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CREATING DELIVERY RULES IN BRIGHTCOVE VIDEO CLOUD

bsp-admin-1 on May 3, 2021

In 2017 Brightcove launched Dynamic Delivery and began generating our manifests and video “just in time” at the point a player requests them, allowing us to repackage content to multiple different formats and support the widest range of devices possible.

Since then, we’ve increasingly been hearing from customers that they want to take advantage of this flexibility themselves and control at a fine-grained level which CDN their content is delivered over, what quality of video renditions should be available and even what order the different quality renditions should be presented in inside the video manifest. This lead to the creation of our Delivery Rules feature, which is now generally available as part of our API.

In this post, we’ll look at how to use this API to solve one of the most common use-cases we see – limiting the maximum quality of video being served to certain devices.

GETTING SET UP

To get started we first need a video to test with, which we’ve ingested as normal via Video Cloud.

Looking under the covers at the HLS manifest that’s being delivered to that player, we can see it contains a number of the following lines, representing rendition manifests of different resolutions – in this case 480×270, 640×360, 960×540 and 1280×720 (below):

#EXT-X-STREAM-INF:PROGRAM-ID=0,BANDWIDTH=2205500,CODECS="mp4a.40.2,avc1.4d001f",RESOLUTION=1280x720,AUDIO="audio-2",CLOSED-CAPTIONS=NONE
https://manifest.prod.boltdns.net/manifest/v1/hls/v4/aes128/5270290572001/aa7059e5-586b-4caa-ae6f-5533f223a569/a557b391-f20e-4727-9185-459411a63029/10s/rendition.m3u8

If 960×540 is the maximum resolution we want to deliver to our hypothetical device, then we should see the 1280×720 rendition disappear once our rule has been applied.

CREATING OUR RULE

Delivery Rules are made up of Conditions (when a rule should be invoked) and Actions (how the rule should affect the content).

Since we know that we want the rule to limit the maximum video rendition quality, let’s go ahead and create the Action first with the following HTTP request:

POST /accounts/{accountID}/actions
  Content-Type: application/json
  Authorization: Bearer {access_token}

and the request body set to:

{
  "properties": {
    "max_video_resolution": "960x540"
  }
}

This will create the new Action and return us something that looks like:

{
  "id": "88b13752-3469-4e46-b4aa-49cd4f1685a6",
  "properties": {
    "max_video_resolution": "960x540"
  }
}

MANUALLY INVOKING ACTIONS

Before we dive into conditionally applying our Action, we can manually invoke it and check it does what we want by adding its ID as a parameter to our Playback API request:

https://edge.api.brightcove.com/playback/v1/accounts/5270290572001/videos/6230434222001?config_id=88b13752-3469-4e46-b4aa-49cd4f1685a6

This will now return us the same HLS manifest as before, but with the 1280×720 rendition removed!

As well as being useful for testing, manually invoking rules in this way is a powerful technique for customers that leverage the Brightcove SDKs to build their own apps, allowing them to invoke different rules per-device, per-app or even per-user, just by passing in different Action IDs.

A common usage we see is for our customers to apply an Action to serve a basic type of content to anonymous users, while anyone who signs up has a manual Action applied to serve them richer (higher-quality video and audio, modern codecs such as HEVC, premium CDN provider) content.

CONDITIONALLY INVOKING ACTIONS

For customers that don’t want or need the granularity of manually invoking Actions, we provide a set of pre-canned Conditions to control under what circumstances the Brightcove manifest generation services should apply rules. These will apply to all requests and so are a great way of targetting certain groups of users, regardless of what type of device they’re viewing your videos on.

The full set of Conditions offered can be found in the API reference here.

For this tutorial, let’s imagine we know that users in the UK have been struggling with buffering high resolutions because of country-wide network capacity issues and so we want to strip out the higher resolution rendition until these are resolved.

