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POWERFUL TOOLS FOR LIVE EVENTS AND 24/7 CHANNELS

bsp-admin-1 on April 11, 2017

Live streaming at scale is inherently complicated, requiring a careful orchestration of hardware, encoding services, and distribution platforms, with a narrow (and often unforgiving) margin for error. Getting an event or service up and running is a daunting task, so many turn to off-the-shelf streaming platforms and tools that have solved many of these basic challenges.

However, as users (especially in large organizations) have noticed, these products often lack advanced features to integrate into your existing video streaming ecosystem, protect and monetize your content, or accelerate content creation and VOD publishing. They’re also expensive, though not nearly as expensive as building your own.

We saw an opportunity to build a better solution: Brightcove Live. It’s a resilient, cost-effective, API-driven platform built specifically for media organizations and enterprises. It’s a ground-up redesign of Zencoder Live, bringing a host of new features, such as 24/7 streaming, server-side ad insertion (SSAI), cloud DVR, content protection, on-the-fly live clipping and live-to-VOD asset creation.

Instantly Clip Live-to-VOD

Whether you’re streaming 24/7 or putting on live events, creating VOD highlights of your content is often part of the plan. Usually, this involves an entirely separate workflow from the live stream, and getting clips posted quickly requires a costly on-site editorial team. With Brightcove Live, you can instantly lift clips out of your live stream with a single API call while your stream is still on the air. Brightcove Live will ingest clips directly into Video Cloud, or upload to an S3 or FTP location of your choice, for immediate site publication or social media sharing.

Brightcove Live also streamlines the process of publishing an entire live event as VOD, and has already saved customers like NHRA and Seven West Media time and resources.

“The NHRA uses Brightcove Live for our NHRA All Access product and are impressed with the quality and reliability of the stream.  We’ve especially enjoyed the ease of transferring the live asset to on-demand after an event ends as it saves us hours of work each race weekend” (Pam Allison, Director, Digital Products at NHRA).

Seven West Media utilized Brightcove Live’s VOD clipping feature while still in beta for their coverage of the 2017 Australian Open, enabling them to turn around the final clashes in minutes instead of hours. For example, the Williams sisters’ entire 90-minute final match was published just 20 minutes after it ended.

Increase your Reach with SSAI

Traditional client-side ad insertion is tricky to implement across multiple platforms and can cause glitchy playback, leading viewers to abandon playback sessions. By injecting ads before the stream reaches the client, server-side ad insertion (SSAI) works across all devices, eliminates ad-playback glitches, and helps to mitigate ad blocking technologies.

With DoubleClick for Publishers, FreeWheel, or any VAST 2.0/3.0/4.0–compliant ad server, Brightcove Live seamlessly inserts ads into the stream before delivery to the player, improving playback performance and reach. Ads can be cued via OnCuePoint messages embedded in the input stream, or you can use the REST API for both scheduled and instantaneous (a.k.a. “big red button”) ad cues. Ad insertion is frame-accurate, and you can even specify a custom video slate to show viewers when an ad slot isn’t filled.

Protect Your Content

Brightcove Live also provides tools to protect sensitive or confidential content. We’re supporting HLSe encrypted streams at launch, with support for the major DRM systems coming soon. Playlists and chunks can also be delivered via SSL for additional transport-layer security, and token authentication is supported for Akamai Edge Auth 2.0.

Built for Scale

Brightcove Live is available in multiple regions across the globe, which helps you to improve resiliency and latency by provisioning streams closer to your live source. Streams are delivered to viewers via HLS, ensuring compatibility with a wide variety of platforms and players, as well as most popular CDNs.

Managing growth and configuration are two of the biggest challenges when you’re spinning up a live streaming solution, but Brightcove Live’s API-centric approach makes this simple. All streaming options are set per-job, so you can change settings or add redundant streams with a single API call to create a new job. Stream status, VOD clipping, and SSAI are all controlled via API for easy integration with your existing tools.

Live streaming is hard, but it doesn’t have to be. We’ve taken care of the hard part, and we’re excited to see how you’ll use Brightcove Live to make live streaming work for you.

LIVE STREAMING FORMAT OF THE FUTURE

bsp-admin-1 on March 31, 2017

Live streaming at scale is inherently complicated, requiring a careful orchestration of hardware, encoding services, and distribution platforms, with a narrow (and often unforgiving) margin for error. Getting an event or service up and running is a daunting task, so many turn to off-the-shelf streaming platforms and tools that have solved many of these basic challenges.

However, as users (especially in large organizations) have noticed, these products often lack advanced features to integrate into your existing video streaming ecosystem, protect and monetize your content, or accelerate content creation and VOD publishing. They’re also expensive, though not nearly as expensive as building your own.

