Brightcove Blog - More Eyeballs

Facebook Comments Box: Combining engagement and discovery through social media

Rob OConnor — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 15:34:22 +0000

There has been a lot of buzz recently about the importance of leveraging social networks to drive video discovery and inbound traffic. Of course, the buzz is well founded: Facebook recently became the second-largest referrer for online video streams behind Google. What’s more, viewers who discover video through social media are much more engaged, watching more video for longer periods of time. But there's another side of the social story that's equally important and doesn't get its fair share of attention - fostering engagement and discussion with in-page comments.

Comments are nothing new to the web, of course. Most CMS platforms have some sort of built-in commenting system. There are also free and paid third-party plugins available for general use. Brightcove even has a number of partners like Filemobile, IntenseDebate, and Pluck that offer various levels of integration with your Brightcove players. By creating a context for discussion around video, comments can make visitors contributors and encourage them to get engaged not only with video content, but with your website overall.

Facebook's updated Comments plugin

While comments are certainly "social" and great for driving engagement, they don't often help your content get discovered. That's the "other" part of social media and video - namely, sharing to social networks. That’s why I'm particularly excited about Facebook's new Comments Box plugin.

There are a bunch of benefits to using Facebook's plugin. The vast majority of your site visitors are familiar with Facebook, if not active users. Seeing a brand they trust when asked to log in to provide comments makes it easy to encourage social engagement, dialog and interaction. If they're already logged into Facebook, which is often the case, they actually won't have to authenticate any further. You can also enable visitors to login using other social profiles, so the small number of visitors without a Facebook profile won't be left out.

TechCrunch recently switched over to Facebook's Comments Box plugin and, as they noted in an article last week, they're seeing fewer "trolls" – i.e., commenters who flagrantly bash posts while providing little or no value. This is because the plugin causes you to use your real name with a link to your Facebook profile, decreasing anonymity but also encouraging a higher caliber of posted comments. While the number of comments TechCrunch gets using the new plugin has decreased, the quality of the comments is greatly improved.

Comments as a discovery engine

But the real value of using Facebook's comments plugin is that it seamlessly combines the community and the sharing aspects of social media. As long as a user leaves the "Post to Facebook" box checked when they make a comment, the item is going to appear on their friends' News Feeds letting them know their someone in their network commented on your site. The News Feed item also contains a link back to your site, so any time a user makes a comment she is also sharing your content with the rest of her social network.

Even better, when a user's friend replies to a comment, they'll receive a notification within Facebook. Clicking that notification takes the user back to your site, driving even more traffic to your property. This combination of sharing and discussion has powerful implications for the ways users interact with your site, presenting a compelling opportunity to both foster a community and increase your site traffic. And the best part: it’s all from a tool that's 100% free and very easy to use.

To see the system in action and read an interesting pros-and-cons analysis of the plugin, I'd recommend checking out this TechCrunch article. Then head on over to the Facebook Developer Blog post for an in-depth look at the features and functionality of the plugin, as well as instructions for integrating it into your site.

And if you haven't had a chance to read it yet, be sure to download Like, Link, Share, Tweet: A How-To Guide to Video + Social Media for more tips on boosting your online video efforts with a solid social media strategy!

Scotland's STV blazes trail for catch-up TV services

Eric Elia — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 19:08:04 +0000

The BBC iPlayer is regarded as one of the best catch-up TV services in the world. The reputation is well-deserved. But a similar or at least comparable experience is well within reach of smaller organizations. In a recent usability study of catch-up TV services in the UK, reported in the Telegraph, the quality of Scotland's STV user experience ranked just behind the BBC and ahead of the Sky Player.

"The research, which was carried out by Webcredible, a user experience consultancy, scored iPlayer 88 per cent in usability stakes, closely followed in second place by STV Player, the Scottish TV broadcaster’s VOD offering, which is gave 76 per cent. According to Webcredible's analysis, the BBC iPlayer currently offers viewers the "most usable video on demand offering"."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/8035125/BBC-iPlayer-best-catch-up-TV-service-in-the-UK.html#

My reaction is more about Web product development today than it is about Brightcove and video specifically. But I take a few lessons away from this review, below.

We've had the good fortune to work with and for the STV team for over two years. Brightcove helped design and develop the first version of the STV Player in the fall of 2008, and then were pleased to see that work get tossed in the dustbin within a year. :) Brightcove Professional Services team works on dozens of large-scale projects each year, but our goal is to teach our customers to fish, so to speak. To get them up to speed quickly with Brightcove and independent going forward, not to rely on custom work going forward. In that spirit, it's been impressive and rewarding to see what the STV team has done in the two years since that initial launch.

