14 improvements to Brightcove: Faster workflows, more control, and deeper insights

Over the past weeks, we’ve shipped 14 improvements across Brightcove Studio, Live, ingest, catalog, Player, Gallery, Analytics, and Beacon. Some introduce new capabilities, while others make existing workflows more flexible and efficient.

From managing content and monitoring live events to building better viewer experiences and getting more useful insights from analytics, these updates are designed to help you work more efficiently and get more from Brightcove.

Here’s what’s new.

More control over live workflows

Live events move fast, and the less you have to manage manually, the better. These updates give you more visibility into your streams, more flexibility in how you distribute them, and less cleanup to handle after an event.

Monitor SCTE-35 markers for SSAI

Get a clearer view of how your ad markers are flowing during a live event. Health Monitoring now shows SCTE-35 markers in both your input and output feeds, making it easier to spot discrepancies and validate your SSAI setup while there’s still time to act.

Send SRT parallel outputs

Need to send the same live stream to multiple destinations? SRTparallel outputs are now available alongside HLS and DASH, with support for both caller and listener modes. This gives you more flexibility when distributing live content to partners, affiliates, and downstream platforms, including over less predictable networks.

Automatically archive live channels

Keep your channel capacity available without having to clean up after every event. You can now set a retention period at the account level, after which completed live channels are automatically archived, freeing up channel slots for what’s next.

Schedule clips and control how they’re processed

Need clips from your late-night or weekend shows ready to go without someone monitoring the clock? Scheduled clipping lets you automatically create clips at the times you choose, directly in the Live module or through the API.

Schedule one-off or recurring clips, choose the processing profile for each, and set their status when they’re created. That means clips can be prepared automatically for their next destination, with less manual work after the live event.

Content management pages now render up to 65% faster

Managing content in Brightcove is now significantly faster. The platform renders up to 65% faster, while overall page load times have decreased by up to 50%. The biggest gains are on the Video Details page, where teams spend time managing and working with individual pieces of content.

That means less time waiting for pages to load and more time spent managing, updating, and working with your content.

More flexibility for ingest and content management

Managing video at scale means working with different formats, metadata, and content structures. These updates give you more control over how content is ingested, organized, and surfaced across Brightcove.

HDR10 color profiles

Bring more control to HDR workflows with support for HDR10 color profiles in Dynamic Ingest. You can now include mastering display metadata, MaxCLL, and MaxFALL values with your mezzanine files, with each asset able to use its own profile.

The profile is carried through to transcoding, helping ensure content is processed according to the HDR requirements of each title.

More powerful custom field search

Describe your content in more detail and create richer viewing experiences. List-type custom fields can now hold multiple values, so a single video can be tagged with multiple genres, contributors, categories, or other attributes.

Use these richer metadata values to improve how content is presented in the frontend and power more relevant recommendations and playlists. You can also use OR and AND logic when searching across multiple values.

Multiple thumbnail variants for one video

Engage different audiences with thumbnails tailored to their language, interests, or viewing context. You can now create multiple thumbnail variants for a single video and serve the most relevant image to each audience, whether that means featuring a different face, framing, or localized text.

All variants stay connected to the same video, so you can create more relevant content experiences without duplicating your video assets.

Better experiences with Player and Gallery

Give viewers more ways to discover content and create experiences that fit the way your audience browses. These updates make it easier to showcase more of your video library and give viewers a better sense of what’s worth watching.

Customize animated thumbnail previews

Give viewers a better preview of what’s behind each thumbnail. You can now choose how long animated thumbnail previews play—from one to ten seconds—so you can find the right balance for your content.

You can also track player events to understand how viewers interact with previews and whether they’re helping drive further content discovery.

Four new Gallery embed templates

Give your video library a look and layout that fits your site. We’ve added four new Gallery embed templates:

• Horizontal Carousel
• Grid
• Playlist
• Hero

Grid and Playlist sections are also now available in the website builder. All four templates work across Website and Embed projects, giving you more flexibility to showcase your content without building the experience from scratch.

More useful insights in Analytics

Analytics are most valuable when they help answer real business questions.

That’s why we’ve added new ways to understand how content performs across markets and how Recommendations influence viewer engagement.

See performance by city

Understand how your content and players perform in different markets with two new reporting dimensions:

• Video + City
• Player + City

See performance at a more granular geographic level to better understand regional audiences, inform programming decisions, and optimize your content or advertising strategy by market.

Understand the impact of Recommendations

Get a clearer picture of how Recommendations influence viewer behavior with three new metrics:

• Probability of recommendation
• Bounce rate
• Lift rate

Lift rate shows recommendation-driven views as a proportion of initial views, helping you understand the additional viewing Recommendations are generating.

These metrics give you the insight to refine your content and placement strategy based on what drives the strongest viewer engagement.

Clearer marketing consent in Beacon

Beacon now captures and stores each viewer’s marketing consent choice, giving you a clear record of how viewers have chosen to engage with your marketing.

If you’re using Beacon to build audience engagement and marketing programs, this makes it easier to manage consent and build campaigns around a clear record of viewer preferences.

More improvements are already underway

We’re continuing to listen to customers and improve Brightcove around the way teams actually work. 

From faster content management to more flexible live workflows and more actionable analytics, these updates are designed to make Brightcove easier and more powerful to use every day.

More updates are already in progress, shaped by customer feedback and the needs of video teams.

Want to see what’s new in Brightcove? Explore the latest product updates →