Video Portals 101

What do most highly successful websites have in common? Something that is integral to driving traffic, keeping visitors on site, and improving conversion rates? A video portal.

Video portals offer site visitors a rich experience that can help to boost a plethora of engagement metrics. So, what is a video portal exactly? At Brightcove, we define a video portal as a place on your website where all videos are archived, categorized, and easily accessible for on demand viewing. Implemented alongside a strategy of embedding single videos in articles or product pages, with a video portal you're effectively adding a rich extra layer of content to your site. The is a best practice that Brightcove and our customers have developed over the past few years as Internet audiences expect more video on websites--and also often want to know exactly where to find a comprehensive video library. In our view, video portals complement the video content that should alrealy map contextually to other relevant material on your website.

If you are a business user of Brightcove Video Cloud, we have many player templates that you can select that will act as a video portal. I have included an image of one of my favorite players, the Chromeless Video Player with Tabbed Playlists, below.


To set up this player, you must first upload your videos. Then, create as many playlists and categories of content that will suit your needs for a specific video project. Once this is complete, attach the playlists and categories to your player. Simple!

If you are a developer, you may want to consider using the Brightcove Video Cloud Media API to build a customized experience. This is the standard way to create a dynamic, categorized, searchable video portal. Using the API allows you to pull thumbnails, short descriptions, titles, number of plays, and all of the other metadata around a video. This is great for creating "most popular" sections, "just added" lists, and "related content" categories. An added benefit is that you can match the look and feel of the site even more smoothly, integrating the CSS elements and HTML that you already have in place. Check out the full Media API here for more information.

Diving deeper into the documentation reveals some pretty powerful tools. For instance, you can generate sample code snippets that you can then copy and paste into your application. Additionally, check out the "search videos" function here. This will allow you to create a searchable database of all your videos in your Brightcove Video Cloud account, sorted by metadata.

The sky's the limit when using the Brightcove Video Cloud Media API as your video portal framework. I'd love to hear any feedback! Leave a comment or email me directly at kzapcic@brightcove.com.