We saw an opportunity to build a better solution: Brightcove Live. It’s a resilient, cost-effective, API-driven platform built specifically for media organizations and enterprises. It’s a ground-up redesign of Zencoder Live, bringing a host of new features, such as 24/7 streaming, server-side ad insertion (SSAI), cloud DVR, content protection, on-the-fly live clipping and live-to-VOD asset creation.

Instantly Clip Live-to-VOD

Whether you’re streaming 24/7 or putting on live events, creating VOD highlights of your content is often part of the plan. Usually, this involves an entirely separate workflow from the live stream, and getting clips posted quickly requires a costly on-site editorial team. With Brightcove Live, you can instantly lift clips out of your live stream with a single API call while your stream is still on the air. Brightcove Live will ingest clips directly into Video Cloud, or upload to an S3 or FTP location of your choice, for immediate site publication or social media sharing.

Brightcove Live also streamlines the process of publishing an entire live event as VOD, and has already saved customers like NHRA and Seven West Media time and resources.

“The NHRA uses Brightcove Live for our NHRA All Access product and are impressed with the quality and reliability of the stream.  We’ve especially enjoyed the ease of transferring the live asset to on-demand after an event ends as it saves us hours of work each race weekend” (Pam Allison, Director, Digital Products at NHRA).

Seven West Media utilized Brightcove Live’s VOD clipping feature while still in beta for their coverage of the 2017 Australian Open, enabling them to turn around the final clashes in minutes instead of hours. For example, the Williams sisters’ entire 90-minute final match was published just 20 minutes after it ended.

Increase your Reach with SSAI

Traditional client-side ad insertion is tricky to implement across multiple platforms and can cause glitchy playback, leading viewers to abandon playback sessions. By injecting ads before the stream reaches the client, server-side ad insertion (SSAI) works across all devices, eliminates ad-playback glitches, and helps to mitigate ad blocking technologies.

With DoubleClick for Publishers, FreeWheel, or any VAST 2.0/3.0/4.0–compliant ad server, Brightcove Live seamlessly inserts ads into the stream before delivery to the player, improving playback performance and reach. Ads can be cued via OnCuePoint messages embedded in the input stream, or you can use the REST API for both scheduled and instantaneous (a.k.a. “big red button”) ad cues. Ad insertion is frame-accurate, and you can even specify a custom video slate to show viewers when an ad slot isn’t filled.

Protect Your Content

Brightcove Live also provides tools to protect sensitive or confidential content. We’re supporting HLSe encrypted streams at launch, with support for the major DRM systems coming soon. Playlists and chunks can also be delivered via SSL for additional transport-layer security, and token authentication is supported for Akamai Edge Auth 2.0.

Built for Scale

Brightcove Live is available in multiple regions across the globe, which helps you to improve resiliency and latency by provisioning streams closer to your live source. Streams are delivered to viewers via HLS, ensuring compatibility with a wide variety of platforms and players, as well as most popular CDNs.

Managing growth and configuration are two of the biggest challenges when you’re spinning up a live streaming solution, but Brightcove Live’s API-centric approach makes this simple. All streaming options are set per-job, so you can change settings or add redundant streams with a single API call to create a new job. Stream status, VOD clipping, and SSAI are all controlled via API for easy integration with your existing tools.

Live streaming is hard, but it doesn’t have to be. We’ve taken care of the hard part, and we’re excited to see how you’ll use Brightcove Live to make live streaming work for you.

INTEGRATING VIDEO WITH YOUR TECH STACK

bsp-admin-1 on March 30, 2017

Today’s marketers and communicators are focusing holistically on the viewer experience. Companies of all kinds are realizing they have to build architectures that marry content with data and deliver experiences that compel and delight their audience.

“Platforms that knit together to help form this unified customer experience. And those are platforms that should be used in every organization, all the way through the organization, to deliver that wonderful customer experience. So those are the purchases that should be centralized. Everybody should be using the same CRM, the same marketing automation platform, the same video platform, so you’re able to knit these things together and create that great experience.” – Anita Brearton, Founder/CEO CabinetM

When you integrate your online video platform (OVP) with your existing tech stack, like your CMS, MAP, and CRM, it ensures your company can make the most of your video investment. Workflows are streamlined, experiences are heightened, and marketers can now focus on building long-term personal relationships with customers and prospects.

Furthermore, when cross-enterprise video platforms are integrated with eCDNs and single sign on (SSO), it allows for IT, HR and other internal communications to utilize these same system pathways.

Below, we’ll discuss the various ways in which video can be integrated into your company’s technical ecosystem.

Connecting Your CMS and OVP

Managing a content strategy can be overwhelming, as can putting all that content in one place. Video communicators and strategists at all levels of a company spend much of their day pulling assets from numerous systems and working with many internal collaborators.

