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INCORPORATING CUSTOMER VIDEO INTO YOUR MARKETING STRATEGY

bsp-admin-1 on March 22, 2019

Customer stories can be extremely valuable assets when it comes to establishing trust and moving contacts along the sales funnel. Interested in learning more about how and where to incorporate your customer story content? Read on for our tips and best practices.

CASE STUDIES

A great place to start is with case studies. Once you have a customer who’s willing to be featured, conduct an interview with them that focuses on the ways in which your products and services have helped them to reach—or exceed—their goals. Whenever possible, incorporate direct quotes from the customer, as well as specific statistics that prove that your partnership has helped the brand grow and succeed. Doing so will make your case studies increasingly powerful.

VIDEO TESTIMONIALS

By adding a video testimonial into the mix, you can make your case studies even more engaging. In these videos, your customer contact can specify—in their own words—how your products and services have helped them to streamline a particular process, boost sales, or achieve another exciting accomplishment. By allowing your audience to see and hear your customer speak about the value of this partnership, the message will resonate on a more emotional level. To increase your reach, you can even share clips of these video testimonials on your brand’s social channels.

TARGETED EMAILS

Incorporating customer stories into your marketing emails and nurture campaigns is another effective way to leverage this content to move prospects and current customers along the sales funnel. Call out impactful statistics and proof points in the subject line and beginning of the email to capture your audience’s attention—and keep the message fairly short so that you keep them engaged. Be sure to include a call to action that drives readers to your product or service page.

WHITE PAPERS

Are you creating a white paper or guide to gain leads and highlight your team’s subject matter expertise? Consider driving your points home by incorporating relevant customer stories. For instance, our team recently created a guide to sports video, and we added various customer stories that highlighted how our products empower our sports clients to deliver broadcast-like sports streams and a professional OTT experience. This is a great strategy for calling attention to the solutions you offer in your thought leadership content.

EVENTS

If your company hosts an online event, consider inviting your customers to participate in panels or lead breakout sessions. This can be a powerful way to get your success stories out there to a wider audience. And since most—if not all—of your team will be at the event itself, it will be even easier for a prospect who’s intrigued by a customer story to connect with you and learn more.

THE VALUE OF INCORPORATING CUSTOMER STORIES INTO YOUR MARKETING STRATEGY

Sharing these stories benefits both your brand and your customers. At the most basic level, this content sends the message that your company is not not just “tooting its own horn.” Success stories that come from a customer’s words and point of view are increasingly believable and authentic. And, on the customer’s side, telling their stories on a variety of different channels can help to increase their exposure and brand awareness.

In addition, this content can be really powerful when it comes to converting leads. You can even incorporate these customer stories into your ABM campaigns. When a prospect learns the specifics of how you’ve helped a similar company achieve their goals, they will feel more confident that you can do the same for them—helping you to establish trust amongst your target audience.

Overall, it’s clear that customer stories can and should play a meaningful role in your marketing materials. Which story will you share first?

TIE VIDEO TO MARKETING AUTOMATION

bsp-admin-1 on March 20, 2019

According to Wyzowl’s State of Video Marketing in 2019, 91 percent of marketers consider video an important part of their strategy. However, most companies are still manually tracking their video data, rather than integrating it with their MarTech stack. However, automating video and tying it to the rest of your marketing campaigns makes your life easier. Done effectively, it can even take your ROI to the next level.

WHY VIDEO?

Video is more engaging and more effective at converting viewers than most text assets. According to our research with YouGov, 45 percent of adults say that video is more engaging than other content, and 76 percent of them have made a purchase after watching a video. Video is also easier for your audience to consume than long-form copy, and easier for marketers to set up. Think about it: using a video platform like Brightcove, you can easily drop a video thumbnail into an email (which increases your click-through rate by up to 50 percent, according to Campaign Monitor) and create the associated video landing page with one click. Compare that to setting up a landing page with a custom form, and then tracking form submissions.

WHY AUTOMATE VIDEO DATA?

Let’s say you used Brightcove to drop a video thumbnail in your email, which then leads to a landing page where the video can be viewed. Do you have time to manually track engagement statistics on that video, let alone follow up with every lead who watches it? Of course not.

