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BRIGHTCOVE HELPS XERO BOOST CUSTOMER CONVERSION RATE AND LIVE HAPPILY EVER AFTER

bsp-admin-1 on September 19, 2017

Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, Beauty and the Beast—there’s nothing more moving than a great love story. But have you ever heard of Xena and Xero? No? Well, we hadn’t either. That is until Xero’s Pat Macfie stopped by this year’s PLAY conference to introduce the two.

First we met Xena, a small business owner who loved manual spreadsheets. She was happy with her tried-and-true accounting process and wasn’t looking for anything new. Xero, on the other hand, was an online accounting software trying desperately to woo Xena over to the cloud. He made some small talk, tried his best lines, but it wasn’t until he said something particularly special that finally turned Xena’s head:

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“Your spreadsheet’s a fool. If I was your accounting application, I’d never let you do your banking reconciliation alone.”

Xero Woos Customers with Informative and Engaging Video Content

Macfie posed this clever tale of attraction and romance to illustrate Xero’s approach to the customer journey, a roadmap firmly rooted in video marketing strategy. At every stage of its sales funnel, from acquiring leads, to nurturing prospects, and converting customers, Xero uses video content to guide target audiences toward a successful business partnership. Not only that, but Xero also provides customers with engaging, educational video, ensuring users a smooth onboarding process and overall customer satisfaction.

“At the end of the day, we’re still an accounting software, and to get that up and running does require users to navigate a few tricky moments,” Macfie. “If we can’t navigate the relationship through those moments, it dies. But if we do get through it, then we’ve landed a paying customer that’s unlikely to leave.”

Using Brightcove’s Video Marketing Suite, including integrations with Marketo’s marketing platform and Salesforce’s CRM applications, Xero managed to create a transparent acquisition and retention process, one that provides Macfie and his team the necessary data to successfully guide customers toward a long-term, committed business partnership.

“Marriage! That’s where the real adventure begins,” says Macfie. “It’s a whole new journey based on deep understanding and shared experiences. That’s why we don’t take retention for granted. As our customers move throughout the process and their experiences shift slightly, we also shift our content in order to deepen customers’ understanding of our products.”

Brightcove’s Partner Integration: The Beating Heart of Xero’s Customer Conversion

With the help of Brightcove’s Audience module and its integration with Marketo’s marketing automation platform, Macfie is able to leverage Xero’s video analytics to determine a highly-focused, highly-effective customer retention process. More importantly, the data provided by Brightcove Audience helps Macfie in assessing the impact of Xero’s video marketing initiatives.

When the two technologies combine, they work together to share detailed information on video viewership among Xero’s customer database. Or simply put, Xero is able to see who among its entire list of customer contacts have watched video content and for how long. After identifying interested viewers, Marketo then provides them with a lead generation form—the first step to customer acquisition.

“Audience integration provides us with the information we need to have highly focused, contextual conversations with customers,” says Macfie. “Without it, it’s difficult to move beyond this point in the sales journey.”

Those contextual conversations happen with the help of Salesforce, Xero’s CRM platform. Similar to Brightcove’s Audience integration, Xero links Brightcove’s video platform to its Salesforce CRM interface, giving Macfie a detailed profile of user engagement. By tracking a variety of engagement metrics among viewers, the digital team can not only (1) modulate marketing efforts to reflect more impactful video content, but they can also (2) provide Xero’s sales team with a comprehensive list of prospects, their preferred viewing behavior, and subjects in which they’re most interested. From this point, the sales team can then qualify leads and create personalized communications tailored to these viewers’ video preferences.

Education is Key to Customer Satisfaction

But for Xero, it isn’t just about conversion. The company maintains a large constituency of satisfied customers, providing them the education necessary to leverage Xero’s products and boost their own businesses. Macfie explains how important it is that Xero remains committed to their customers’ needs, even after the closing of a sale.

“To help customers really enjoy the benefits of our products, we need to give them a fundamentally different type of video content and user experience that reflect this stage of the customer journey.”