Creating an efficient content workflow and maintaining an asset library that works across various systems is absolutely vital. So what do you have to gain by integrating your OVP into your CMS? When video flows freely to web publishers via connectors and/or media management APIs from your OVP to your CMS, video becomes accessible to every person in your organization who publishes content.

The OVP and CMS connection also opens the door to dynamic publishing based on tags, and adding video results to search on your website. Video is now an integral part of your digital marketing and internal communication workflows and not isolated from it. Now let’s look at how video can perform in your marketing campaigns.

Integrating Video Data into Your Marketing Automation Platform

Marketing automation gives marketers a complete picture of an individual prospect or customer, leveraging the digital interactions monitored through your CMS, and now, OVP. Marketing automation allows you to utilize the analytics from both platforms to send content based on individual interests, delivering the right content to the right person at the right time. Strategically placed video increases email opens, CTRs, and landing page conversion, boosting your lead generation.

You can also gather leads via MAP-specific and/or progressive profiling forms placed before, during, or after a video viewing. Again, the video data pushed into your MAP helps you qualify, segment, and nurture those leads. By integrating video and marketing automation platforms, you can take much greater control of your marketing efforts and increase ROI.

Pulling Video Analytics and Content Preferences into Your CRM

CRMs empower conversations, bridging the gap between marketing and sales with information. CRMs are powered by the rich data provided by your OVP, CMS, and marketing automation. By integrating your OVP with your marketing automation and CRM platforms, you create customer interactions with the sales team that are more targeted, efficient, and effective for all. Sales reps love a complete profile.

Because of the data flowing between these systems, it will be clear what videos were watched, how much of the content was consumed, what additional content was sent via marketing automation, and lastly, when in these marketing efforts the individual was qualified as a sales-ready lead. All this information personalizes sales follow-up, creating a better experience for your prospect and leading to more conversions and upsells for your sales team.

Streamlining Security with SSO and eCDN

Internal communicators may not have the broad tech stack needs of marketers aligning their video marketing across multiple channels and campaigns, but internal comms can present it’s own set of unique challenges. An important partner in your tech stack ecosystem, IT, needs to make sure that internal-only communications stay that way—secure and accessible only to an internal audience (employees, franchise owners, partners, and more).

A single sign-on (SSO) integration enables select groups of employees to view video seamlessly without having to go to a new site and enter a special password. This all takes place behind the firewall. SSO also integrates video with your existing user management solution, giving IT, HR and anyone else who manages company communications, centralized control over who has access to what video content.

By integrating your video platform with an eCDN (enterprise content delivery network) you ensure internal video viewers can simultaneously watch live or VOD streams without plugging up the company network. eCDNs let you minimize your bandwidth usage, latency, and buffering, which means your content is delivered in highest resolution and plays to the highest standards, without clogging up the intranet.

When you have a company of 10,000 employees, you can imagine the network strain of everyone watching the CEO’s live town hall. eCDN and OVP integration means you can concentrate on the content you’re delivering, without worrying about bringing down the corporate network.

Reporting on Video Analytics and Campaign Success

The marriage of content and data comes together with analytics. Marketers and communicators, and sales teams love data, but who doesn’t? Video metrics are one of the most insightful tools for determining the value of campaigns and singular communications.

The analytics that flow through integrated platforms will allow you to understand how video content is performing, which you can share with web development, business intelligence, and sales teams. Tech stack integrations help us to align both external video marketing campaigns and internal communications with business goals and results, demonstrating ROI.

“We’re not spending the time as marketers to think thoughtfully about not only the technology that we’re going to use, but the integration with all the other pieces of technology out there and what are the other departments that need to leverage that?” – Joe Pulizzi, Founder, Content Marketing Institute

Marketers and internal communicators crave the creativity and business results of video, but also look for efficient workflows. That’s where a little knowledge of tech stacks comes in handy. We don’t need to be fluent in things like RESTful APIs and webhooks—it just needs to work.

With the right integrations, you get to 1) create memorable experiences for employees, prospects, and customers, 2) make IT happy with higher utilization of of existing platforms throughout the digital and marketing stack, and that all leads to 3) the creation of revenue for your company and greater ROI across the board.

9 SOCIAL VIDEO BEST PRACTICES FROM REAL INFLUENCERS

bsp-admin-1 on March 21, 2017

Social media, in a lot of ways, is about being benevolent, helpful, and genuine. This is how some accounts attract thousands of loyal followers—these influencers embody these “golden rules” of social media.

So what do you do if you’re an influencer and you’re asked about how to best utilize social media and social video as a marketer? Share the wealth, of course. Read below to learn more of our Video Marketing Mentors’ advice.