Because videos are so engaging and effective, capturing details about the people who view them is essential. We use our own analytics and tracking tool, Brightcove Audience, to tie the metrics of our videos—SDR outreach videos, product videos, webinars, etc.—into Eloqua, which is then tied to Salesforce. This means we can track view activity without gating every piece of content. It improves our users’ experience and helps drive more leads to sales, which increases our funnel. Not only that, but the increased visibility into engagement metrics helps our creative team learn which types of videos are most effective, so that they can optimize for conversion.

Marketing automation makes it effortless to capitalize on the power of video. When your stack works together seamlessly, your sales team gets leads that they can follow up with—or your leads can enter an automated nurture track (yes, more automation!). Here at Brightcove, we have over thirty different nurture tracks which can be triggered by activity on our website, event attendance, users’ job titles, and more. Automating those nurtures makes our job easier, and by connecting Eloqua to Salesforce, it also makes our sales team’s job easier. They can effortlessly see which content their prospects have already interacted with, and where their interests lie, before starting a conversation with them.

Hopefully by now, I’ve convinced you that video marketing automation is a no brainer. Looking for a tool that will do all the work for you? Check out Brightcove Segment Sync, our video marketing automation solution.

DRIVE REVENUE WITH E-COMMERCE VIDEO

bsp-admin-1 on March 15, 2019

If you want to continually increase your cart value and boost online sales, it’s no longer optional for you to incorporate video into your e-commerce strategy. According to the results from our 2018 Video Marketing Survey, 76% of consumers report purchasing a product or service after viewing a video. As e-commerce video continues to play a major role in today’s customer life cycle, it’s more important than ever that brands understand how to use video assets to drive brand engagement and increase online sales.

Here’s a quick overview of the types of videos that will help you drive purchases—and tips on how to take your campaigns to the next level.

CREATE PRODUCT DEMOS AND HOW-TO VIDEOS

Today’s consumers want to be able to see your products in action before they click “add to cart.” Demos and how-to video content bring online customers closer to an in-person shopping experience, and empower them to make informed purchase decisions. Leverage this type of content to highlight the best, most desirable features and benefits of your products.

LAUNCH VIDEO PORTALS

Once you have published a handful of e-commerce videos, you can increase customer engagement even further by delivering interactive digital experiences through video portals. With Brightcove Gallery, you can launch a branded portal in minutes—leveraging our suite of in-page layouts and easily implemented interactive elements. You can then embed these layouts in your email campaigns, blogs, landing pages, and websites.

DEVELOP INTERACTIVE VIDEOS

Interactive videos can be an extremely powerful tool for driving purchases. By adding calls-to-action and add-to-cart functionality, you can increase cart value and ultimately, convert more viewers into buyers. Companies around the world are seeing amazing results by adding this kind of interactivity into the mix. For example, Endeavour Drinks Group’s shoppable video campaign, Global Christmas Menu, empowered them to drive huge holiday sales. In fact, a whopping 41 percent of viewers used the video’s add-to-cart functionality.

LIVE STREAM EVENTS

Today, an increasing number of e-commerce brands are adding live streaming into their marketing mix. Whether you decide to live stream your fashion show like HUGO BOSS or create live versions of your product demos and how-to videos, live streaming empowers you to create an immersive video experience that will boost engagement. Once you have a few successful live streams under your belt, you can take your content to the next level by integrating interactive elements into your live-streamed events.

ANALYZE VIDEO ANALYTICS

Make sure to track and measure the performance of your e-commerce videos so that you can understand the type of content that is resonating best with your audience—and which assets are worth your investment in production time and money. These analytics will help you uncover purchase behaviors that empower you to make strategic decisions to increase cart values.

SET UP INTEGRATIONS

By integrating your videos with your marketing automation platform (MAP), you can generate and access detailed viewing analytics for individual shoppers. Once you have these metrics, you can score and segment prospects—and send personalized communications. Similarly, by integrating your e-commerce video analytics into your customer relationship management (CRM) system, you can develop a better understanding of what interests your customers and how they’re interacting with your content.

In today’s growing e-commerce marketplace, video is a powerful tool for cutting through the noise and engaging customers on a deep, personal level. By incorporating video into your strategy, you can get viewers closer an in-person shopping experience at home.

AMP UP YOUR EVENT CONTENT STRATEGY

bsp-admin-1 on March 8, 2019

Throughout the year, industry leaders and innovators come together at major events and conferences to share insights and learn more about the future of their space. While it’s always valuable to have some of your team members on the ground to discuss your brand and offerings at these important industry events, a successful, comprehensive marketing strategy involves more than just the right in-person talking points.

