Brightcove Blog - Product Blog

New Video Cloud Updates Increase Engagement and Productivity

Rob OConnor — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 16:25:13 +0000

In December, the Video Cloud product team was hard at work releasing features to help our publishers increase engagement with their video content and streamline their publishing workflows. Read up on December’s release here, but don’t forget that you can always check up on the most recent release on our product updates page.

Increase Engagement with Quality Playback in Video Cloud

Just how important is playback quality with online video? A 2011 study from IDC analyzed viewer behavior of six major 2010 sporting events that were streamed live on the Web to consumers in North America and Western Europe. The study confirmed our suspicions that a quality playback experience matters for viewers, but also called attention to additional factors:

Higher playback bit-rates had the greatest positive impact for viewers in terms of extending session lengths. Simply put, higher quality translates to more viewed minutes per view.
The number of rebuffering events (how many times the player paused to rebuffer) had the greatest negative impact in terms of dropped views.

Therefore, we are excited about our new playback improvements for Video Cloud. Briefly, the changes we made include:

Video Cloud players now analyze viewer playback more frequently
Renditions are selected based on available bandwidth and can now use a greater percentage of that available bandwidth
If the player can’t detect available bandwidth, it selects a higher rendition than it previously had

The end result of these changes? In the week after implementing them, we saw a 35% jump in average bitrate streamed by our publishers as a whole. Just as importantly, this improvement came without any noticeable increase in rebuffering events. This means customers get the benefits of increased engagement from higher quality streaming without risking additional dropped views because of rebuffering events.

Of course, this increase in quality means that bandwidth consumption will likely rise. However, with the ability to create custom encoding profiles, Video Cloud provides the flexibility needed to find the right balance of quality video delivery and bandwidth utilization. In light of the new playback improvements, we recommend that publishers take a look at their encoding profiles to ensure that encoding and delivery settings meet both their own business goals and the quality needs of their viewers.

Improved Facebook Sharing Experience

Now setting inline playback for your videos when they’re shared to Facebook just works, with no additional coding required! Inline playback encourages viewers to watch your content, as they won’t be required to leave Facebook’s domain to view it. Try sharing the video on the Brightcove.com homepage to Facebook for example, and you’ll notice it appears inline in your Facebook news feed.

In addition, we updated open graph code to allow video playback for Facebook users with secure browsing enabled in their security settings. Read more.

Provisioning Remote Assets in the Media Module

In the past, creating remote assets in Video Cloud required using FTP batch provisioning or the Media API. Now, you can provision remote assets using the Media module in the Video Cloud Studio, so your less-technical users can now add videos for which you maintain the files on your own or using a third-party system, without worrying about the more complex workflows required with FTP batch provisioning or the Media API. Read more.

Quickly and Easily Identify your DRM-Protected Content

If you’re using our DRM feature, you can now quickly identify the videos to which you’ve added DRM through a small icon next to the asset in the Media module of the Video Cloud Studio. Read more.

Be sure to check up on our product updates page often. You can even subscribe to the Product Updates RSS feed to make sure you’re the first to know after every release.

Brightcove Video Cloud Adds Productivity and Compatibility Enhancements with Latest Release

Rob OConnor — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 14:06:22 +0000

The engineering and product teams at Brightcove are busy! Our recent Video Cloud release includes a suite of new and updated features designed to make your life as a video publisher easier and more productive than ever. I’ve highlighted some of the features below, but make sure to visit the product updates section for a full list.

Universal API

Building custom player experiences that work in both Flash and HTML5 traditionally requires implementation of different APIs, entailing a much greater workload for publishers that care about consistent experiences across devices and environments. To combat this complexity, we recently released a suite of HTML5 improvements for Video Cloud, the latest of which is a Universal Player API that enables the use of a single API to build custom video player components that work anywhere, regardless of device, runtime, or browser.