1. Don’t Be Everywhere, Be Where Your Audience Is

Chris Moody, Content Marketing Leader at GE Digital: “I think the most important thing with social today, and going forward, is to be at one place at one time. So many times we’re trying to be on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, LinkedIn. We can’t be everywhere. Our audience is not everywhere. And when you’re stretching yourself so thin, it’s going to water down what you’re actually doing on social. So find the place where your people are, your prospects, your customers, your advocates. Be there, and do a great job of producing content there and engaging with folks.”

2. Create a Communication Strategy for Each Social Site

Joe Pulizzi, Founder of Content Marketing Institute: “Every channel that you leverage should have its own ‘why.’ So strategically, why are we communicating on that channel? What is the audience that we’re communicating to? And what is the ultimate behavior we’d like to see? So you should do a ‘why’ exercise with every channel you use. Right now the average enterprise engages in per audience between 13 and 16 different channels. That’s too many.”

3. Start with the Buyer and Tailor Social Content to Them

Carlos Hidalgo, CEO of VisumCx: “I have connected with a firm in Europe, who is actually using social specifically, and that’s all they do. But they’re working with brands like Fujitsu, and IBM, and Vodafone to really say social media—if you wanna demand gen, we can really help spur that on from a social media perspective. And they’re having great success with it, because they start with the buyer. What does the buyer like on social media? What social media properties are they on? What kind of content do they wanna consume?”

4. Add Visual Interest to Your Standard Tweet

Chris Moody: “Social media posts with animated GIFs or video are nine times more effective than those that do not have animated GIFs or video.”

5. Keep Social Video Short and Action-Driven

Stacy Adams, Head of Marketing at GoAnimate: “Social video should be short. Social video should encapsulate very quick, concise points, and should point to something else. Video for video’s sake I think doesn’t do anything to enhance your brand, and what’s your call to action for that video.”

6. Use a Video Platform You Can Control

Joe Pulizzi: “So what is the platform that you’re going to have for the video so that you’re not playing by somebody else’s rules? So I would like to see the video at least the ultimate home for it be on something that you can control. Because YouTube changes our rules, Facebook changes our rules, and they will continue to because they don’t care about what you’re doing, they only care about what they’re doing.”

7. Make an Owned Content Hub

Michael Brenner, CEO of Marketing Insider Group: “I think it’s a real mistake for brands to focus on creating satellites of content in social platforms because as we’ve seen Facebook can change the algorithm and you see organic reach on Facebook go from 100 percent of the people that follow your brand, seeing your content, to now it’s less than 1 percent. So I think the real focus is really focusing on creating a core owned piece of digital property or content marketing program and then looking at social platforms as mechanisms of distribution.”

8. Tailor Content to Where Consumption is Taking Place

Stacy Adams: “A lot of success can be had by taking a video and putting different components of it in different places using a longer-form video on your website where people are there, they’re visiting, they have a little bit of time.”

9. And Whatever You Do, Don’t Use Social Media as a Modern-Day Billboard

Jeff Julian, Co-Founder of Enterprise Marketer: “I still go back to, ‘What is at home? What are your customers seeing when they get to your homepage? What kind of platforms are you immersing into the experience of mobile devices on your website?’ Start there, and then look at the social networks as ways to amplify and be a part of the conversation, not just the broadcast message where we all walk outside and throw our billboard up there. Instead, say, ‘Okay, how can we have a platform that’s integrated?’ That’s easy for us to reuse and use in our platform, and it’s seamless, and gives the customers an amazing experience.”

DIGITAL RIGHTS MANAGEMENT (DRM) IN DYNAMIC DELIVERY

bsp-admin-1 on March 12, 2017

Dynamic Delivery brings many benefits to Brightcove, including greater device reach, distributed ingestion and delivery, reduced storage costs, and greater CDN flexibility and security. This post specifically addresses how Dynamic Delivery simplifies the challenges faced around delivering DRM protected content across a range of platforms that necessitate unique combinations of streaming and DRM formats.

Introduction

We all want video to just work and play back everywhere. For non-premium content, this is relatively straightforward. But as soon as you add more advanced requirements like DRM, closed captioning, subtitles, and multiple audio tracks for different languages and audio descriptions, video delivery across different platforms becomes really complex.

The landscape of end-points (web browsers, smartphones, tablets, connected TVs, and streaming boxes) is ever-changing. This makes video delivery hard because for an optimal playback experience, the endpoints frequently require different combinations of video codecs, packaging formats, and DRM systems. There is no standard combination of settings that will work on all devices, and since many of these systems are competing with each other, we don’t see one coming any time soon. For example, an HLS stream protected with FairPlay DRM for an Apple TV will not playback on an Android device.

Until now, packaging video to support a wide range of endpoints has meant creating versions of the same content for each endpoint, or using a multi-DRM solution. Creating different versions for each endpoint means that the processing and storage requirements are ever growing, and they start to increase exponentially if you add different captions and languages.