In order to establish your brand as a thought leader and maximize your opportunities to connect with prospects, you need to create and distribute the right event content before, during, and after a conference takes place.

BEFORE THE EVENT

When it comes to the biggest and most important events in your industry, you should start publishing relevant content weeks (or months) in advance. By establishing the right strategy here, you can take advantage of the opportunity to increase your site traffic and brand awareness.

BLOGS

There are two main approaches you can take when it comes to pre-conference blogs. One option is to create a post that focuses on the future event itself. This kind of blog can cover what attendees should expect, the themes of the conference, session highlights, and other relevant information. These posts are also the perfect place to call attention to any panels or sessions your team will be involved in.

Another option is to create blog content around the key themes of the upcoming conference. For example, imagine that you work in the e-commerce space and interactivity is going to be a major topic at an upcoming industry event. Consider developing associated interactivity 101 and roundup posts that empower you to define your brand as a leader in this space. Getting in on a trending conversation in this way can give you an organic search engine optimization (SEO) boost.

WEBINARS

Similarly, you could create webinars that focus on the major themes and topic areas that will be discussed. By having one of your internal subject matter experts (SMEs) lead the webinar, you can further highlight your team’s expertise—making prospects even more interested in connecting at the event itself.

ASSETS REQUIRED FOR SCHEDULING MEETINGS

Is your team planning on hosting meetings with customers and prospects while they’re at the event? If so, you should develop a landing page where users can book a specific time slot. And don’t forget to create various marketing assets that will drive your audience to this page.

One particularly engaging content type to use for this purpose is a short promo video. These videos can be shared on social and included in any pre-event emails you send out to prospects and customers. A straightforward, simple formula to use here is to leverage b-roll event footage from previous years to make up the majority of the visuals. You can then incorporate on-screen text or a voiceover to explain that your team would love to connect at the event—and provide all the pertinent information about scheduling a meeting. If you have the necessary interactivity integrations in place, you can even add a call-to-action (CTA) at the end of the video with a link to the landing page where individuals can book a specific time slot.

DURING THE EVENT

Some of the most exciting and impactful event content is published or distributed during a conference. This content serves one of two purposes. The first is to share first-hand insights and exciting reveals with those who could not make it in person. And the second is to provide your marketing and sales team with physical assets that they can distribute.

SOCIAL POSTS

Live tweeting has become a hugely important part of every event content strategy. Once you have a plan in place for which team members will be attending a particular conference, consider who will have the time and social media expertise necessary to be in charge of live tweeting. Make sure to limit this responsibility to one or two individuals—and clearly define who is in charge of posting about each session. In particular, powerful social content can incorporate photos taken during the event itself and inspiring quotes pulled from speakers.

LIVE STREAMS

If you want to take your event content to the next level, consider incorporating a live stream into the mix. Depending on your technical capabilities and integrations, you can stream this content on a hosted site or your social channels. If you have the necessary permissions and access levels, you can potentially stream panels your organization is involved in—as well as unique content, such as in-person interviews your team conducts.

VLOGS

Daily vlogs are another type of valuable video asset you can create during an industry event. These videos can fuel social content and serve to recap what’s happening on the show floor each day. Overall, this content can provide your audience with a first-hand visual peek into what it’s like to be at the conference.

DATASHEETS

If you have a booth or other space where prospects and customers can arrange to meet with your team, you should come prepared with printed assets to distribute. Datasheets that highlight the specific features, advantages, and use cases of your products can be a really valuable tool to drive these in-person conversations and encourage new contacts to follow up with your team at a later time.

PRESS RELEASES

If your team is planning on making any big announcements during an industry event, you should make sure your public relations team has an approved press release that’s ready to go live right away. These announcements may revolve around new product releases or updates, new executive leaders of your company, and other exciting changes.

AFTER THE EVENT

Don’t let the conversation end after a conference is over. There are a variety of different ways you can leverage content to keep the momentum going.

RECAP BLOGS AND VIDEOS

Consider developing blogs and videos that summarize the most exciting announcements, trends, and themes that your audience should be aware of moving forward. This content will be particularly enticing for those who couldn’t make it to the conference, but the assets will also be valuable recaps for those who were there.