PUT /accounts/{accountID}/conditions
  Content-Type: application/json
  Authorization: Bearer {access_token}

This API call takes an array of Conditions but for now we’re just creating one, by including the following body with our request:

[
  {
    "name": "Cut off high-quality renditions for the UK",
    "if": {
      "request_country": [
        "GB"
      ]
    },
    "then": [
      "88b13752-3469-4e46-b4aa-49cd4f1685a6"
    ]
  }
]

Now, if we make our standard Playback API request from within the UK (notice no config_id parameter attached this time) then we’ll see the high-quality rendition stripped out!

WHAT’S NEXT?

Hopefully this has given you a taste of the power and flexibility of Delivery Rules. The full lists of supported Conditions and Actions can be found here and if there are any others that you’d like us to add in the future, then please reach out to Customer Support or your account rep and let us know!

If you’re keen to read more about how our customers are using Delivery Rules then take a look at how Seven West Media Optimises Video Content Delivery With Brightcove’s Delivery Rules.

HOW TVNZ USED BRIGHTCOVE TO BOOST AD VIEWABILITY REPORTING

bsp-admin-1 on May 2, 2021

LAUNCHING OPEN MEASUREMENT SUPPORT AND BOOSTING AD VIEWABILITY REPORTING

Verification is vital for brands to establish the true return on investment from advertising campaigns. Traditionally, ad viewability is tracked using technology limited to desktop environments, offering limited access to measurement data on other endpoints.

As the media landscape rapidly changes, advertisers are increasingly looking for solutions to measure viewability and validity, specifically where ads are being placed and who is viewing them.

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TVNZ, New Zealand’s state-owned, commercially funded broadcaster, is all about sharing the moments that matter – whether it’s breaking news, following adventures, sharing stories, or putting smiles on faces. Each day, TVNZ reaches more than 2 million New Zealanders through channels TVNZ 1, 2, DUKE and online platform, TVNZ OnDemand. Leading news site 1news.co.nz and socially-driven online news brand Re: connect Kiwis to the important issues throughout the day, however they choose to engage.

Supported by Brightcove’s SSAI technology, TVNZ became the first broadcaster certified by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) for Open Measurement support in the APAC region, with the ability to measure viewability and invalid traffic with third-party verification on TVNZ OnDemand mobile apps.

“With our audiences increasingly using mobile devices to view content, we sought to address the need to report on this segment with integrity. Brightcove SSAI makes it easy for us to deliver ad-supported video to all devices – including mobile – without having to build and maintain integrations for every device to report against KPIs,” says Jodi O’Donnell, Commercial Director at TVNZ. “TVNZ OnDemand provides a bot-free, geofenced, brand-safe, and full-screen viewing environment that our users and advertisers trust, thereby with Open Measurement support, we’re able to better verify this.”

Brightcove technology exposes the verification data in the ad response so it can be passed to the new Open Measurement Software Development Kit (SDK). This makes ad metrics more visible and accessible to advertisers, increasing the value of inventory and boosting CPMs. By enabling better report viewability metrics, Brightcove not only simplifies the analysis of ad performance, but boosts the viewing experience for the audiences the ads are intended for.

Brightcove also solves for other challenges many broadcasters face today, such as preventing ad blockers from detecting ads, eliminating buffering, and preserving revenue while boosting audiences’ viewing experience by serving ads as one continuous stream.

As analytics become increasingly important and drive business decisions, broadcasters need to invest in Open Measurement to measure viewability and ensure they are getting the whole picture.

Our work with TVNZ marks a first for Brightcove SSAI, and we look forward to helping other broadcasters streamline their advertising operations.

HOW VIDEO IS KEEPING SPORTS FANS AND TEAMS CONNECTED 24/7

bsp-admin-1 on April 29, 2021

As the pandemic brought a sudden and dramatic change to the sports world last spring, one thing that remained was the loyalty of fans who still craved the action and connection to their favorite teams and players. Video broadened its role in filling that void, uniting teams and fans like never before with experiences that could often rival the plays on the field or in an arena.

In a recent Brandweek Sports Marketing Summit, I talked with Stephanie Paterik, Executive Editor of Adweek, about what we’re seeing at the fascinating intersection of sports and video.

The trends and examples in our conversation coalesced around three themes.