Macfie has already migrated about 2,000 pieces of video content to the Brightcove platform. Using Brightcove’s customized players, complete with advanced chapterization, text-to-anchor-point links, and product simulations, these video assets are distributed to Xero’s customers, where they can then keep up-to-date on all of the company’s products and technical know-how.

“We’re committed to ongoing customer and product support through our integration with Brightcove,” says Macfie. “We plan to support our customers’ entire content journey throughout their lifecycle, all within our app.”

Want to hear other ways Brightcove can help boost your company’s sales and customer retention? Join us next year at Brightcove PLAY 2018.

To get on the invite list, just RSVP to [email protected] from your work email address.

And to learn more about how Brightcove can help increase your reach and revenue with video marketing, click here.

CHANGES TO VIDEO AUTOPLAY IN WEB BROWSERS

bsp-admin-1 on September 19, 2017

You may have heard that there are changes to autoplay coming on Apple Safari and Google Chrome and are interested to know more. In this post, I go over some of the history of the video element and how autoplay shaped video support in browsers, issues that cropped up and how we fixed those issues, recommendations for developers for the best autoplay behavior, and what to expect in the future for autoplay on the web.

If you don’t want to read the entire post, here is the gist of it: you can continue using the autoplay attribute and things should work, but to get the best support, you should consider moving away from the autoplay attribute and use the play() method to take advantage of the play promise that it returns.

BACKGROUND

In February 2007, Opera published a manifesto calling for video on the web. Along with it they released a technical specification for what we now know and love as the <video> element. The WHATWG quickly adopted the spec with other browsers starting to implement support in the following years.

Apple was one of the first to release support for the video element with the release of Safari 3.1 on iOS and desktop in March of 2008. Mozilla Firefox followed in June of 2009. Google Chrome in October of 2009. Internet Explorer was a bit of a straggler; they released IE9 and support for the video element in March of 2011.

By March of 2011, Opera, IE, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari for desktop had support for autoplay, with the exception of Apple’s iOS, which restricted autoplay functionality. This was because of the battery and user experience issues around it, particularly because videos on the iPhone always launched into the native player rather than playing inline.

Between 2008 and 2016, battery life greatly improved and video on the web became prolific. With the tremendous growth in video, in iOS 10, Apple introduced the ability to autoplay media on iPhones and iPads. However, there was a catch: the video must be muted or not have an audio track. In addition, on iPhones, the video must be allowed to play inline with the playsinline attribute.

After Apple introduced muted autoplay, Google followed suit and introduced it in Chrome for Andriod 53. In the months since, we worked, along with the ad SDK providers, to resolve issues around the new autoplay behavior.

In June 2017, Apple announced that starting with Safari 11 they’d include the same autoplay behavior on desktop, i.e., unmuted autoplay would be rejected. With this announcement, we thought it best to take a step back and think about the issues around autoplay, particularly with ads, to see if the issues all stemmed from the same place. It was time to address autoplay as a fundamental change in how the player functioned.

In September 2017, Google announced that they are implementing similar changes in Google Chrome: Unified Autoplay. Unlike Apple, Google is taking it a step further, besides allowing muted autoplay, they are going to allow autoplay if the site has been interacted with by the user or if a Media Engagement Index (MEI) was crossed. The MEI is assigned to each website and tracks how much the user interacts with the page and if the user views videos or listens to audio. This way, sites with video as their core feature, like YouTube and Netflix, would have a high Media Engagement Index and would not be required to wait for a user gesture to play unmuted. But a site that the user has never visited before will not be able to autoplay video with sound. This will be released in early 2018, as a part of Google Chrome 64.

THE ISSUES AND WHAT WE DID

After a thorough test, it turned out that there weren’t a lot of fundamental changes that needed to be made to the player. The main issue arose from how Video.js made sure that autoplay was added to the video element it created, and an inconsistency with how browsers were treating its HTML attributes and properties.

The first issue was that during initialization, Video.js set autoplay as the first attribute on the video element before other attributes like muted and playsinline were included. While Chrome re-ran their autoplay checks when those attributes were set, Safari and iOS did not. So, we made sure that the autoplay property was only set after muted and playsinline were provided.