Multi-DRM solutions have their own challenges and do not work well in situations where a mobile web or device native streaming solution is needed. When new media formats are introduced, or format specifications change, these packages need to be updated or recreated.

That’s where Dynamic Delivery comes in. Instead of creating multiple versions of the same content for each endpoint, we create the right version dynamically as needed through “just-in-time” packaging. This way, there’s no additional storage required and we can easily support new formats as needed.

Benefits

Dynamic Delivery can help manage the proliferation of delivery formats in the following ways:

  • Reduced storage footprint. This is achieved by storing your renditions once and generating downstream formats on-the-fly for delivery as needed.
  • Device reach and support. Just-in-time packaging generates renditions based on the device requesting the content, automatically selecting the appropriate packaging and DRM formats. This greatly reduces the cost and effort to  accommodate future devices and formats.

Configuration Steps

Though Dynamic Delivery has greatly reduced the complexity of delivering content using DRM, there some steps to get up and running.

First, you’ll need to ask your Brightcove account manager about enabling DRM on your account. If you plan to deliver content to iOS devices (including Apple TV), you will need to obtain a production ready FairPlay Deployment Package from Apple. The package will include the following 4 key pieces of information, which you will need to provide to Brightcove Customer Support:

  • CSR (Certificate Signing Request). A small file with a .csr extension
  • ASK (Application Secret Key). A 128-bit plaintext hex key that Apple provides
  • Certificate. Typically a file with a .der or .cer extension.
  • Key (Standard Private Key). Stored in a file with a .pem extension.

Even if you’re testing your Fairplay implementation on iOS devices in a Test or QA environment, you will need a production certificate from Apple to ensure successful ingest and playback.

Once your account is set up for DRM, ingest your source file using Dynamic Ingest and specify a Dynamic Delivery-enabled ingest profile. For example, if your ingest profile included 360@600kbps, 720p@1200kbps and 720p@2000kbps renditions, a single set of 3 fragmented MP4 renditions will be stored. Dynamic Delivery will automatically package these renditions for DRM-enabled endpoints that support the following formats:

  • DASH-CENC with Google Widevine Modular or Microsoft PlayReady
  • Smooth with Microsoft PlayReady
  • HLS with Apple FairPlay

The diagram below illustrates the concept of the single storage format and just-in-time packaging:

Diagram illustrating the single storage format and just-in-time packaging used with DRM

Playback testing is required on popular desktop browsers (in most cases natively without browser plugins such as Silverlight & Flash) and any iOS or Android Apps where you need to deliver protected content. If you are using the Brightcove Player and SDKs, make sure you configure your DRM settings.

Once your account is enabled for DRM, all of your titles will be delivered using DRM protection by default. If you need to make exceptions by delivering some titles in your DRM enabled account without DRM, this can be done by either of the following:

  • Set the “drm_disabled” flag to true using Video Cloud CMS API during or after ingest
  • In Video Cloud Studio, use the DRM toggle on a title to turn off DRM.

This toggle is only available on accounts enabled for DRM.

We support a variety of policy settings to meet requirements set forth by your content providers. If you have custom settings for license policy restrictions on how your content should be played, speak to your Account Manager for more details.

5 EASY WAYS TO JUMPSTART YOUR VIDEO MARKETING

bsp-admin-1 on March 10, 2017

Where to begin? This seems to be the top question marketers have about video. The best advice I have is, “begin where you are.” Think of video as one of the mightiest tools in your marketing toolbox, and start using it with your existing strategies. For example, if you already have a great nurture campaign in place, add video to one or more of your emails. Or if you’re targeting prospects through Facebook advertising, switch out your text-based ad for a video rich equivalent. When getting started, assess what content could be more effective if delivered or enhanced with video, and make the switch.

1. Video Content Management is Key

Back End Organization – For Your Sanity

First things first, you need to get organized. Not only will launching a marketing campaign with video feel less daunting, but you’ll set the proper foundation for continued success, particularly as your use of video continues to grow. With Cisco stating that over 80% of internet traffic will be video by 2019, it’s safe to say your video libraries will be growing. Whether you have just two videos now or you’ve inherited a collection, assume exponential growth once you’re up and running.

  • Find and discover videos. Assess what video assets already exist. Talk to your web team, and with teams within marketing, sales, customer success, and HR. Search your company name and “video,” and see what comes up. It’s often surprising what content exists in disparate parts of the web. Could you repurpose this pre-existing content? If so, do it.

  • Get tagging. And don’t do it in a silo, marry your video taxonomy to your company’s existing taxonomy. Using a common language for tagging and taxonomy ensures your video content is easily found internally for use, and that it’s referenced consistently in campaigns and programs.