CREATIVITY WITH SHOULDER CONTENT

Leading teams, leagues, broadcasters, and publishers find new and unique ways to tap into the power of video to stay connected with their audiences.

  • The LPGA streamed virtual World Golf Tour (WGT) matches with some of its leading players, engaging fans with a new level of access that included some friendly trash talk.
  • Manchester City, in the English Premier League, offered their “Cityzens” online lessons and training for kids when matches weren’t being played and video diaries of their players helping in the community. They also made their City+ OTT service free for during the pandemic, with archived games available for rewatching.
  • The Golden State Warriors created Dubs Draft Room, delivering a video-heavy second screen experience for fans (and revenue for the club, as it was sponsored by Chase).
  • One Fighting Championship, a mixed martial arts leader in Asia, created and streamed their version of The Apprentice reality show competition featuring athletes, celebrities and corporate sponsors.

DELIVERING UNIQUE FAN EXPERIENCES

While nothing compares to the sights and sounds of a live event, video opens up a whole new world that lets passionate fans experience the game in their own way.

  • Fans may get the opportunity to isolate certain players or moments from a game or leverage interactive layers and scrolling timelines.
  • For fans into stats and metrics, teams can assemble video archives that track players’ careers and records, often scaling content creation with AI-based solutions
  • Some teams or leagues have their own editors assemble thematic clip packages for fans, creating editorial around them with articles, commentary and social engagement. GolfTV’s “2000s Week” and “Power Week” were themes designed to get fans through the initial pause in the action last spring.
  • “Watch with” functionality enables fans using services like BT Sport to co-view games from different locations with their video experiences in sync – sometimes privately amongst friends and sometimes in different public forums featuring special sport celebrity guest participation.

EMBRACING EACH SPORT’S PERSONALITY

What does your sport have that no other sport offers? By focusing on a unique trait or aspect, leaders create ownable, differentiated video experiences that fans will enjoy:

  • The England and Wales Cricket Board developed the interactive video experience “Out, Not Out,” letting online fans play the role of online umpire reviewing and ruling on video clips.
  • Polls, quizzes and virtual chats focused on specific trends, rules or historical moments of a sport engage fans during the season and off-season.
  • For hardcore golf fans, the infinite “shelf space” of the internet lets the PGA Tour stream every shot from every player in certain tournaments. This investment adds up to tens of thousands of individual video moments and greater engagement and monetization opportunities.
  • Relatedly, with golf and tennis tournaments featuring players from multiple countries, rights holders now enable loyal fans to cue-up performances from hometown favorites even when they are not atop the leaderboard or on Centre Court.

A WINNING FUTURE

Even as in-person events slowly resume, the innovation across the sports landscape over the past year has produced video experiences which will persist.

Fans will continue to demand a rich, engaging viewing environment for their favorite team or sport, but while errors or fouls are part of the games they watch, they will not abide the same in terms of skipping, lagging, or poor-quality video.

This is why sports organizations across the globe count on Brightcove to deliver a quality, broadcast-grade viewing experience that is highly scalable, highly redundant and global. For us, the game is never a game.

HOW THE MET OPERA LEVERAGES BRIGHTCOVE VIDEO FOR STREAMING

bsp-admin-1 on April 25, 2021

There’s a special connection between performers and their audience, an almost electric energy that flows between them. An audience’s enthusiasm pushes performers to new heights, which only intensifies the audience’s reaction. So what happens when that connection is broken? Can it be made in other ways?

Answering those questions takes creativity, which, fortunately, performing arts organizations have an abundance of. Take the Metropolitan Opera. For the Met, rising to the challenge of the past year has meant using video to unlock new ways to engage fans, monetize content, and grow its audience, even with its entire performance season cancelled.

“The combination of the arts and technology is pretty powerful. It has completely expanded our audience in such wonderful and exciting ways. It’s changed the game in some sense for us,” says Mia Bongiovanni, Assistant General Manager of Media at the Metropolitan Opera. “What we want more than anything, and I think our audience wants more than anything, is that we return to performing on our stage, hopefully as quickly as we can. But we have the opportunity now to welcome in everyone who has reached out to us in this time and think about creative ways to keep engaged.”