The second issue was browser inconsistency in regards to HTML attributes and properties. For example, you could make an autoplayed, muted player using HTML attributes like so:

<video autoplay muted playsinline>

This did work but if we tried to do it programmatically like the following, it didn’t:

video.muted = true;
video.autoplay = true;

It didn’t work because the video wasn’t actually muted on some iOS devices. Instead, we had to make sure to set the attribute and the property; different cross sections of devices wouldn’t work with just a call to setAttribute. This lead us to the following:

video.muted = true;
 // muted is a boolean attribute, so, any value turns it on, using the name of the attribute is an often used convention
video.setAttribute(‘muted’, ‘muted’);
video.autoplay = true;
video.setAttribute(‘autoplay’, ‘autoplay’);

The muted issue cascaded further. When using Video.js to ask if the video was muted, we sometimes got the wrong answer. Video.js used the property value to check if something was set, but in some cases, if the feature was set using the attribute, the property wasn’t set to reflect that value. So with an embed code like the following:

<video muted>

We would get false when we asked the player for the muted value:

player.muted();
// -> false

So, internally, we made sure that each setting set both the attribute and the property and each getter looked at both.

THE NEW STATE OF AUTOPLAY

Now that these changes are available, autoplay works great, right? No so fast…. Because of the way that autoplay rejection works when the right conditions aren’t met (i.e. muted on Safari 11, iOS, and Chrome for Android as well as the addition of playsinline on iPhones) it’s hard to detect whether Autoplay was rejected or that the user just hit play and immediately followed it with a pause. This is something that ad SDKs need to take into account and something that we’ve noticed as Known Issues below. On mobile, most ad SDKs have already updated for proper support but there is no official support for Safari 11 from the ad SDKs at the time of this writing.

THE PLAY PROMISE

In recent years, browsers have updated to return a Promise, a representation of an asynchronous process and its return value, from the play function. The promise allows you to know whether a play succeeded. If the promise is resolved, the play succeeded; if the promise is rejected, the play failed. Previously, two of the main reasons why the promise was rejected are that the video couldn’t be played and that the user (or another script) paused the video shortly after playing but before the video was able to play successfully.

Now, we have a new rejection reason for the play promise. If you are on a platform that will reject autoplay if the video is not muted or silent (or allowed to play inline on iPhone), the promise will be rejected.

The Play Promise is also the only way (currently) to know whether autoplay was rejected, which is why browser vendors recommend switching to the play() method over the autoplay attribute.

RECOMMENDATION

With the changes that we’ve made, the autoplay attribute will work and continue to do so to the best of its ability. However, switching to using the play() method is recommended.

First, browser vendors themselves recommend using it over the autoplay attribute and it’s generally a good idea to follow their advice.

Second, using the play() method allows you, as a developer of the player, to know whether autoplay has succeeded when you listen to the promise:

player.play().then(function() {
  // play succeeded!
})
.catch(function(error) {
  // play failed
  console.error(error.message);
});

Then, if autoplay is rejected, you can put up a message or have an alternative.

Third, if the play() method is used on the player, the player can store the promise that is created and use it internally to provide even better handling around edge cases that arise from rejected autoplay.

To summarize, you can continue using the autoplay attribute and things should work, but to get the best support, you should consider moving away from the autoplay attribute and use the play() method to take advantage of the play promise that it returns.

THE FUTURE OF AUTOPLAY

It seems like the future of autoplay is, in some respects, also the death of autoplay. Apple is going with a fairly strict policy on autoplay: only allow muted autoplay across the board, and require a user gesture for playing back unmuted. The upside of this is that desktop and mobile are consistent. Google is going with a slightly more relaxed policy: only muted autoplay is allowed unless the user has interacted with the website in that session, or it’s a site that the user often goes to to view video. Google’s Unified Autoplay, however, is probably what the future of autoplay should be. It puts restrictions on autoplay to help the user, and at the same time makes it so websites can mostly continue working as is. In the end, I hope that all browsers work together to maintain consistent autoplay restrictions, freeing the developer from targeting browser specific autoplay behavior. Hopefully, the future of autoplay is a unified one.