  • File wisely. I could write an entire post on choosing the right online video platform (OVP) for your needs, but for purposes of this topic, I’ll just say you’ll want to organize your content so you can find it once you have 10x, 20x, 100x your current video library size. I ran video strategy at one enterprise company and video marketing at another, both with sizable video libraries, and I found a platform with folders that allowed my team to organize the growing libraries was the trick to sanity. And no, Google Drive isn’t going to cut it.

Front End Organization

So you’ve organized things all nice and neat for yourself. Excellent! Now do the same for your viewers. There’s no point spending resources and budget on content if no one can find it. So make your videos not only findable, but put them in context for the viewer. This can take many forms.

  • Curate playlists. If you have a specific collection of videos or a specific sequence of video content, playlists work well. One of our travel customers, Overseas Adventure Travel, has done this well. In addition to an overview video on the Vietnam destination, the playlist player includes videos on the trip itinerary, exploration, and introductions to the guides – giving a detailed overview of the both the trip and the experience for the traveler. All the information a potential traveler could want is at their fingertips.

Curated Playlist

  • Create smart playlists. Smart playlists are a great option for evergreen or long-termed webpages where you want to continue to up-level content about a specific topic. In building a video hub or central resource, you can set a playlist to pull in all content for a specific tag or tags (see what I mean about tagging being essential?) For example, if your company has a B2C solutions page, you can set the playlist to pull in videos tagged with both “B2C” and “product solutions.” After easily creating your first iteration, new content will always be added dynamically to this playlist, ensuring the page doesn’t become stale and  your team doesn’t have to constantly monitor or update the content.

  • Immerse the viewer in video galleries. In our Video Marketing Academy, Joe Pulizzi of Content Marketing Institute gave us this insight when speaking about video and content marketing: “if we’re going to make an impact we need to do what media companies have been doing year after year, decade after decade, and that’s creating consistent valuable content experiences…tell the story over a long period of time and build an audience.” If you are inspired to follow that advice, you will be creating an expansive series of videos for your audiences. These can all live in hubs or video galleries that allow for an immersive brand experience, streaming episodic online content. Make sure these live on your website, match the look and feel of your brand, and are searchable. Additionally, if you’d like to use video galleries to work with your existing campaigns, consider where and how you’ll add CTAs. While CTAs for each individual video are a great idea, a video collection may require a holistic CTA. Thus you’ll also want to consider a page-level CTA, flanking your content, to reflect the next step of a longer story your videos have told.

Detroit Symphony Orchestra video gallery

For example, Detroit Symphony Orchestra uses their gallery of videos as part of a subscription push, asking the viewer to donate to receive access to symphony performances online. They created this program after lack of funding caused them to close early in the season a few years back. Funds from this subscription have helped the organization keep their doors open ever since.

2. Integrate Video into Email Campaigns

Now that you’re organized, it’s time to get started marrying your video to your existing marketing strategies. Marketers agree, email is still pretty darned effective. Video, however, makes it even MORE effective. Studies show video increases key email metrics including a 19% increase in open rates, 65% increase in CTRs, and 26% reduction in unsubscribes. Here are a few key things you need to know about including video in email campaigns.

  • DO put the word “video” in your email subject line– it increases open rates

  • DON’T embed your video file in the email– most email clients won’t support it

  • DO choose a compelling thumbnail image– pique interest and increase click-throughs.

3. Use Video on Landing Pages

Video landing pages enhance the user experience and provide more efficiency for marketers. If you’ve integrated video into your email campaigns, as we covered above, here are three steps to keep your reader engaged and drive immersion through video.

  • Place your video prominently on the page. If your email promised video, then deliver a video-centric landing page.

  • Use autoplay. In this case, video autoplay lets the viewer know they’re in the right location because the transition from email to landing page is seamless.

  • Avoid clutter and emphasize your CTA. Your objective should be clear, the next step to your visitor, easy. Your copy should be minimal, use your video to convey the broader picture, ensuring viewers stay on the page and don’t click to another location. Whether you’re looking for a trial sign up or purchase, push to your CTA, utilizing forms within the video itself.

When created properly, landing pages optimized with video can garner 4x the lead conversion of unoptimized landing pages.

4. Collect Leads With Video

While there is a never ending battle in the marketing ranks on the “gate or no gate” issue, where would the marketing practice be without lead gen to prove our worth to the c-level? Video gating (placing content behind a lead form) can be an easy win when you start video marketing. An OVP with built-in lead forms that feed into your marketing automation and CRM platforms makes your videos work that much harder for you. If you have video content compelling enough to warrant asking someone to give you their contact information, then that’s the video you’ll want to test gating.