A TREASURE TROVE OF ARCHIVAL CONTENT

The Met Opera has always embraced technology and had already laid the groundwork to reach its audience on mobile, web, and TV before 2020. “When we started ‘Met Opera on Demand,’ that technology was our bridge to the audience. We made sure that we had a platform in place to reach them wherever it was convenient,” says Bongiovanni. “Thankfully we were able to put our rich catalog into play very quickly and start connecting with people. We’re fortunate to have extensive programming going back to when we started broadcasting in the 1970s, our radio broadcasts going back to the 1930s, and our ‘Live in HD’ series.” At the very start of the pandemic, the Met started streaming “encore” performances nightly from its extensive library. As a result, these streams garnered more than 408 million total viewing minutes, and the number of Met Opera on Demand paid subscribers more than doubled.

CREATING NEW CONTENT FROM HOME

The Metropolitan Opera’s “At Home Gala,” proudly streamed by Brightcove, was a virtual event featuring more than 40 artists performing for an audience of more than 750,000 people from 150 countries. “It was one of the greatest projects I’ve ever worked on. And it was an emotional experience,” says Bongiovanni. Making use of whatever technology artists had available at home, new performance content came together with some masterful orchestration. “It was wonderful to see our artists figure out how to bring their creativity to life within the confines of their home, and into people’s homes,” says Bongiovanni. “If we needed more light, they’d grab an old lamp. If we needed to change the camera angle, they’d prop their laptop up on a ladder or an ironing board, whatever. It was very homemade, and therefore very human.” The Gala also featured prerecorded segments showcasing the extraordinary Met Orchestra and Chorus.

REACHING NEW AUDIENCES AND DEMOCRATIZING THE ARTS

With people having more time at home to explore the arts, opera seems to be having a moment. “We have all of these new people out there who are discovering that opera is a wonderful art form. They may never have listened to an opera before or thought they would enjoy it, but they’re discovering it. And for us, of course, it’s the silver lining, and it’s thrilling.” For those who may not have been able to travel to New York to attend the opera, video has also opened up access. “Honestly, it speaks to the power of the art form, the power of the creative community to bring solace and comfort in difficult times,” says Bongiovanni. “It really shows the power of technology to connect on a human level.”

Brightcove is incredibly proud to partner with the Met Opera to continue to connect with and grow its audiences everywhere through the powerful combination of music and video.

BRIGHTCOVE’S COMPREHENSIVE COMMITMENT TO VIDEO SECURITY

bsp-admin-1 on April 21, 2021

Security is a bit like your basic utilities like electricity, heat, and water: you don’t think about them much and maybe even take them for granted until they’re gone. Then you suddenly realize how critically important they are. In fact, piracy alone can have significant financial impacts. In the United States alone, GDP losses due to piracy estimate between $47 and $115 billion.

Security considerations impact everything we do at Brightcove. From product development to video management, our focus is to ensure that our customers are successful. From playback restrictions to data security, customers can uphold brand integrity and see a return on investment.

Whether content is for an internal or external audience, free or monetized, Brightcove keeps content and data secure while still allowing viewers to access it from any device, anywhere in the world. Our policies ensure that internal content remains confidential, external content is effectively monetized, and your brand maintains its integrity.

A COMPREHENSIVE APPROACH TO SECURITY

We make video readily available to anyone who should see it – and inaccessible to anyone who shouldn’t. But our approach to security is much more comprehensive than simply securing a video. At Brightcove, security is built into every step of our operations, from office security protocols and employee compliance certification to product development and content management.

Brightcove’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) video platform has a broad set of functions that help customers scale and manage their video content securely and reliably. Our data is hosted in a multi-tenant environment, but segregation is integrated at the customer level, as this image shows:

Comprehensive Security

For added security, the Brightcove platform also offers the option of storing master videos only in a region selected by a customer. For example, if a customer is tied to us-east-1, the content delivery network (CDN) located on the East coast of the United States, their masters wouldn’t leave us-east-1 – this is critical to ensuring compliance with regions that require data to stay within certain geographic areas.