Enabling HTML5 players when Flash is not installed

Video Cloud Smart Players are able to automatically determine if a site visitor has Flash installed and fall back to an HTML5 player to ensure they get a high quality, stylized video experience regardless of their device or operating system. While this feature has been in production for a while for iOS devices, we’ve now extended this HTML5 capability to include any device that does not have Flash installed to ensure your content is always accessible. This is an opt-in feature, so check out the support documentation to learn how to turn it on.

HLS Encryption

Delivering content in HTML5 environments presents a challenging problem: the content is delivered via HTTP and security options available in Flash environments cannot be implemented. To solve this, we've released HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) Encryption. HLS Encryption lets you send encrypted video over HTTP for playback on iOS-based devices—including iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, and Apple TV—and on desktop computers (Mac OS X). HTTP Live Streaming supports multiple alternate streams at different bit rates, and the client software can switch streams intelligently as network bandwidth changes. HTTP Live Streaming also provides for media encryption, allowing publishers to protect their content. HLS Encryption is an add-on, so contact your consultant or Account Manager if interested.

Metadata Assurance also available for Media Sharing

Video Cloud's Metadata Assurance feature helps publishers with quality control by ensuring that content missing required data can be uploaded, edited, and even inserted into playlists, but will remain in an “inactive” state and thus will not display in players on the Web. The feature can also be applied to content that is shared into your Video Cloud account, further guarding against the possibility of publishing errors caused by lack of metadata.

Advanced Search is now on by default

Advanced Search makes it much easier to find specific content or groups of content by enabling customers to search for a collection of video properties and providing access to create powerful queries using complex searches. Look for videos by playable status, creation date, scheduled start and end dates, update date, and more. Read more about Advanced Search and tips for using it here.

Download Rendition URL for UDS accounts

Hard drive crashed and you lost all of your video content? No problem – with the Download Rendition URL feature you can easily retrieve your source files from your Video Cloud account. Previously this required a complex API call, but now we've included it right within the Video Files section of the Video Settings menu. Some limitations apply – for example your account must be set up to use Universal Delivery Service – so learn more here.

Again, there is much more in the latest release, so head over to the Product Updates page to read up on the rest! And be sure to check up on that page often, as we are releasing great features faster than ever before. You can also subscribe to the Product Updates RSS feed to get the latest updates.

Come read about the Brightcove Video Cloud 11.11 Release

Sara Radkiewicz — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 20:59:17 +0000

Removing the complexity behind Video delivery for you is one of the goals of Brightcove Video Cloud - and with our Video Cloud 11.11 release, we have taken that one step further. We have released a new JavaScript player API that works with our Smart Players - whether they render as Flash or HTML5. This allows you to build once, and use regardless if the player renders on a tablet or PC - saving you time and preserving the user experience you work hard to create. While the Smart Player APIs do not yet have complete feature parity with our Flash Player APIs, but we have captured the most commonly used features and will continue to add more functionality over time. You can read all about what is possible on support site.

Speaking of mobile devices, if securing your streams is important, then read on! We now support HLS encryption which will allow you to send encrypted video over HTTP for playback on devices running iOS - including, the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch. We use Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) and some other technologies to encrypt your content to protect against piracy when delivering the content. And the best part? There is no noticeable difference to your end users. You can read about the technical specification on our support site.

Please check out our product updates page for a full list of features in this release.

Updated Search in Media Module - Find Videos with Ease

Sara Radkiewicz — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 14:49:17 +0000

Have you noticed the new location of search in Brightcove Video Cloud Media Module? The search bar has not only become more visible, but has become more useful! The base search now searches all metadata text fields. Using tags to organize your content? No problem, you can now search by tags. Need to find the videos with a particular custom field? Great, we search that too!

For those of you with large video libraries, we also provide the ability to refine your search. If searching the text fields alone does not provide enough granularity, you can use the "Advanced Search" or "refine search" capabilities to combine search terms and search date ranges. Simply select which specific fields you want to search and viola, you get refined results.

Please read more about this feature on our support site.

We hope this new functionality allows you to more easily locate your video files going forward! And keep your eyes out for more features from Brightcove to help improve your workflow and save you time.