KNOWN ISSUES

  • Silent ads (ads that do not have an audio track) will autoplay on platforms that reject autoplay without muted. However, when the ad finishes, content will not resume because the player is not muted and no user action was given. This applies to IMA and FreeWheel.
  • If the player is muted, autoplay begins, and the user unmutes the ad, the content will not resume because no user action was given and the player is no longer muted.
  • In FreeWheel, if the ad contains audio but the platform rejects autoplay (for example: on Safari 11), FreeWheel will think that there was an issue with the ad when autoplay is rejected. It will wait the ad timeout interval and then switch back to the content, which will not autoplay because the player is not muted and no user action was given.
  • If autoplay is rejected but playsinline was set, the Brightcove Player will hide the big play button and show the control bar. However, the poster image should still be visible in most cases. This is due to how autoplay rejection works when using the autoplay attribute.

HOW JIKIDEN PIONEERED LIVE STREAMING IN FINANCE

bsp-admin-1 on September 13, 2017

Jikiden supports internet financial services with video distribution. We provide total support for online seminar distribution, IR, and online distribution of general shareholders’ meetings conducted by banks and securities companies. Brightcove supports the core of this business.

SUPPORTING SECURE AND STABLE VIEWING ENVIRONMENTS FOR FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS

Jikiden was established in 2004, a time when online securities companies were appearing one after another due to deregulation.

“How do financial institutions without physical branches build communication and relationships of trust with their customers? We thought that a system that would allow us to explain things in real time while showing our faces online and answering questions from customers would be effective, so we developed this service.”

“At the time of its launch, it was still the era of ADSL lines. Real-time video streaming was also still in the ActiveX stage of Internet Explorer. Even with three frames per second, it was still possible to feel a sense of ‘realness’. Also, there was no other service that allowed live Q&A, and at the time, most of the online securities and FX companies that had appeared were using it.”

The fact that they made proposals that took our customers into account was also a big factor. They are a reliable partner with whom we can work together to create services.

Masashi Hirayama

President, Jikiden Co.

At Jikiden, where around half of the staff have experience working at securities companies and financial institutions, we support the marketing of each company from a consulting standpoint, providing full support not only for software and connection-related matters, but also for the content of online seminars and the content of distributed materials.

ADOPTING BRIGHTCOVE AS HIGH-SPEED LINES BECOME MORE COMMON

The basic business model has not changed since the company was founded, but we have updated the delivery technology we provide in line with advances in Internet technology and the state of the environment.

“Before we signed a contract with Brightcove, we were using a flash-based system to provide general webinar-style content that combined video and documents. However, we gradually realized that there were limits to the way we could express ourselves using this standardized method of communication. In recent years, the viewing environment for seminar participants has improved, and the overwhelming majority of people now watch high-quality videos as a matter of course. If we don’t do something, people might say things like, “You can watch beautiful images on YouTube, but the images in the live seminars that are streamed are hard to see. So, in order to smoothly transition to an environment that can deliver higher-quality images more stably, we decided to introduce Brightcove.”

Online seminar distribution frequency: for daily distribution

Customer-generated edited videos: Combining in-house studio distribution

PROVIDING A ONE-STOP SERVICE WITH A RESELLABLE CONTRACT FORMAT

“They understood our business model well and were able to accommodate our contract as a resale partner, which was still rare at the time. In addition, the sales representative carefully explained the status of the API and how to use it in a way that suited the characteristics of the industry, and they were able to make proposals that took our customers into consideration. We felt that we could trust them as a partner to create services together.”

LINKING WITH IN-HOUSE SYSTEMS VIA API TO PROVIDE A SMOOTH DISTRIBUTION SYSTEM

Currently, Brightcove is embedded within ‘Go Stream’, which was developed in-house.

“Customers can receive videos using the Brightcove platform simply by logging in to ‘Go Stream’. The API for Brightcove Live was already well established, so it was easy to link it to our direct management system and develop it. We were also grateful that they developed additional APIs that we didn’t have at the start. It’s also great that we can maintain our services for customers without any problems, in line with technological innovations in the internet and computers.”