Video gives you the opportunity to choose how much you want to give away before asking for “payment”—in this case, contact information. In other words, you can gate at the head of a video, in the middle, or at the end. Middle gates are very effective when you’ve built up a great story that resolves after the gate. An end gate, however, is a great way to judge if you’ve created the content the viewer needed. If someone watches all the way through your video and then gives you their information, you can appropriately elevate them in your lead scoring model.

5. Add Interactivity to Videos

Marketers know what it’s like to speak into a void. We’re all looking to create an effective dialogue with our audiences, and interactive videos are the fastest and most effective way to create this feedback loop. Ensure your video is gathering information while delivering what the viewer is looking to learn by using quizzes, story branching, hot spots, assessments, and calculations. In-video appointment scheduling is another way to put the viewer in control and is a favorite of demand gen and sales teams.

Perhaps you’re just getting started with video, but that’s no reason to leave easy-to-build interactive options on the table! After all, 70% of interactive video users indicate that interactive video engages audiences well or very well. So, what are some easy ways to get started with interactive video? Try refreshing your existing video by adding interactivity.

  • Is it a long video? Add chapterization to help the viewers navigate to the sections that interest them. The data from chapter viewing will also help you plan for topics for future videos.

  • Do you have specific next step for the viewer? Add a CTA to download the next logical piece of content in a customer journey. Interactivity can create bridges between your resources.

  • Is your offer time-sensitive? Consider marrying videos to your events.  Creating a video that promotes your event presence while offering the ability to schedule one-on-one meetings on-site, and/or enter in a contest. All three of these offers will increase booth traffic, and if done properly, drive conversions.

As you tackle this project, find an existing video that you can repurpose to add to your campaigns, integrating it into an email/landing page combination. Or instead of testing channels, test content. Choose an existing video and add one piece of interactivity to it and see how that one move affects your test video’s performance. As I say over and over to people who ask me about video strategy, it’s not about producing more videos or slapping it up on a homepage, it’s about making video work harder for you in your current marketing efforts.

MOBILE SDKS: SERVING VIDEO NATIVELY IN CUSTOM APPS

bsp-admin-1 on February 24, 2017

Brightcove SDKs are built on top of the native player framework. This means you can take advantage of the performance and speed of the native OS and create really compelling video experiences in your apps. Beyond adding video simply and easily for your audiences, our native SDKs enable you to manipulate the player to accomplish the advanced features you require, integrating into tools for security, monetization, and performance analysis.

Fundamental diagram of the Brightcove Player SDK

The SDKs follow established conventions in naming standards, memory management, and design patterns in order to make getting started as simple as possible. Brightcove maintains SDKs for iOS, TvOS, and Android platforms while our mobile team updates the SDKs on the regular basis.

Beyond maintaining these resources, Brightcove has extended our native player frameworks to handle key integrations for digital rights management (DRM) and advertising. For our SDKs, simplicity is key. Each feature released is designed to be integrated with the least lines of code.

How to Add Video to Your App

Depending on the platform you want to develop a mobile video app for, you will need to acquire the necessary prerequisites such as Xcode for iOS/TvOS or Android Studio for Android. Visit the Brightcove Native Player SDKs Resource Center to find instructions broken down by platform, IOS, TvOS, Android.

Brightcove Player SDK for iOS Overview DiagramBrightcove Player SDK for iOS Overview: some of the components in the Native SDK for iOS and how they relate to each other.

In this resource center, you’ll find general overview information for each platform, the location of the SDK, a step-by-step guide to building your first video app, and additional material on plugins for the SDK. But that’s just scratching the surface; there are even sample apps which can be downloaded and used as a playground.

Brightcove Player SDK for Android Overview DiagramBrightcove Player SDK for Android Overview: some of the components in the Native SDK for Android and how they relate to each other.

Working with hundreds of Brightcove customers, we’ve seen it all. Here are some of our top-of-mind tactics for SDK implementation.

Testing and Troubleshooting Strategies

  • If there is an issue with playback, we will use a software proxy like Charles Proxy to look at the network traffic. That way, we can see the request, its parameters, and the response.
  • The Android market is more diverse than the iOS market in terms of devices. Brightcove maintains a device lab, and we have multiple Android devices which represent the most popular devices running different Android OS versions.
  • When we develop/debug an Android app, we make judicious use of logging and events.
  • Interested in using a plugin? Review all documentation, and the notes sprinkled therein. For example, when we first started working with the SDKs, we were trying to get a DRM stream to appear on Android, but it kept failing. After looking the usual suspects, we found the cause: DRM would not work in the emulator. Moral of the story? Had we looked at the doc carefully, we would have saved ourselves a lot of time. Avoid the tendency to skim.
  • Lastly, Brightcove offers and maintains a Developer Forum. Request to join, and then subscribe. As a subscriber to the Brightcove Native Player SDKs forum, you can review current questions, search through the archive, contribute answers, and of course, pose your questions.