Brightcove's 11.10 Video Cloud Release

Brian Kahn — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 19:48:57 +0000

We are excited to announce new features in our October Video Cloud release. In this release, we have added encryption to our HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), rendition URLs to the Brightcove Video Cloud Studio and the ability to failover to our HTML5 player if Flash is not installed. I am going to mention some highlights here but you can read about all our new features from our product update page.

One of the key features in this release is that we added encryption to our HLS streams. This new feature allows you to stream securely to iOS based devices by adding AES encryption to the HLS stream. In additional to simply putting AES encryption on the content, we have taken additional steps to increase the level of protection such as delivering the keyfile and playlist files securely to the player.

For customers who have accounts enabled for Universal Delivery Service (UDS) now have added the ability to view the URLs for all of the renditions in the Video Cloud Studio. In the “Edit Video” dialog you can now view the URLs for each of the renditions and either download or reference each rendition directly.

Lastly, we have added a feature in the player API to allow our player to failover from the Flash player to the HTML5 player in situations where Flash is not installed on the device. The purpose of this feature is to prevent a user from getting a message that they need to install Flash before than can play the video. This will instead, play the video via the HTML5 player without any error messages.

Check out our product updates page to read about all of our updates in this release.

Get a Quality Control and Productivity Boost with Our New Metadata Assurance Feature

Rob OConnor — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 16:26:05 +0000

For many of our publishers, video metadata is an essential tool for content management and tracking. Whether they are using tags for video search engine optimization, assigning content to players programmatically with the reference ID, or using a custom metadata field for custom functionality, video metadata can be a crucial step of the content publishing workflow.

Our latest Video Cloud product update includes a metadata assurance feature (for Professional and Enterprise editions) to assist organizations like these in content publishing and quality control. The feature lets account administrators denote certain metadata fields as “required.” Content missing any required data can be uploaded, edited, and even inserted into playlists, but will remain in an “inactive” state and thus will not display in players on the Web.

This feature helps our publishers with quality control, essentially playing the role of a QA employee. Since it’s designed to help publishers easily find and update all content missing required metadata, it can improve your team’s productivity while simultaneously reducing or even eliminating any publishing errors caused by lack of video metadata. This is especially important if you decide to roll out new custom fields for a video project – if users uploading content into your account forget to add data because the field is new to them, metadata assurance will catch their mistake.

Metadata assurance is just the first in a number of Video Cloud improvements we have planned to help our customers increase productivity and eliminate mistakes in their content publishing workflows. For detailed instructions on using the feature, visit the metadata assurance support documentation. And stay tuned for more Video Cloud productivity enhancements in the near future!

Saving you time - Brightcove's 11.9 Video Cloud Release

Sara Radkiewicz — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 18:05:04 +0000

The Brightcove Product Organization is very happy to report some feature releases that we hope will make our your video workflow easier. In today's release, we have included some tools to make assuring the quality of your meta data simpler, enhanced our Limited Availability Universal Player APIs, and improved our video playback experience. Read about all our new features, as I am just going to give you a preview of a few.

For our Pro and Enterprise clients, we discovered that nearly ALL of you (our clients) were performing QA on the metadata of your videos. We want to help make this process easier, so we are now providing metadata assurance. This feature makes it easier to ensure you have the correct metadata for your videos. Through the Brightcove Video Cloud studio, you can now make certain standard and/or custom fields required for your videos. When one of your users uploads content, the user will be prompted to enter only the required meta data fields (no forgetting to enter meta data after the upload). If he or she does not have the meta data information, the user can still upload, but the files will be INACTIVE. When a user attempts to activate a video that is missing required information, he or she will be provided with a screen that allows him or her to easily enter just the required information. This process will ensure that you have the fields you need to ensure your videos make it to the site, are monetized, or tracked correctly while making it easier for the user to enter the most important data. The QA process is reduced as files missing this information will be inactive and easy to locate. Activating is also simplified as the user is only presented with the required fields when trying to activate a video. You can read more about this exciting new feature.