“With the previous VideoCloud Live, it was difficult to adjust the start time, so it was a little difficult to use, but with Brightcove Live, we can now adjust it using the API, so it has become even easier for our customers to use. Since we have many financial institution customers, the top priority is that it is secure. We also appreciate the fact that even if there is a minor problem, they can investigate the cause in detail.”

MAINTAINING STABLE DISTRIBUTION AND CONSIDERING NEW WAYS TO USE VIDEO

In addition to distribution from customers, we also distribute from our in-house studio. There are daily distributions, and at times there are as many as four or five per day. In addition to the distribution format using the studio attached to the company, there are also cases where we edit the data recorded by the customer and upload it to Brightcove and give them the tags.

WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON THE FUTURE?

“At the moment, we are only using about 20% of Brightcove’s functions, so we would like to start using functions such as automatic captioning and advertising integration. Also, there is a possibility that VTubers will give financial seminars in the future, so we also need to work on this. To achieve this, we would like to use the Brightcove platform to create a stable distribution environment that will make our customers even happier.”

Direct Stream supports the services of financial institutions through stable and reliable distribution. As live streaming becomes more common, it seems likely that its role will continue to grow.

Brightcove offers a partner program for the resale of solutions licenses.

The risks of relying entirely on Facebook and Google

bsp-admin-1 on September 7, 2017

Maintaining a website that you own and operate is costly, but compared to the cost of handing over control of monetization and brand value to a giant Silicon Valley company, the risks of the former will pale in comparison. The future of publishers is in which “walled garden” they build their business.

CONTEXT-AWARE ENCODING: BUILDING A BETTER MOUSETRAP

bsp-admin-1 on September 5, 2017

In 2015, video heads everywhere marveled at the research Netflix had just completed and applied to their entire library. Their Per-Title Encode Optimization approach, leveraged an analysis of each title to determine the best way to encode based on the complexity of the action in-frame.

ACCOUNTING FOR VIDEO COMPLEXITY

In simple terms, not all video is the same. Sports is complex because it has lots of scene-to-scene motion—not just the players, but camera moves. Whereas episodic dramas may have much less scene-to-scene motion, and talking heads in news and current affairs programming generally have the least motion.

This motion relates to encoding complexity: The more you have, the more complex the video is to encode. Netflix’s approach was to look at each piece of content and determine how to encode it based on its inherent complexity. For an organization that delivers more streams than anyone else, every bit of savings and every slight stream optimization can have a massive return on investment.

As impressive as this innovation was, there are always technologists in this space who look at challenges from a different angle. This is how we’ve gone from postage stamp sized video to today’s HDR 4K, DVR enabled live experiences, and beyond. It seems that no matter how impressive the next innovation is, there is another streaming technologist thinking about how to build the proverbial better mousetrap.

BUILDING CONTEXT-AWARE ENCODING

In this case, Brightcove’s video research team, lead by Dr. Yuriy Reznik, came up with one of our newest video innovations at Brightcove called Context-Aware Encoding (CAE). CAE takes the concept of content-based encoding optimization and augments it with additional information about network conditions and the device distribution amongst the audience.

Think of Context-Aware Encoding as having a compression expert in a box. For every title processed, and every frame therein, CAE is looking at the source asset and also making calculations about the target device and the network through which the stream will be delivered.

Using this approach, it can optimize the encoding process so that multiple attributes of the bitrate ladder are adjusted, not just the bitrate, and save on renditions that aren’t needed. On average, this approach has shown savings on the order of one third across most content types, and as much as 50% where in-frame activity is fairly simple.

TESTING CONTEXT-AWARE ENCODING

Of particular note, Jan Ozer, one of the video industry’s best known video experts put Brightcove’s Context-Aware Encoding through its paces in a broad and subjective test.

In Jan’s words:

“Why was CAE so successful? Because with this low motion, synthetic video, it allowed Brightcove to deliver a higher resolution video to lower bitrate viewers than a traditional ladder. The result illustrates the key advantages of per-title encoding; happier viewers, lower bandwidth consumption, and lower storage and encoding costs from dropping from a seven rung ladder to four.”

