.configURL=www.murdoch.edu.au/_document/xml_data/config.xml

Note that the above is all on one line, not two.

That’s pretty much all there is to it.

Couldn’t be much easier to integrate video measurement from Brightcove into Omniture SiteCatalyst!

Guest Post: Content is King, but Metadata Rules

Guest — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 14:22:39 +0000

This guest post comes from Endeca, a Brightcove Technology Partner. Endeca is a search and business intelligence software company that improves daily decisions for employees and purchase decisions for customers. Endeca and Brightcove have collaborated to develop an integrated solution which brings together Endeca’s industry leading search, navigation and merchandising capabilities with the Brightcove Video Platform.

All of our customers – across retail, media, brand manufacturing, or financial services – are rapidly growing their video libraries. And they’re finding that it’s great for business. Online video – especially for product-centric businesses – closes the gap between the “touch and feel” experience of being in a physical store. And it is exceptionally well suited for product demonstrations. This is because video has the power to influence these metrics more than any other type of online content because it provides detail-hungry shoppers with a unique 360° product view and requires a higher level of customer engagement.

Right Video. Right Time.

But it’s not just about getting more video on your site. It’s also about making sure customers see the right video at just the right time on their journey. We advise customers who are new digital media that as they create and store the new assets to make certain that they have rich metadata surrounding the source content. It seems like a lot of work up front to either manually tag each video or use text analytics technology to draw out more metadata, but it pays off for the customer experience. Why? Because when watching TV or a movie, viewers tend to be fairly relaxed. The online video experience in much different. The viewer is more time-constrained, goal-oriented with hand-on-mouse, ready to click away if not instantly shown what is relevant to them in that moment. And therein lies the challenge: presenting just the right video content in the context of a customer’s path.

So with the right metadata around each video, you can showcase just the right one no matter where the customer is in their experience. On the way to making their final transaction, your customers will spend up to two-thirds of their time searching and browsing through various products. Don’t neglect the opportunity to showcase related videos along that path. This becomes more challenging to do as customers get deeper into the site and combine many product attributes to explore their options. You will have to find ways to automatically associate the content in your video library to specific search terms and combinations of product attributes.

Who’s Doing it Right?

Here are some two really great examples of businesses leverage video in great ways. Homedepot.com takes the guesswork out of finding videos related to a shopper’s intent by highlighting “how-to” videos from most shoppers first interaction with the site – the search box. Advanced search type-ahead on the Home Depot Web site highlights related video content for a search for “kitchen.” Without much hunting, visitors can immediately go directly to “how-to” videos related to their search. Without knowing much about the shoppers intent when they arrive, within a few keystrokes this technique can put the visitor on the path to learning more. Because Homedepot.com has the right around their video content, they immediately increase the relevancy of the search results and the likelihood of a customer discovering new information and products.

Another great example is the The Food Network. They keep visitors engaged on their site with video content no matter what unpredictable path a customer might take. For example, a search for “chocolate” displays all chocolate-related content, while a more specific combination of “chocolate” and “cake” only features videos about “chocolate cakes.” As the visitor refines her search more, only the most relevant video content appears. The video types exposed in the search and browse pages range from expert advice from Bobby Flay to “how-to” videos on choosing the optimal cake pan. You could take this concept a step further by making “video type” a facet in the left hand navigation, allowing visitors to refine specifically on the kind of message they’re interested in hearing at that moment. In this case the strategy is to reveal all related video content in one place and automatically refine the presentation as the customer gives you more clues about what they might be looking for.

Fast Forward to More Revenue

As you grow your retail video library, don’t forget to keep the audience and content top of mind. Having a large assembly of video is of course important. But making sure your customers see the right message at just the right time is even more valuable for growing revenue and reducing returns. As you develop and store your videos, make certain that they have the right metadata surrounding the source content with either manually tagging or using text analytics technology to draw out more metadata. By keeping audience and context in mind, you will likely find many opportunities to use video content to grow your online business in dramatic ways.

For more ideas on how to incorporate video into the online customer experience, download this whitepaper or visit the Endeca eBusinessFacets blog.

About the author: Katrina Gosek is Product Marketing Lead for eBusiness at Endeca Technologies, a leader in innovative customer experience applications used by 44 of the Top 100 Online Retailers and leading online media companies. She is responsible for marketing Endeca's B2B, Media, Site Search and SEO solutions to these eBusiness clients, which includes sharing online marketing best practice strategies and trend. She also works with clients to help outline and analyze Endeca's impact on their business pre- and post- implementation. Prior to Endeca, Katrina spent her early career in the media and publishing industry where she managed online marketing strategy for both new media and traditional products. Katrina holds a BA from Vanderbilt University, an MA in French Literature from Harvard University, and MBA from Babson College. She tweets at @Endeca_eBiz.

New .Net, Ruby, Java, and Context-Aware Contributions to Open Source @ Brightcove

Matthew Congrove — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 15:57:28 +0000

After launching just a little over a month ago, the Open Source @ Brightcove community has already contributed four new projects to the catalog! We're really excited because this set includes contributions from the Brightcove customers: Agora Games and Velir. We're excited to highlight the great work our customers have done to customize on our robust platform, and we hope that by sharing, other members of the community will benefit and share their work as well!