MAKING MEDIA CONTENT MORE SECURE THAN EVER

Content creators need to be ever-vigilant about securing their content, from ingestion through playback. There are many levels of security that can be implemented such as restricting assets (the content itself), handling viewer access/permissions (implement rules around how audiences are able to view the content), and prevention of content piracy.

We recently introduced a new set of features called Brightcove Playback Restrictions, our most advanced security offer for the online video market, which address content security at every level.

PROXY RESTRICTIONS

These restrictions block playback from a variety of potentially risky IP scenarios:

  • ANONYMOUS: The IP address of the client is not available. This includes services that change location to beat DRM, TOR points, temporary proxies, and other masking services.
  • PUBLIC: Multiple users proxied from a location allowing public internet access.
  • CORPORATE: Generally considered harmless, but location can be a concern. You can set up rules around scenarios where multiple users are proxied through a central location or locations while sharing a single network-apparent IP address. Example: Employees could use the Boston or Tokyo VPN; multiple users would be using that same IP.
  • TRANSPARENT: The IP address of the client is available via HTTP headers, though the value is not necessarily reliable (e.g., it can be spoofed).

MID-STREAM RIGHTS CHECK

After the initial rights check is run at the start of video playback, another validation of the viewer’s credentials is run mid-stream. If the mid-stream check fails, the player will stop video playback. A great example of this is for a paid sporting event: if the team has a limit on stream concurrency and a paid viewer shares their login, a mid-stream check would determine the user no longer meets the conditions of the restrictions (i.e, more than one person has signed in with those credentials) and playback would stop.

STREAM CONCURRENCY

Limiting concurrent streams per user discourages viewers from sharing their credentials with friends who don’t have accounts. With concurrent stream limits, you define the number of video streams that a specific user can watch at any given time.

DEVICE REGISTRATION

Device registration occurs when a DRM license request is made. A unique ID is assigned to each device, and with each license request, the device limit is checked and enforced. An example of this is when a content provider grants a publisher permission to stream their content for a period of time, and their contractual agreement limits the number of devices associated with a single viewer to two. Once that limit is reached, if a user tries to view the content on a third device – say, a connected TV – the playback will be denied. This enables content owners to achieve their monetization objectives and minimize unauthorized access.

COMPLIANCE REQUIREMENTS

Brightcove follows a secure platform development model that includes enforcing encryption standards for all data in transit, employee compliance with documented data storage protocols, and user authentication when using the product.

We need to ensure that our customers and our company are completely protected when compliance requirements change. As part of our security strategy, we engage third-party security research firms to perform an annual vulnerability scan and penetration testing, including:

SARBANES-OXLEY (SOX) COMPLIANCE

Brightcove proactively obtains third-party audits to review controls, policies, and procedures. A review of a company’s internal controls is often the largest component of a SOX compliance audit. Internal controls include all IT assets, such as computers, network hardware, and other electronic equipment, that financial data passes through.

INDUSTRY CERTIFICATIONS

Digital Production Partnership (DPP): The DPP “Committed to Security” program enables broadcast and production suppliers to demonstrate their commitment to achieving security best practices. Privacy Shield: Privacy Shield certification reflects our pledge to our customers that we maintain adequate safeguards and comply with the Privacy Shield principles for transfer of European and Swiss personal data to the United States.

DATA SECURITY

Beyond playback, companies that offer robust analytics should provide equally comprehensive features to secure those data points. With Brightcove Audience Insights, we employ several security policies to protect our customers’ data.

SECURE PROTOCOLS

When retrieving data from a partner system or a customer’s datastore, we use secure protocols like HTTPS or SFTP. Once ingested, customer data is sequestered in an S3 bucket with limited access granted, even to our employees. After the data is harmonized, accessing the API or Brightcove Audience Insights requires a robust username and password that sets a temporary session cookie for each user.

NECESSARY DATA

We only pull data we need. Everything else is left behind in the customer or vendor system. In the event of an accident or malicious act, we cannot lose control of something we do not have.