This is great initial feedback for Context-Aware Encoding, and we’re only getting started.

As we work with more publishers, networks, and broadcasters and process more content, the algorithm will learn over time. Ultimately, this will mean that we are continuing to drive the costs out of bringing rich, compelling video experiences to audiences everywhere and transforming the media experience.

INFOGRAPHIC: THE SCIENCE OF SOCIAL VIDEO ENGAGEMENT

bsp-admin-1 on August 30, 2017

There’s no denying that if you want a successful video marketing strategy, social video needs to be a huge component. The major social platforms have shifted their attention to video—and the eyeballs are there, as video content is more and more voraciously consumed across social.

Facebook has largely led the charge with its video-first strategy and has seen the results of this push as 67% of marketers have paid to promote videos on Facebook and views of sponsored content jumped 258% since 2016.

Pinterest and LinkedIn have been the most recent to toss their hats into the ring, with LinkedIn finally rolling out video capabilities and Pinterest rolling out video ads.

For brands in particular, the growing popularity of social video represents a massive opportunity. What can brands learn about the where, what, and why of current social video viewing habits in order to capitalize on them?

This new infographic details the results of a study of 5,500 social video viewers from the U.S., the U.K., France, Germany, and Australia.

Brightcove Science of Social Video Infographic;

VIDEO MONETIZATION: NOT THE MYSTERY YOU MAY THINK IT IS

bsp-admin-1 on August 21, 2017

Video monetization is no longer a future looking buzzword used in the industry. Today, it’s table stakes.

Revenues from digital video hit a record $9.1 billion in 2016, a 53 percent year-over-year rise from $5.9 billion in 2015, according to the Internet Advertising Bureau’s annual report. On mobile devices, video revenue skyrocketed, increasing 145 percent year-over-year to nearly $4.2 billion.

At Brightcove, we see these trend spikes too, as more than 400 million ads are delivered by our players, helping our customers realize nearly $5 million in revenue each month.

That said, the path to online video monetization isn’t without its curves and virtual speed bumps. Here are a few of the present hurdles faced by dynamic ad insertion (DAI) workflows today, along with some solutions that we see driving results for our customers.

AD BLOCKERS

There is no technology in today’s marketplace that generates more grief and anguish than ad blockers. Millions of people worldwide have installed browser plugins to fend off what they determine to be intrusive advertising experiences. There is some merit to this line of thinking.

For a long time, digital audiences have been forced to deal with ads that did all they could to be ‘in your face’, popping up, and taking over the browsing experience, and in turn, all of your attention. A growing dialog amongst industry thought leaders identified that with improved ad experiences, more effectively targeting the user or viewer, the more likely viewers are to allow and even interact with advertising.

From a technical perspective, ad blockers ‘see’ HTTP requests from the browser and prevent that payload from being delivered. When this process is applied to video, it is incredibly disruptive to the viewing experience. Not only does the ad not play, but also the entire video viewing experience is often completely stopped.

The remedy for this is to shift the ad request and delivery from the player to the cloud with server side ad insertion (SSAI). With this process, the browser and player ‘see’ one contiguous stream, with no delineation between ads and video. Given that, ad blockers cannot interrupt the experience.

Furthermore, this is the only way to deliver monetizable video streams to platforms like Apple TV and Roku. The result is that the viewer is able to watch the video and the ads within in a non-disruptive manner, while the advertiser places ads with their desired audience, and the ‘take over’ nature of ad formats that came before are relegated to history.

PARSING PERFORMANCE

More viewers are growing up in a mobile-first world, expecting video instantaneously when they click play, meaning the time to the first frame is even more crucial with this demographic. The longer it takes for videos to start, the more likely viewers are to form negative opinions of that experience or to disengage altogether. This performance is important, and at the same time, something is happening beyond the playback itself.

One common goal of broadcasters, publishers, and networks is to profit from video content. Behind the scenes, the multiple auctions and calls to ad servers disrupt the overall experience resulting in buffering and delays. Issues like this are problems Brightcove is working to solve. Furthermore, measurement and viewability metrics are more important than ever for advertisers. They want to know was the ad played? Was the entire ad viewed? If the answer is no, when did the viewer close out? These client side metrics being captured can contribute to latency and poor video experiences.