PREPARING FOR THE ADVENT OF VIRTUAL REALITY TV

bsp-admin-1 on February 9, 2017

In 2016, the BBC documentary blockbuster Planet Earth II became one of the most talked-about TV programs. In the UK alone, 9.2 million viewers tuned in to the first episode, making it the most-watched natural history program in 15 years and one of the most successful TV shows of the year.

Building on this enormous success, BBC Worldwide has announced a mini-series based on the documentary for 2017.

However, this new series comes with a twist: It will not be available on television or on-demand platforms. Instead, BBC Worldwide is producing the series in virtual reality (VR) format. Across three episodes, viewers will embark on adventures with wild animals from a fully immersive 360-degree perspective. Using Oculus Rift VR glasses or Samsung Gear VR headsets, audiences can experience the natural world as though they are right in the midst of it, rather than passively watching from their living rooms.

The BBC’s shift to VR is significant for every industry, but it is especially noteworthy as the UK’s largest broadcaster leads the charge. This move sets a milestone and establishes VR as the next big trend for broadcasters.

WILL 2017 BE THE YEAR OF VR TV?

Other broadcasters are likely to follow with similar formats, as growing user demand for immersive experiences cannot be ignored. However, VR is still in its developmental phase, and several hurdles need to be addressed before it can become a mass-market format for broadcasters.

  • Monetization: To make VR financially sustainable, broadcasters must first navigate the question of funding. While ad-supported videos pose issues such as intrusive overlays, alternative approaches like sponsorships, product placements, or subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) models offer viable solutions.
  • Quality: The VR experience differs significantly from the linear OTT or VOD formats we are accustomed to. For viewers to embrace VR, the experience must be seamless, with high-resolution visuals and smooth workflows. At this stage, broadcasters will need the expertise of video specialists like Brightcove to deliver premium VR content.

A BRIGHT FUTURE FOR VR

VR will likely grow far faster than the industry currently anticipates, especially as hardware becomes more affordable and accessible to the general public. Broadcasters will need to address these challenges head-on and embrace VR as the future of OTT TV.

The BBC’s VR mini-series will showcase the potential of advanced virtual reality formats, setting a high standard for others to follow. Regardless of how successful the BBC’s VR pilot proves to be, one thing is clear: Virtual reality is more than a fleeting trend. It is a groundbreaking format poised to establish itself as a long-term staple in the entertainment industry.

HOW LOWE’S USED EPISODIC VIDEO TO CAPTURE MILLENNIALS

bsp-admin-1 on January 4, 2017

Lowe’s hit series “The Weekender” is a story of transformation—and not just about each of the weekend DIY projects featured in the ongoing series. “How-To” videos had once been the mainstay of Lowe’s video department: the small video team produced huge volumes of solid “How-To” content, available mostly on YouTube, where the customer rarely returned to the Lowe’s site.

As content evolved, the team identified a gap in their video strategy, and moved beyond “How-Tos” to storytelling content. First came a blog: Lowe’s Creative Ideas. Then Lowe’s teamed with DIY designer Monica Mangin to complete a home office makeover for Season 9 Bachelorette, Desiree Hartsock. Eventually, the team started focusing on showing the content as part of a story and telling the story episodically. However, the rise of the  millennial consumer posed a new challenge for Lowe’s: ad blocking.

Ad blocking is an issue amongst millennials in particular: 2 out of 3 millennials use an ad blocker on a desktop or mobile device and 14% use an ad blocker on both their desktop and mobile device, according to Anatomy Media. How, then, do you reach your audience if they are not seeing ads?

For Lowe’s, the content became the answer, and The Weekender was born. Storytelling and episodic content authentic to the Lowe’s brand helped differentiate them in the marketplace. The concept of a brand producing a TV show was certainly radical in and of itself, but by distributing the show to streaming devices, Lowe’s was able to extend their reach to new audiences, especially millennials.

The Weekender is a show DIYers and millennials want to watch on YouTube or on streaming apps. Because there is no advertising, Lowe’s knows that every download is a Lowe’s targeted person watching the show. Using Brightcove’s template for streaming apps, Lowe’s was able to get to market quickly.

Reaching the “emerging consumer” via targeting, interesting creative, and storytelling content, Lowe’s is using Brightcove to segment its content and target it to different channels. They can curate what they want and where they want it, publishing some content on YouTube and other content on streaming apps. With The Weekender, Lowe’s has reached a new customer type and audience, and has given the company increased street credibility in terms of style to the average DIY homeowner.

How does the Lowe’s team rate the success of The Weekender? The results speak for themselves. Lowe’s launched its streaming app Lowe’s TV in 2016 and just completed the first season of The Weekender, pulling in more than 3 million views for the inaugural season.