In particular, an event summary video can be a powerful and engaging asset to include in any follow-up communications you send out. This may include a post-event thank-you email to new contacts who took the time to meet with your team.

REPURPOSED CONTENT

Some of the content you create prior to or during an event can be repurposed down the line. For instance, if one of your team members gave a presentation, you can incorporate their slide deck and insights into blog content, LinkedIn posts, and more. You can also repurpose any live-streamed content by turning it into video-on-demand (VOD) assets. If you can find a way to make some of these assets evergreen, you can leverage this content for even longer.

WEBINARS

After a major industry event, you should have a solid understanding of some of the biggest trends that will be shaping your space for months to come. Capitalize on these trending topics by creating associated webinars. Is there a new type of technology that’s changing the game? Create 101-style webinars that introduce the basics. Is your target audience facing a new challenge? Develop product webinars that highlight how your offerings can help them overcome this hurdle.

It’s clear that content should play a major role in your overall event marketing strategy. By creating and distributing the right assets before, during, and after a conference, you can establish your brand as a thought leader and maximize your opportunity to connect with prospects.

CREATING BUSINESS VIDEO FOR SOCIAL MEDIA: MISTAKES TO AVOID

bsp-admin-1 on February 27, 2019

In today’s marketing landscape, video plays an increasingly powerful role in brands’ social media strategies. Often considered to be the most engaging form of content, short, captivating videos flood various social channels on a daily basis.

So, how can you deliver top-notch social videos that drive followers to engage with your brand? You can start by avoiding these three common mistakes when creating video content for social media.

1. FORGETTING TO PROVIDE VIDEO CAPTIONS

Over recent years, various social platforms have incorporated auto-mute functionality for video content. This means that in many cases, your followers won’t hear the audio associated with the social videos you upload unless they actively unmute them.

Of course, this poses a variety of challenges for marketers. In order to capture your audience as they scroll through their feed, you need to optimize your social videos for sound-off viewing. One way to do this is by adding captions—allowing your followers to experience the script and get a better sense of what’s happening while the content is muted.

There are a variety of different benefits to keep in mind here. For instance, when you add closed caption files to your videos, the search engine bots that crawl the internet will index and weigh these files in your search results—providing you with a search engine optimization (SEO) boost. And captions make your social videos more accessible for those with hearing impairments.

Thankfully, transcribing and delivering captions can be a seamless process that doesn’t require a heavy lift on your end. By integrating with a company like 3Play Media, you can process closed captions and multilingual subtitles quickly and easily.

2. LINKING TO A VIDEO HOSTED ON ANOTHER SITE

In order to fully reap the benefits of your social videos, you must push your content to the channel’s native player—as opposed to linking to a video hosted on another site. Today’s social channels’ newsfeed algorithms reward a native video experience, which means pushing to the native player will give your content the greatest chance of being viewed by scrolling followers. Social networks also build out more analytics and mobile viewing functionality for this type of content—giving you the tools you need to make your videos even more powerful.

In contrast, posts with external links will take up less visual real estate, and add an extra click between your follower and the video in question.

Recent research has also shown that native social videos lead to increased engagement. According to quintly’s Facebook Video Study, native Facebook videos receive an average of 530 percent more comments than YouTube videos.

3. MISSING OUT ON DATA INSIGHTS

In order to create the kind of powerful social videos that your audience is seeking, you must refer to your video analytics on a regular basis. Doing so will help you understand what is—and isn’t—working, providing you with the insights you need to make strategic decisions.

Once you’ve created and shared a variety of different social videos, evaluate your data to determine which type of video content earned the most views, comments, and shares. By examining your analytics in this way, you can identify patterns that will help you nail down the types of videos that will resonate best with your audience.

While it’s always a good practice to keep testing out new content types and strategies, it’s important to focus your energy on creating more of what has been proven to work. Doing so will help you ensure that the associated video production time is worth the results you gain.

When creating video content for social media, there are a variety of different factors you must keep in mind. By avoiding the three common mistakes outlined above, you can be one step closer to creating powerful social videos that will lead to increased engagement.

3 points to get started with video advertising [Beginner’s Guide]

bsp-admin-1 on February 20, 2019

The video advertising market is growing rapidly today, and there are various new opportunities for advertisers. According to a report by eMarketer, the digital video advertising industry in the US is expected to grow by more than 10% between 2018 and 2021, eventually becoming a market worth more than 2.2 trillion yen. To keep up with the world of digital advertising, we have written some tips and points to keep in mind below.