To remedy these issues, a few things can be done to optimize viewing.

  • Publishers need to up their content game. Engaging content finds audiences, drives ad spend. Sounds simple enough but there is a lot of bad video content out there and this content participates in the same auctions even though it does not carry the same viewing quality.
  • The industry needs to push out low quality content from the system.  
  • Rid the system of bad latency actors to improve upon monetization strategies. This will reinforce the idea that there is no difference in the speed of watching traditional television or online video. I call this idea ‘better than broadcast’. Online video should be as good, if not better, than broadcast when it comes to the viewing experience even when it comes to advertising.
  • As an industry, technologists and advertisers need to come to an agreement on the best method for monetizing video. Reducing dependency on Flash while shifting demand from VPAID Flash to VAST + video or VPAID JavaScript. With the auction process, velocity can increase with the use of programmatic real time ad bidding and SSAI. In short, moving these processes to the cloud can help to increase speed and independence rather than have them tied to the Play button as they are now.

MANGLING MANIFEST MANIPULATION

Everyone likes maps that lead you to treasure. Believe it or not, the video technology that helps deliver viewing experiences to screens and devices of all shapes and sizes is similar to a treasure map. The map is the manifest and the treasure is the video that assembles on our devices. One primary reason for this approach is the ability for the video to shift and adapt to changing network conditions. The overarching term for this technology is adaptive bitrate, or ABR. Though Apple’s HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) spec is largely the most prevalent format, there are other ‘flavors’ of ABR video technology – MPEG-DASH, Microsoft’s Smooth Streaming, Adobe’s HDS.

These video formats contain two primary elements:

  • Fragments. The actual pieces, or ‘chunks’ of video content, generally in four-second increments.
  • Manifest. This is the treasure map, as it helps point a player to the video chunks and the order in which they are to be assembled and played. It is a text-based or XML file with specific variants depending on format.

By changing the manifest, one or more video elements can be modified, such as: inserting ads, inserting alternate content, to adjust for blackouts, limiting or expanding the number of bit rates available, or setting initial bit rates.

Though the concept is simple, manifest manipulation is often tricky. Most of these ABR protocols aren’t very tolerant and don’t like having the manifest rewritten. Specifically with advertising payload, if there is variance in the granular encoding settings between the ad payload and the program content and the manifest is changed, the player will most often break playback along those boundaries.

Put another way, this is the equivalent of forcing the engine in your vehicle to switch from unleaded gasoline to diesel on the fly. It likely won’t end well. Though manifest manipulation provides some flexibility, it can be detrimental to the monetization aspect of an online video strategy.

Fortunately, addressing these hurdles is fairly straightforward. Establish standards between the programming and advertising that plays in and around it. Ensure the compression and encoding settings between the two are identical.

This can be a challenge, especially with the ad payload. If the process properly encodes ad units as they are placed, just prior to playout, this process ensures that playback is uninterrupted, visual quality is maintained and monetization intact by processing all content in a ‘just in time’ process.

Despite these near term hurdles, many media and entertainment organizations are very bullish on their online video strategies. Just like its big brother, traditional television evolved, so too will online video.

In fact, it is very safe to say that the pace of innovation and change is far faster for online video than traditional television ever imagined. This is perhaps one of the key factors that drove Disney to invest billions in online video provider BAM Tech, with an eye to the future of all video and channels – not simply OTT and ‘streams’.

DELOITTE TV NETWORK CONNECTS EXECUTIVES AND EMPLOYEES

bsp-admin-1 on August 17, 2017

According to the U.S. Supreme Court, corporations are considered people.

But corporations can’t breathe. They can’t walk. They can’t play a game of catch with their corporate son or corporate daughter, and they can’t surprise their corporate spouse with a weekend trip for two. Corporations are just…corporations.

However, there’s one business that’s taken this notion of “personhood” and used it do something good. And that’s Deloitte.