With the proliferation of devices that only support HTML5, we understand you are having to create multiple end user experiences for Flash vs. HTML5 devices. In an effort to allow you to write code once and use it on multiple platforms, Brightcove has released our Universal Player APIs. These are a series of player APIs that are supported in both the HTML5 and Flash versions of our players. While we still support our existing player APIs, using the new Universal APIs will ensure that the experience you build once will work on both environments — and we all like more bang for our buck! These APIs are in Limited Availability as we nail all the specifics — so contact your Account Manager if you would like participate.

Finally, we are excited about some updates we have made to our playback algorithm to improve the playback of higher renditions on all desktop devices. No changes or updates are necessary on your side. If you use Brightcove Video Cloud Players, you and more importantly your end users will just automatically see the benefits of the updates.

Check out our product updates page to read about all of our updates in this release.

HTML5 Player Enhancements, Expanded Support for Android

Simon Genzer — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 22:58:31 +0000

The Brightcove product team is excited to share some cool new feature enhancements that improve HTML5 playback experiences and expand support for Android devices.

BEML for HTML5 Video: Brightcove was a pioneer in providing an easy-to-use, XML market-up language for building highly customized players, plug-in and extensions for Flash-based video experiences without having to write new Flash and Action Script code. In the current release we are improving the HTML5 playback experience: the HTML5 player plays the video and makes best effort to render all visual components even if some of the BEML elements in the player cannot be rendered correctly. For detailed documentation on BEML support in HTML5 see Supported BEML Elements for HTML5 Players.

Video Cloud Supports Android 3.1: We're happy to add Android 3.1 to the fast-growing list of platforms Video Cloud support for HTML5 video. Android 3.1 powers the popular Motorola Xoom tablet and many other devices.

Webinar: Introducing the new Video Cloud widget for Ektron

Rob OConnor — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 15:01:30 +0000

This Thursday, June 23 at 1:00 PM ET, Shiri Friedman, a Partner Manager at Brightcove, will be presenting at a webinar that takes a closer look at a new Video Cloud integration with Ektron, a Brightcove Alliance Premier Partner.

Ektron’s web content management (WCM) platform makes it easy to create and manage multi-channel customer experiences for online engagement. Brightcove and Ektron have teamed up to offer close integration between Ektron’s WCM and Brightcove’s Video Cloud platforms, making it extremely easy to incorporate high-quality video into sites, pages, and campaigns.

Join us this Thursday to learn more about:

Why video is a powerful content type and can be used to rapidly tell a story, deepen engagement with website visitors, and improve your ranking in search engine results.
Ektron’s integration with Brightcove Video Cloud, and how it enables publishers to easily incorporate high-quality, branded video experiences into online properties and marketing campaigns
How to leverage Video Cloud’s best-of-breed media transcoding, management and publishing tools without leaving the Ektron drag and drop user interface
How to publish video content on your website that seamlessly works on PCs, as well as Apple iOS and Android smartphones and tablets

The webinar is free and open to all, so sign up today. We hope to see you there!

New Omniture SWF Added to Open Source @ Brightcove

Rob OConnor — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 12:29:06 +0000

Using Omniture in conjunction with Brightcove just got easier. Open Source @ Brightcove, the community site for apps, SDKs and other developer tools, has added a new Flash plug-in for reporting events from within Brightcove video players to Omniture. Reports can then be rolled up using Omniture's SiteCatalyst.

SiteCatalyst is a powerful website analytics platform that helps marketers and web teams track site visitors and optimize websites. With the new open source Omniture SWF, you can easily integrate your Brightcove account with Omniture and start tracking website and video analytics within the same platform for a comprehensive view on the performance of your online properties.

Joint Omniture/Brightcove users can use the plug-in to specify at a detailed level what information gets sent for a wide variety of player and video events. For example, if you want to know the frequency of rendition usage to fine-tune your rendition settings, you can leverage events already set up in the plugin code and simply add further details to track specific events.

All that's required is setting up an XML file. And, since it's an open source project, you can even take the code and extend it or tweak it yourself, shortening your development time and getting a custom-tailored analytics to market as quickly as possible.

Check out the Omniture plugin page on opensource.brightcove.com for more details on setting up the plugin.