HOW TO INCORPORATE VIDEO INTO THE CUSTOMER JOURNEY

bsp-admin-1 on January 30, 2019

Leading demand gen marketers recognize that their job doesn’t end once a prospect signs on the dotted line. It’s crucial to the marketer’s and the organization’s success to continue nurturing that customer’s relationship with the brand’s product and/or services.

One engaging way to nurture that relationship is to incorporate informative video content throughout the customer journey. Not sure which types of videos you should be creating for each stage? Check out the following tips.

AWARENESS

During the awareness stage, you want to get your brand name in front of prospects’ eyes as much as possible. While it may be tempting to start diving into all the details about your amazing products and services right away, it can be valuable to take a step back and take this time to establish yourself as an industry leader in your audience’s eyes.

Consider creating how-to videos that answer common questions your target customers may have. For example, a marketing agency may produce a video about how to launch your content marketing strategy. Or a cybersecurity company could release content around how to respond to an attempted phishing attack.

These types of videos highlight your brand’s expertise to viewers, making them more willing to continue down the sales funnel. The extra bonus here is that how-to content can be easily optimized for search, making it even easier for new prospects to find your brand.

CONSIDERATION

Your goal during the consideration stage is to keep prospects engaged and lead them toward taking a specific action. At this point, you’re focused on reaching an audience who is more likely to need your product or identify with your brand.

One type of video that can be particularly powerful during the consideration stage is a product demo. These assets should give a quick overview of what your product is, how it works, and why your audience needs it.

By creating videos that highlight the features that make your product suite unique, you can be one step closer to landing a new sale.

PURCHASE

Of course, the purchase stage is one of the most exciting. You’re so close to officially converting another prospect, and you just need to provide some final affirmation to confirm they sign on the dotted line.

At this stage, you can offer one final wave of encouragement through customer testimonials and case studies. These types of videos should incorporate first-hand stories from your customers about how your product offerings have helped them streamline a specific process or achieve a particular goal.

Testimonials will resonate with your audience on an emotional level and help you establish trust, a crucial part of any customer relationship.

RETENTION

Now that you’ve earned another customer, it’s time to do all you can to keep them on board. Of course, the retention stage involves meeting customer needs and continuing to take your product suite to exciting new levels. But it should also involve cultivating and maintaining your desired brand image.

And part of your brand image comes down to the team you have in place. Customers appreciate the opportunity to see the people behind the brand. They want to know about your core values and how your team abides by them every day—and company culture videos can be a great way to showcase this.

There are a variety of different tones you can set with these types of video assets. If you’re looking to do something a little more fun, you can incorporate footage of team members enjoying office perks, such as a ping pong table or free bagels on Fridays—which shows that your organization appreciates its employees and values work-life balance. Or you can strike an emotional cord and talk about a great community service initiative employees took on.

When customers believe in the values you have set forth and the people that make your brand great, they’ll be more likely to stick around for the long haul.

ADVOCACY

There’s no better win than having your customer turn into an advocate for your brand. Word-of-mouth marketing can be extremely powerful, so the more brand advocates you have the better. These will be the customers who truly believe in your products and brand, and want to tell others about their positive experiences.

The best advocates will want to share content, such as event videos, that highlights why your brand is their top choice. These videos can feature events like your team celebrating an exciting new launch or one of your leaders presenting at a big industry conference.

This type of video content reaffirms that you’re a leader in your industry and gives you a chance to highlight some of your big wins. Be sure to make these assets easily shareable so that your advocates can spread the word on all their social channels.

Of course, we’ve only just scratched the surface here. There are a wide variety of videos demand gen marketers can incorporate into each stage of the customer journey. But one thing remains clear: Engaging, informative video content can help you turn a prospect into a customer and a customer into an advocate.

BRIGHTCOVE PRODUCT UPDATES: 2018 IN REVIEW

bsp-admin-1 on January 22, 2019

2018 was a great year here at Brightcove, in part due to the vast number of products we shipped to the market. Before we get fully engrossed in an exciting new year, we wanted to take a step back and do a quick recap on some of our favorite launches and product updates from the last 12 months.

BRIGHTCOVE VIDEO CLOUD

Make translated or voice-over videos easily with multiple audio tracks

  • Brightcove now supports multiple alternate audio tracks within the player, which is very beneficial for videos that need to support various languages or voice-over work. Visit our multiple audio tracks page for more information.  

