Video Week Day Three - Brightcove
Brightcove is a video delivery service that is used by many big players in the publishing world, including the New York Times.
What you may not know is that smaller publishers can also take advantage of the Brightcove platform for their videos as well. Using their Brightcove Studio program, smaller producers like IHEs can post their videos on Brightcove’s public facing content galleries and embed the video on their website.
I’ve used Brightcove as a test for a couple of videos, including an interview with our newly announced college president. We shot the video in 16×9 format and instead of recording to tape, hooked up our Macbook and recorded live into iMovie. You’d be surprised how much time that saves in post. We did some minor editing before uploading to Brightcove.
To upload videos to Brightcove, you use their PublishPod program, availble for Windows and Macs. Unlike services like YouTube or Google Video, Brightcove’s program first does a local encode into FLV video before uploading to Brightcove. Depending on the power of your local machine, this can take awhile, but you get a local copy of the encode if you check the preferences to do so. Using the PublishPod also allows you to take a screen shot to use as a video preview. Encoding quality is good - you are able to set some quality and size settings before you start encoding.
Once your video is uploaded, you log into the Console area, where you can build your player and manage other items, including the advertising options that will play when the video is played in their gallery. This, in my opinion, may be a sticking point for some institutions who don’t want to pay Brightcove for a full-blown setup. In their gallery, there may be pre- and post-roll ads that are shown.
You are given many options about the player style and other playback options in the Console. Since I shot the interview with our president in widescreen format, I wanted to playback in full 16×9 with no black bars. I was able to manually tweak the player to get it how I like. Here’s the video:
Brightcove does offer one interesting proposition that other services don’t - you can allow users to buy downloads of your video. This may be an interesting revenue stream for some schools, who want to offer a special event or something rather niche-y.
One other nice area of Brightcove is their stats. You can customize reports and see results for each title you have in their system, or get composite stats. I like the fact that Brightcove not only tells you how many plays your video has had, but also how many minutes of viewing and the amount of data downloaded. The minutes stat isn’t one you see, but it’s pretty interesting to see that a video you’ve posted has been viewed for 2,000 total minutes. For example, our Dr. Mullen video has been viewed a total of 33 hours. You’re also given the option to download the reports you create as a CSV.
If you are a major video producer, it may be worth looking into Brightcove’s publishing plans.
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You knew I had to chime in on this one.
Although we don’t get the full benefits of Brightcove that you mention I’ve enjoyed using their service. It looks so much more clean and professional than YouTube and is just as customizable. If anyone is interested in seeing a College that uses Brightcove to display videos check out Wofford’s Sights & Sounds page.