Owned and operated under the Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited (DTTL) umbrella, Deloitte employs thousands of dedicated professionals in independent firms throughout the world, providing auditing, consulting, financial advisory, and risk management services to select clients. Despite the company’s vast coverage across the globe, all of its member firms adhere to the same principle: purpose.

“Deloitte is led by purpose,” says Michael Weinstein, the company’s Multimedia Manager. “That purpose is to make an impact that matters. This purpose defines who we are. It endures, transcending the everyday and binding us together. It gives us reason to exist.”

That said, it’s refreshing to hear that a company does, in fact, have feelings.

At our PLAY 2017 conference, Weinstein stopped by and talked to us about Deloitte’s mission to humanize its global brand, with a lot of help from Brightcove video.

Like most organizations, Deloitte sets the tone for its leadership style and corporate culture from the recommendations of its C-suite executives. But with over 244,400 professionals across 150 countries, it’s safe to say aligning these initiatives is no easy task. For each one of Deloitte’s independent firms, they not only have to adhere to the regulations of the countries in which they operate; they also have to function under the guidelines of DTTL’s executive management. Add to the fact that there’s leadership turnover every few years, it’s a difficult challenge to get all Deloitte employees on the same page.

In order to get everyone on board with company operations, Weinstein introduced video as a way to put a human touch to the organization. Whereas an email or a company-wide voice mail message would have sufficed before, Deloitte aimed to connect with staff on a personal level and get everyone engaged.

“We wanted to have a way for our network of thousands of employees to meet the new leadership,” he says.

Cue Brightcove.

Combining Deloitte’s intranet and Brightcove, the company created an internal video portal dubbed the “Deloitte TV Network,” a place for employees and executives to connect on a more personal level, no formalities included. The page, exclusive to Deloitte’s global organization, features videos of impromptu conversation between hosts and Deloitte management, giving employees a sneak peek into the everyday personalities of their leadership staff.

On the technical side, the firewall-protected employee page operates on a multi-tab Brightcove-powered player, with each tab representing a distinct company-related topic. Topics include “Global,” “Brand,” “Community,” and “Events,” among several others. Click on a tab and playlist appears, featuring video content relevant to the subject at hand. There’s even a separate channel centered on CEO communication, giving viewers advice and personal anecdotes straight from C-suite staff.

“Executives are passionate about helping people,” says Weinstein. “They want employees to feel more connected, so they offer this platform to give advice, and to get to know them better.”

After its launch, the “Deloitte TV Network” proved a smashing success. Using Brightcove’s analytics, Weinstein was even able to report a 75% play rate among company employees—a statistic that’s exceeded all initial expectations.

“We assumed most people wouldn’t have time to sit and watch until the end of the videos,” says Weinstein. But lo and behold, Deloitte recorded over 21,000 minutes of viewing time, crushing the company’s original goal. Employee engagement was through the roof. Even executives themselves noted how wonderful it was to participate in the videos and connect with fellow employees.

Kudos to Deloitte for reminding us that big companies have big hearts, too.

HOW XERO ATTRACTED AND RETAINED ITS FIRST MILLION SUBSCRIBERS

bsp-admin-1 on August 15, 2017

If you haven’t already heard of Xero, the New Zealand-based cloud accounting platform, it’s time you have them on your radar. Founded in 2006, the company has grown over the past ten years into one of the most successful SaaS companies worldwide.

We recently caught up with Drew Unsworth, Digital Advisor for Xero, to chat about Xero’s digital marketing approach and how video plays a big role in helping the fast-growing accounting software business attract and retain customers successfully. Clearly it’s working — Xero recently reached the milestone of over 1 million subscribers.

While discussing how every business today is using data to drive decisions, Drew highlights the importance of leveraging analytics to drive customer engagement. He also provides practical advice on what marketers should look for and do to get the most out of a video strategy and increase interest in digital content.

However, a digital video marketing strategy is only as good as the tools and technology that underpin it. When the business started reaching a certain level of growth, Drew notes that it required an enterprise-grade video platform that could keep up with its expansion goals and provide key features, integrations, and brand security to support Xero’s progress.