.NET Media API Wrapper

Velir Studios announced that their Brightcove .NET SDK is now available from Brightcove's Open Source initiative. The code serves as a fantastic starting point for integrating Brightcove into any .NET application, providing full coverage of the Media API. The SDK also boasts built-in extensibility and robust error detection and reporting. Velir is a full-service web agency with expertise in content management and data visualization.

Ruby Media API Wrapper

Agora Games added their Brightcove Ruby SDK to the Open Source @ Brightcove repository shortly after launch. This SDK also includes full Media API coverage and can be added to any project for a quick and easy Brightcove integration. Agora Games is a Brightcove partner that builds and supports online gaming communities.

Java Media API Wrapper

The popular Java Media API Wrapper, written and maintained by Brightcove employees, has been ported over to Open Source @ Brightcove. The move features a new version release (v3.0) and includes a Java Commons library that serves as a platform to build Java integrations on top of.

Context-Aware Related Videos

Open Source @ Brightcove released a small JavaScript plug-in that parses the page where it resides, returning videos related to the content it finds. You can use this plug-in to surface more meaningful videos to your visitors with limited effort.

Inspired by these awesome efforts? Think about contributing your work to the Open Source @ Brightcove library.

Guest Post: The Frustration Range

Guest — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 17:30:25 +0000

This guest blog post is authored by Luke Davies, LeanIn President and Brightcove Technology Partner. LeanIn is the world's first in-video search company. They make it really easy for viewers and for search engines to find the exact scene they are looking for. They also make it really easy for your viewers to share a specific scene of a video with their friends. Learn more about LeanIn.

Either I’m really impatient, or searching for a scene that I want to watch in an online video is really, really hard. Not hard like ‘calculus after a night of drinking’, or ‘picking up a steamer that your dog dropped’ hard. More like ‘trying to cut your lawn with a pair of scissors’ hard.

My frustration stems from the fact that the scrubber is just not an efficient tool for searching! I’m always either a little too far forward, then a little too far back, then a little too far forward… you catch my drift. This dizzying back and forth gives me digital sea sickness. Its what we refer to at LeanIn as The Frustration Range.

The Frustration Range is that area where you are scrubbing back and forth and back... trying to find that special scene.

Imagine how many more cats stuck to ceiling fans, or toddlers sacking their dads, you could watch if it weren’t for that pesky frustration range?

In an attempt to make the world a better place, LeanIn has developed powerful scene-based search tools that allow you to quickly navigate to whatever it is you’re looking for. With LeanIn viewers are rewarded for identifying interesting parts of video and tagging it. Also, as viewers share video - and describe what they are sharing - with the LeanIn service, all of the relevant meta data gets stored at the exact frame where it belongs.

With LeanIn searching for a scene looks like this:

No more scrubbing, no more wasted time.

Learn more at www.leanin.com, or follow us @leanedin.

LeanIn and Get Sticky

Guest — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 20:57:24 +0000

‘Sticky’ and ‘video’ are two words that are rarely seen together. In fact, most online video is the exact opposite of sticky. It usually gets viewed once, maybe shared, but it’s all-too-often forgotten. Check out this drop-off data collected from TubeMogul:

In a word, this is brutal. Currently, online video is very slippery.

Contrast the above results with the shelf life of a well written document or blog post and the results are the polar opposite. Documents and blogs accumulate links gradually over time and slowly but surely rise up the ranks of the Google. Documents and blog posts get more and more viewers over time, while video goes out of style faster than MC Hammer.

Is adding a bunch of links the answer in increasing video longevity? Well, it’s part of the answer. But if you want really sticky video – that viewers keep coming back to – it’s best to emulate the masters. Facebook, for one, knows how to get viewers hanging out for ages (users’ average time on the site is over 17 minutes per session) and returning frequently.

So why is Facebook so good? Simple, they know how to appeal to two very powerful human emotions:

The desire to be popular
Deep curiosity about what friends and acquaintances are doing

Every time anyone ‘likes’ a post on Facebook, the poster is notified. Typically, the poster will return to Facebook to see who did the liking and what they liked. So how does one get popular and accumulate likes? Simple: post something interesting, say something funny, or be a taste-maker. Throughout the process of getting popular, viewers return to Facebook multiple times.

People desperately want to know what others are doing, how they feel, and what they like. Facebook has proven this. People are also very willing to share. The second reason Facebook is so sticky is that it’s constantly changing and everyone wants to see what’s new with their social circle.

So how can you incorporate the above lessons into online video? How do you add lots of links, the ability to see what your friends are up to, and the opportunity for people to become experts and get popular? How do you get Sticky?

One way is to incorporate LeanIn to your online video strategy. LeanIn installs in minutes and turns your video into a social experience. Viewers can easily publish from anywhere in your video stream to both Twitter and Facebook. Viewers can also see what their friends have been watching and what they have been ‘liking’. Finally viewers are motivated to leave in-stream comments in an attempt to become experts or taste-makers. They can do all of this with their existing social network credentials from Facebook or Twitter.

