More Eyeballs

Stunning HD video on Brightcove

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...

Cool UI, silly short shorts on Atom.com

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...

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

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...

Facebook more popular than email sharing

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...

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

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...

Brightcove - Endeca Custom Adapter now available from Brightcove PS

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...

Late night hacking

1am, a case of red bull and no deadline. I'm beyond lucky to get to work with this team.

Q&A with Sun: The ROI for User-Generated Video

Brightcove Professional Services does a lot of work with Sun in support of the superb ChannelSun offering. It's one of the most ambitious enterprise video experiences we've seen, let alone helped to build. It has live features that are still sitting in requirements docs at major media companies, and traffic that would make some of them jealous. Some of our team is planning on attending JavaOne this year, the first week of June in San Francisco. In researching the conference we stumbled upon a JavaOne contest - "Dude, Where's My Pass?" Submit a video and you have a shot of...

SEO, iPhone and Closed Captioning - now available from Brightcove Pro Services

In a previous post about building mature online video businesses, I wrote that SEO usually becomes important to a video business after the "hey kids lets put on a show" phase of getting some clips up on a website. This used to take 18 months or so, but is now happening right at the start of a new engagement. In response to high demand for SEO-focused projects (and a few other new trends) I'm proud to unveil three new Brightcove Pro Services packages. What might you ask is a "package" and what makes it different from the usual project? Professional...

Brightcove "Pages" - Video SEO in a box

Brightcove Pages combines a set of proven best practices to maximize your site traffic. Brightcove Professional Services will work with you to customize and launch a video experience optimized for search engines. The site will incorporate a variety of best practices to drive traffic and hold onto your viewers, such as comments, ratings, most popular videos and more. The best part - the site will run on your own systems and blend into your existing site design. Example: http://www.wired.com/video What's included? A lot... - Java, PHP or ASP.Net server files to run on your system - Editable CSS files to...