I take away a few big lessons from this one in particular:

Don't build it if you can buy, or rent. It still boggles my mind to see potential Brightcove clients (or online video platform customers, period) building core video platform functionality on their own. Players, analytics, transcoding, ad integrations. Most of them fail or don't maximize their full potential, because they don't have teams (and budgets) large enough keep up with the pace of change in the market.
Iterate, iterate, iterate. We encounter way too many clients that can't make a decision. Voltaire would have made for a good product manager when he said "perfect is the enemy of the good." Too often we run into clients that have 2-3 years worth of roadmap functionality that they'd like to see come to market in 2-3 months. So instead of starting small, they don't start at all. Just ship something, and learn from it in the market.
Simple is good. In a post-Google/Facebook time, I'm still amazed by new services that come to market that are cluttered and too heavy, and services that try to be too clever for their own good. I've been involved in quite a few projects where the client is intent on sophisticated "chaptering" UI features, interactive video hotspots, and crazy AJAX flourishes. I'll put dim the lights in that bucket too. Not worth the pixel space on the screen. STV did a smart thing with their shows and broke them up into discrete chunks, making it easy to navigate to the final quarter of a show. Smart for a catch-up TV service. And they did this with basic HTML.
SEO. There's no excuse in this day and age for leaving this traffic on the table.
- Page name has to match the video name
- Video name in the URL (and category too, please)
- Video name and metadata in HTML
- Related videos and clusters like most popular or recommended in HTML, too
- Google sitemap

Thanks.
Eric Elia
VP, TV Solutions
http://www.twitter.com/ericelia

Increase viewership with recommendations

Eric Elia — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 22:30:01 +0000

Search Engine Optimization is only half the story when trying to maximize traffic to your video site. It's been great to see many Brightcove clients adopt strong video SEO strategies over the past few years. Sites as disparate as The New York Times, USA Today, Consumer Reports, Lifetime TV, and Wired may look very different from each other but they share some common SEO best practices.

I'm waiting for more sites to follow the Times' lead and adopt individualized recommendations as a way to maximize traffic for users who are already on site. When I started my career as a tech writer at NewMedia magazine, my mentor Phil Hood was fond of saying that a magazine had to sell itself twice - on the newsstand, and on the coffee table. It's the same for online video - you've got to get viewers to the site, and then to watch more video on the site.

The Times is using technology from Brightcove partner Taboola to customize the end slate of the video screen to recommend videos that the viewer might like to watch based on the content and behavior of that viewer. I think they've done a really nice job. I'd like to see more video publishers take advantage of technology like this, and ideally stick the recommended videos adjacent to the video player so they are on-screen at all times. Most viewers don't get to the end of a video.

This is the same type of approach Amazon.com, for example, takes when recommending products to you based on the shopping habits of others. People like you who like A, will also like B. I find these smarter recommendations engines to be more effective than metadata-based related content, and a good complement to lists of newest, most popular and editorially picked videos. I'm less bullish on top-rated videos lately - particularly based on a 5-star rating system - everything seems to fall into the middle.

Eric Elia
VP, Professional Services
@ericelia

Apple's not going to kill cable any time soon

Eric Elia — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 19:54:19 +0000

I really enjoyed this article over on Silicon Alley Insider, the commentary and Henry's sweet double-negative quote which pretty much says it all. "I see almost no chance that this is NOT the future of the TV business." Similar to something our founder Jeremy Allaire said to me in late 2004 when he convinced me to leave Comcast for what would become Brightcove. TV of the near-future, which is already here for some, will look a whole lot more like the rest of the Internet than TV of today. "Unparalleled levels of choice and control" is what we used to say in the early days. Seems quaint now to ever think this would not be the case.

Will Richmond has a nice complement to the SAI piece over on his VideoNuze blog today (http://bit.ly/4IWueL). He fleshes out some of the economics at play behind the scenes here. Apple is certainly going to be an interesting player here. But it is one of many, and there are are a lot of tensions at work that will take years to play out.

1. You've got the inertia of the American public (never to be underestimated) vs. the growing minority of Hulu-Netflix-Amazon-Torrent cable cutters. These revolutions take a bit longer than we all expect in our echo chamber. Tivo anyone?

2. Sports is another area of tension. It's the killer app for HD, and the reason that Comcast SportsNet exists. It's easy to connect the dots from Eli Manning's $97mm contract extension to TV rights to higher affiliate fees for ESPN from the MSOs. I'll be watching Jack Bauer regularly over my new gig ethernet network at home well before I ever see a Super Bowl (no less one featuring Donovan McNabb - c'mon Birds!).