LeanIn and get Sticky

For more information or to request a demo, go to www.leanin.com.

Embed video in Facebook with a link

Chris Little — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 14:36:43 +0000

You may have noticed that sharing a Youtube link to your Facebook Wall/Newsfeed results in an embedded version of that video. Did you know you can also do this with Brightcove? All you need to do is add some metadata to your video pages and when links to those pages are shared, you videos will be embedded in Facebook, check it out below:

1.) Post Link:

2.) View your video:

I explain in detail how this works in my developer center article - enjoy!

BEML Search Component Available from Truveo

Chris Little — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 20:46:31 +0000

We are excited to announce a new BEML search component available to any Truveo partner for free!

Truveo has built a search component that you can use in your Brightcove templates. It has the ability to search your entire Truveo channel and will return results that will playback in your Brightcove player when selected. This is done through an integration with the Player API.

Main Benefits:

Offers search functionality, provided by the leading Video Search provider Truveo, embedded in your Brightcove video player.
It greatly helps with recirculation and engagement with the optional "Related Video" functionality at the conclusion of a video.
It's free.

Here's how you can participate:

If you have not already, create a channel on Truveo.com. Truveo is a great video search engine partner and indexing your content there can help you reach more new viewers. You can sign in using existing AOL, Bebo, or AIM credentials to create/access your 'Director Account'. This is where you can add feeds of content - http://developer.truveo.com/DirectorMyAccount.php.

Once you have created this account and are approved, you can add your channel name, appid and edit the optional parameters in the SWF URL for your Brightcove BEML template:

<SWFLoader id="truveo_widget" width="480" height="420" source="http://www.truveo.com/brightcove/release/truveo_search.swf?channelName=<your channel name>&appid=<your appID>&hideWebWideSearch=true" depth="2" visible="false"/>

The SWFLoader element should be placed within "<Canvas>" tags, ie:

<Runtime>

      <Theme name="Deluxe" style="Light"/>

      <Layout>

        <Canvas>

          <VideoPlayer id="videoPlayer" width="480" height="420"/>

          <SWFLoader id="truveo_widget" width="480" height="420" source="http://www.truveo.com/brightcove/release/truveo_search.swf?channelName=BCCL&appid=f2f9d2d35f529c1db&hideWebWideSearch=true" depth="2" visible="false"/>

        </Canvas>

      </Layout>

      <Labels>

        <label key="controls menu">Search</label>

      </Labels>

    </Runtime>

The "Menu" button will trigger the search menu, in this example we have renamed it "Search". Please note that currently the player dimensions must be 480x420.

Demo: http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid36249156001?bctid=15251106001

Full instructions from the Truveo team are available here: http://developer.truveo.com/BrightcovePlugin.php.

Let us know what you think!

Stream live video with Brightcove and Livestream

Chris Little — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 20:17:30 +0000

New Brightcove Alliance partner, Livestream, today announced the availability of their new API and a Brightcove player plug-in that they developed with it. At its simplest, the new plug-in allows joint Brightcove and Livestream customers to broadcast live web shows within their Brightcove players.

Setup is fairly simple, especially since Livestream put together some straightforward instructions here. For the technically-oriented, the process involves creating a custom player template using BEML; creating a player that uses that template; and then specifying which Livestream "channel" should be loaded into the player. Easy.

Livestream offers some great tools for live broadcasting, making the process dead simple. You can use their downloadable Procaster application for single-source broadcasts, or their more fully featured Studio, which allows you to choose from and switch between multiple sources (live or VOD), add graphics, and perform other control room-like functions.

The entire system is turnkey, too. No need to figure out solutions for uploading, encoding, hosting, distributing, etc. It all just works. And as of today, it works with Brightcove!

Learn more about Livestream here, or just sign up for an account and try it out.

Embed Video in Facebook News Feed

Chris Little — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 18:17:10 +0000

We recently worked with Facebook to enable playback of Brightcove video in the 'News Feed.' Now Brightcove publishers can allow their users to share content into their News Feeds on Facebook*.

You will probably want to create a new player for viral sharing on Facebook to turn off advertising and track the performance seperately in your reports. Within the HTML code of your site you can configure how the metadata will be passed into the News Feed, full details on Facebook sharing options can be found here. Once this is set, a few lines of Javascript enable a user to post one of your videos to their Facebook news feed for all of their friends to see.

One of our first customers to take advantage of this is Rainbow Media's WE tv. I have also created a demo of this and attached the source code with getting started instructions below.

Getting Started:

Download the file and open a text editor - Download Source Code
Edit Meta tags at top of the HTML page
Replace existing Brightcove player with one from your account
Edit "image_src" and "video_src" within Facebook button code to reference your image and the video player that you would like to be posted in the News Feed (retain format of 'video_src' url and add your publisher/player/video IDs).

*Note: Be sure to abide by Facebook’s Platform Guidelines, and the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. Please note that advertising is not allowed on user profile pages.