Admin auditing: How long has it been?

  • Looking to see when your users last logged into the Studio? Now you can within the admin panel. In addition, you are now able to see which users created and/or updated the video within the Media Module.

Brightcove Video Cloud Media Module

Looking for a video?

  • You are now able to export a list of videos for your account. You can download a list of the entire library or search for videos and download all videos in that search request.

Exporting Video Data in Brightcove

Upload Module overhaul: See your progress

  • Our new Upload Module has been updated and simplified to make development of new features faster in the future. Some of our recent updates are:
    • We introduced an upload progress bar that appears above the fold so you can easily see your video upload status.
    • You can now create a new folder from the Upload Module, instead of having to create it in the Media Module.
    • We introduced a new account-level upload setting to force required fields to be filled in before uploading videos. This helps ensure all your required metadata is filled out by uploaders. This setting is located in the Admin Module upload settings.
    • And finally, we added the ability to set videos to ‘offline enabled.’ This setting will show up in both the Upload Module and Media Module, but only for customers who are enabled for the offline playback feature.

Update your playlist

  • Our latest version of the playlist plugin provides easy options for horizontal layout and a new “up next” countdown. See how to update your playlist.

Play on Player editor

  • The new Player editor makes it easier than ever to modify your video player and truly make it your own. You can select the editing options in the new tabbed structure, and even use a new feature that lets you change the shape and location of your “Play” button. As you make changes, you can see your player settings change in real time. Need help navigating? Check out our guides to learn more!   

SERVER-SIDE AD INSERTION

Get in the advertising mode

  • We’ve added an advertising mode for Video Cloud SSAI. This feature gives you the ability to prevent the user from scrubbing past ads, and empowers you to display feedback on the time and number of ads remaining in an ad break. Read our Video Cloud SSAI overview to find out how.

Defend against the dreaded ad blocker

  • Ad Block Detection and Auto-Failover is now available in Brightcove. When ad failover is turned on, the Brightcove player will automatically request an SSAI stream if it detects an ad blocker present in the browser. This feature allows for seamless execution of client-side IMA- or SSAI-based ads based on the detection of ad blockers — allowing you to recover 10–30 percent of ad revenue lost to ad blockers.

BRIGHTCOVE LIVE

A whole new look and feel

  • Brightcove Live also had an overhaul in 2018. The brand-new Live Module is built upon a whole new platform. The updated interface is easy enough for new Live users to use to get an event set up, but offers a variety of more robust fields for power users.

Extend the reach of your live content: Create clips and push to social

  • Our new Brightcove Live user interface allows you to create on-demand video clips while your live stream is still running. You can store these clips in Brightcove or publish to social channels within the clipping interface.

BRIGHTCOVE SOCIAL

Fight for your Facebook rights manager

  • Do you ever find that the videos you post on Facebook are re-posted on other sites without your consent? Good news: You can now configure rights properties within Brightcove Social if you have Rights Management enabled on Facebook. Check out our documentation for more details around the Facebook Rights Management process and how to configure your Brightcove Social account.

Social video captions: The sound of silence

  • You now have the ability to add closed caption files to your videos on Brightcove Social. With this feature, your viewers can watch your videos with the sound off on social channels. Furthermore, adding captions to your social videos can have a positive impact on your search engine optimization. Start adding captions today!

AUDIENCE

Does your marketing team use UTM Codes?

Increase open rates: Easily embed your videos in your emails

  • Brightcove Marketing Studio has made it easier to start sending videos in your email campaigns with the new “Publish to Email Landing Page” feature. We have seen that videos in your email campaigns increase open and click through rates. Now your prospects will notice, open, and read your emails in even higher numbers.

Going mobile

  • We want to ensure your Gallery video portals continue to have a great mobile experience, so we have been updating our templates for better mobile optimization. Make sure your templates are mobile friendly!

Avoid building separate event pages: Live stream on your website

  • With the new In-Page Experience Live Template, you can embed your live stream into your existing web pages, templates, and CMS. The new template offers similar functionality as the Live template, such as event countdown and pre-, during, and post-event states.

OTT FLOW

OTT Flow had 40+ feature updates in 2018, including In-App Purchasing for iOS, Authenticated VOD Support, the ability to binge watch through your app, and much more.