3. Perspective. TV folks have the benefit of watching what's happened to print publishing and music, and will be more pragmatic. Multichannel programming will be the norm for a while. Operationalizing that as part of the business presents a great opportunity for innovation - workflow, ads, analytics, mobile, social viewing.

Should be a fun year. Long way of saying I agree with the author (except for the VMSO coinage – we’re already calling these companies MVPDs). 2010 will be a watershed year for new services providers to emerge that will change how we watch what we watch.

Stunning HD video on Brightcove

Eric Elia — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 21:39:58 +0000

Our friends at STV have taken full advantage of Brightcove's ability to handle high quality, dare I say, HD video with the new four-parter, Scotland Revealed. I'm a big fan of what STV has done with their video library as a whole and I'm really happy to see the team take full advantage of Brightcove's capabilities. The videos are in 720p and there will be several additional episodes coming over the next two weeks. The videos are available for 90 days, so watch them now.

It's easy to foresee cutting the cable and when you see video like this, play around with Boxee or see Internet-driven services built directly into TVs from Samsung, LG and the like. It's a great time to be a viewer as so many new options become available, providing us with more choice and control.

My desktop display doesn't do it justice. Time to finally get that Mac Mini to leave permanently connected to the TV at home.

http://player.stv.tv/programmes/scotland-revealed-hd/2009-09-17-2101/

If they were able to capture the Loch Ness monster in HD that would be icing on the cake.

Cool UI, silly short shorts on Atom.com

Eric Elia — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 18:28:04 +0000

Our friends at MTV's Atom.com have launched Dutch West Short Shorts, a fun new "video wall" featuring over 60 super short comedy clips. Some are borderline NSFW. Happy clicking.

The overall user experience is kind of neat. Years ago when my colleagues and I were playing around with crazy circular players on Comcast.net, we learned that usually - the more thumbnails the better in a video UI.

Atom came to Brightcove Professional Services with this concept. We worked to flesh out the design and bring the experience to life. It's all Javascript and CSS fed from Brightcove APIs. Atom manages content, thumbnails and player design through the point-and-click easy Brightcove Studio. I think the approach works quite nice for this variety of short-form content. With news, sports or music videos, more text would be useful. But the content here is likely all new to the end user, and its the images that sell the video.

Try it out for yourself.

STV's new catch-up TV service - behind the scenes

Eric Elia — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 19:08:17 +0000

Scottish Media Group's STV was one of our first launch partners in Europe. I'm delighted to see them enhance their successful year-old experience with a new "catch-up TV" site. We had the good fortune to work with Alistair Brown, David Low and team last year in building the main site. It was one of the first SEO-focused video experiences we built, driven off of Brightcove Media APIs. That site is different from a "traditional" monolithic Flash player or video ghetto, in which all of the videos play on one page. Instead, each video plays on its own page and features a variety of SEO-focused best practices.

STV's new "STV Player" (sorry, video is only playable in the UK, but the rest of the site works) builds on this experience, but is focused on long-form content. I'm personally enamored with the site, as much for what is there as what is not there. The STV team avoided the temptation to just rip off Hulu (if I had a nickle for every time I heard "the Hulu of...") or build a greatest hits compilation of a random set of features from other sites. Instead, they focused on what is most important for this site. The functionality is as straightforward as the design:

video playback, of course
lots and lots of thumbnails to discover more content
nice full-screen player with dynamic delivery of multiple bitrate video (trust me, if you aren't in the UK)
cross promotion of video from the same show
TV listings information

Anyway, enough of my yapping. I asked Alistair Brown, Head of New Media at STV, for a little more detail on the project. Thanks and congratulations, Alistair.

EE: Congratulations on the launch. What were the goals for the site and how do you think the design supported those goals?

AB: Our goals for the Player were to create a simple, clean and friendly interface to our long-form programming. It would ensure quick access to important and popular content, show programmes in the context of our TV listings, and all this while ensuring a positive experience of watching television online.

The design of the site supported this by presenting the user with simple choices, creating short paths to content - as little as one click from the home page to latest episodes of our most popular shows - and simply providing an experience which will ensure further visits to the site in future.

EE: What Brightcove APIs or services did you use to pull this together?

AB: We use a wide range of API functions both in the front-end of the site and the back-end which powers our content workflow.

Our CMS uses the Media API to integrate data in our systems with video data held at Brightcove; we leverage the Player API quite heavily to power our automatic sequencing of programme parts within a show; and we use small elements of the Social API to power some custom bookmarking and social media functions.

We are making further use of recent Brightcove API upgrades in upcoming releases of the Player, and are delighted to be helping be at the forefront of new developments by using beta features to add some excellent new functionality.

EE: Did you develop this in-house or with a partner?

AB: The site was developed entirely in-house.

EE: How long did the project take? And what were the easiest and most difficult parts of the project?

AB: The project took around six weeks from initial design and data conceptualisation but in truth, we knew what we wanted from a year of operating our previous STV Video site - launched exactly a year ago this week.

The most difficult part was creating a seamless workflow which allowed transition to this new site without affecting any of our content and transmission systems, or requiring re-training of our staff.

EE: What lessons did you learn from the previous video site that informed this new direction?

AB: We found that a simple interface, with quick routes to the most requested content, was crucial. We also felt that because our programming is split into various parts (thanks to commercial breaks), we had to find a reliable way for these parts to play in a full sequence with no intervention.

Just as important was the role of surfacing related content in a more meaningful way, both at programming level - finding previous episodes of a favourite show - and at the category level, finding related shows.

Lastly a major goal was to separate our long-form programming from shorter clip-based videos, and the Player is the first step in doing this - where our previous site was basically an extensive library of all our video assets. It became clear to us that users have different needs and we had to focus our content accordingly.

EE: This is a full video site, not just a multi-video Flash player. What advantages do you get from a site rather than a big player with browsing built in?

AB: Operating the Player as a site essentially gives us more flexibility and integration. We have been able to incorporate some other data from other parts of our platform - such as TV listings - and have the option to add much more of this content quickly and easily. Despite being a distinct site within our network, we have applied the same consistent design and development rules we would apply to all our sites, something which is crucial to us as a development team.

The HTML choice also allowed us to quickly develop a fully accessible site based around our existing design grids and corporate branding, as well as giving the site real SEO capability, a clean URL structure and efficient performance.

Facebook more popular than email sharing

Eric Elia — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 17:14:50 +0000

Mashable has some nice stats today on the popularity of various viral sharing services and email. Here in Professional Services land at Brightcove we've integrated with Clearspring's AddThis widget quite a bit, which is a nice one-click way to post a link to just about every viral/social/bookmarky service out there. I generalize and say "just about every" because under the "More" button they've got services like Segnalo, Propellor and Plaxo that don't exactly set the world on fire.

AddThis is nice, but invariably, clients seek to get a few chiclets right there adjacent to their video players - a clear call to action for a few key services. But the question often comes up - "which services do you recommend."

For the past few months we have been recommending Facebook, Twitter and whatever else is important to the client. The stats seem to back up those recommendations. If Yahoo were somehow able to combine its various properties - Delicous and Buzz for example - that would be another interesting contender.

Twitter links seem to have a pretty high clickthrough rate, which can be interesting and worth considering as well. Mashable has some additional stats here.

Brightcove player templates, with built-in Comments by JS-Kit

Eric Elia — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 19:56:57 +0000

Our friends at JS-Kit have a very exciting announcement today. They used the Brightcove 3 player framework to integrate comments into a standard Brightcove player template. Brightcove video publishers can deploy comments in their players without writing a line of code.

For those of you new to JS-Kit, their tools are some of the most popular on the Web for building social features into your sites, blogs, and now video players. On the front end there's easy to customize comments, ratings, polls and survey tools. On the backend there's a really nice set of web-based moderation and management tools.

The new Brightcove video comments functionality relies on that same backend, but renders the comments right inside of a video player.

After working with JS-Kit on quite a few major video portal projects, we are really happy to see them take this next step. Enjoy.

Brightcove - Endeca Custom Adapter now available from Brightcove PS

Jeff Kushmerek — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 18:08:32 +0000

When we had a few free moments, a couple of us on the Proserv team cooked up a pipeline adapter to integrate with some of our mutual customers. There have been several requests over the last couple of months from customers that want their video indexed alongside other content types. The adapter is now a Packaged Application in the same vein as SEO, iPhone, and Closed Captioning.

The pipeline adapter will query the Brightcove API during indexing and return the video URL, thumbnails, and other metadata, and then create properties and dimensions that can be searched and browsed as part of any Endeca search application. The video assets are now part of an Endeca record, and a developer can do fun things like play videos from search results, Content Spotlight videos, etc. Some additional concepts that can be done (but are not part of the offering) are features like content spotlighting in videos and creation of smart playlists via Endeca dimensions.

This adapter brings me personal pleasure, as it partners the technology of 2 leaders in the Cambridge Internet tech world that I have been lucky to work for.

Feel free to contact Eric or myself for additional information regarding this package.