BRIGHTCOVE PLAYER DELIVERY IMPROVEMENTS

bsp-admin-1 on January 17, 2019

THE PROBLEM

New versions of the Brightcove Player are released all the time with the most up-to-date technologies in order to provide best playback experience. In order to get real-time analytics for new changes to the player, Brightcove runs A/B comparison tests to preview the impact of these changes. This blog post will provide an overview of how our A/B testing process works and how we’ve been making improvements to ensure the player is always delivered as efficiently as possible.

Historically, A/B comparison testing has been achieved by bundling together the A and B versions for each player with automatic updates enabled prior to a full release. From a technical perspective, this was done by concatenating the A and B player source code and adding a small “shim” to decide which player to execute at runtime through a project we call the “player-shim-builder”:

Player Shim Builder A/B Diagram

After careful analysis of metrics reported during the A/B test, the new Brightcove Player version was either made globally available or rolled back for future consideration. While this system achieved its goal, it had a major problem – bundling together two players doubled the size of the payload for end users. Anyone with a slow internet connection or an old mobile phone could notice a small increase in player load times from our A/B testing. In order to facilitate long-term A/B testing of our player, something had to change.

A NEW HOPE

Before I reveal the secret sauce for how we addressed this issue, it’s important to get an understanding of the Lempel-Ziv coding (LZ77) compression algorithm and its role in delivering the Brightcove Player. Virtually all major browsers support it through the gzip Content-Encoding HTTP Header. While a deep dive into the technical details of the algorithm is outside the scope of this blog post, the algorithm compresses data by finding series of repeated characters and using special tokens to refer to these shared bits. Optimal compression ratios are achieved when data with very similar characters are in close proximity.

From a Brightcove Player perspective, this is key—usually only a very small percentage of the overall player code changes between versions. In the case of an A/B test, almost all of the code between the A and B versions is identical. Rather than concatenating the two player codes together, the player-shim-builder can divide each player codebase into small sections, or “stripes,” of the source code, and interweave them into the bundled package. Each stripe from Player A is likely to be very similar to the corresponding stripe from Player B’s source:

Player Shim Builder A/B Stripes Diagram

“Striping” the player for A/B testing has a drastic effect on the size of the player delivered. Using the concatenation method to create a test player results in an index.min.js size of 372 kB, while striping it reduces that size to 212 kB – a 43% reduction in bytes delivered.

However, the striped player code we are delivering is not immediately usable. In order to play video, the player must be de-striped when the page loads and evaluated into executable JavaScript. The following table presents a breakdown of de-striping times for a few major devices and browsers during an initial testing period:

         
Browser Device Player Loads De-Striping Time
(90th Percentile) | Time to Download 160 kB
(90th Percentile)
Safari iOS 82629698 6 ms 311 ms
Chrome Mobile Android 72502892 16 ms 189 ms
Chrome Windows 10 20244826 4 ms 65 ms
Samsung Browser Android 9447000 16 ms 256 ms
Edge Windows 10 6689872 5 ms 63 ms
Safari OSX 6762600 3 ms 106 ms

Even after accounting for de-stripe times, we found player load times to be significantly faster than concatenation across all major browsers and devices. Certain end users of the Brightcove player no longer have noticeable delays during A/B testing. By optimizing our player delivery strategy, we reduced the initialization time for our player in almost all scenarios.

Striping the player for A/B comparison tests allows us to not only run longer tests without the fear of slowing down player delivery, but also to expand our tests outside of our previous testing windows tailored to developers on Eastern Standard Time. Striping the player to enhance A/B testing is one of the many improvements Brightcove has made to push the limits of global player delivery.

FAQ

Why stripe the player at all? Why not select the player at run-time?

The Brightcove player code has a long-standing guarantee for synchronous player instantiation. Given an embed code, any script tags invoked after the player is instantiated are guaranteed to refer to a player object, and selecting the player code from a remote asset does not provide similar invariants.

How did you determine the size of the stripes?

The sliding window of gzip compression by most browsers is 32 kB. In order to maximize the number of repeated characters between stripes without impacting player publishing time, we use a sliding window of 16 kB for code from each A or B player. We tested on a variety of different stripe sizes to ensure the correct length was selected.

How did you compare de-striping time to download speed?

Player delivery download speeds were unavailable for a variety of reasons—instead, we used playback bitrates to estimate the rate at which the player code is downloaded by end users.