PSEUDONYMIZATION

With the introduction of the GDPR standard in 2018, the concept of pseudonymization became a global policy for Brightcove. While we normally avoid collecting PII, there are a few use cases that require an email or IP address. Per GDPR, this data is immediately encrypted upon ingest using a one-way hash. The source data is deleted. There is no way back from the hashed result to the source data.

CLOUD STORAGE

Physical access to the data storage device is always a concern. This is where using a cloud-based service like AWS has its advantages. Access to the AWS data centers is strictly guarded and their architecture makes it near impossible to tell which data is on which server or storage array.

DEVELOPMENT AND DEPLOYMENT STANDARDS

Brightcove has established SDLC processes to ensure delivery of quality software services. We use an AGILE-based planning process, version control, automated testing, and automated deployment. Automation ensures not only reliable delivery but also an auditable process based solely on the resources noted in our version control system.

TEAM RESPONSIBILITY

Since we are only as strong as our weakest link, each teammate at Brightcove is reminded that they have a responsibility to speak up if they have a concern. It’s better to delay a release and even miss a deadline if a little extra time allows us to test a potential weakness and ensure our security standards remain strong.

THE RISING IMPORTANCE OF SECURITY FOR ENTERPRISES

When most people think about enhanced security, they usually envision some kind of media-related use case. But today, that’s simply too limited, and many enterprise organizations are seeing the need for enhanced security.

From confidential town hall meetings to big-budget virtual events, security plays a crucial role in safeguarding your brand and ensuring you maximize ROI.

Brand integrity is the lifeblood of an enterprise, and a breach of internal information or communications has a significant impact on a brand’s integrity. In one recent example, an unwelcome guest infiltrated the internal town hall of a well-known fast food brand. The announcements made at the town hall appeared in the next day’s news, causing the organization significant negative publicity and even exposing them to legal impact. The brand is now working with Brightcove to protect their internal communications from unauthorized access through user permissions and link-sharing prevention.

Events represent a major expense for companies, and securing a return on the significant sums invested in them depends on the ability to control who can attend. If you’re charging for admission or for access to premium content, it’s essential that every attendee pay the appropriate amount. No one should be able to share logins or links to content with people who haven’t paid for it. Brightcove security measures will enable you to maximize your ROI for every event.

PEACE OF MIND

In today’s world, it’s critical to be able to connect with everyone who is important to your business, but those connections must be completely secure. And Brightcove’s extensive industry-leading security measures gives you the confidence that they are.

With Brightcove, you can implement rules regarding how audiences are able to view your content and on how many devices. You can set concurrent stream limits and prevent link sharing. If piracy is a concern, you can ensure that viewers can’t copy content and share it with others. You’ll be in control, and you’ll never worry about security again. Not because it’s unimportant, but because you won’t have to.

Want to know more? See our security features page to stay up to date on our latest security efforts and see how Brightcove can help.

THE NEW WAY TO BUY VIRTUAL AND HYBRID EVENT TECHNOLOGY

bsp-admin-1 on April 20, 2021

A few years back a good friend of mine made a comment that stuck with me, something along the lines of “Where there is chaos, there is money to be made.” Granted, we were having fun with the idea of creating the perfect distraction for stealing a piece of artwork from a heavily-guarded museum, but the point is universally applicable. And nowhere was this statement more true than in the virtual event technology space during calendar year 2020.

As we are all painfully aware last year was—for the most part—uncontrolled madness for enterprises when it came to maintaining business continuity. I’m not going to drag everyone through yet another extended 2020 recap, because we all know what happened. But suffice it to say work at home mandates, travel restrictions, and last-minute event virtualizations not only opened up some previously tight budgets, but compressed video technology buying timelines from months into weeks or in some cases even days. And important things were missed, because this is always what happens when humans aren’t given adequate time to collect and process information.

We’ve all heard the virtual event horror stories, and many of you lived them first-hand. Some used a popular video conferencing application and were bombed by Internet trolls. Others brought a ‘workplace’ version of a social media app into their organization and put data privacy at risk. Many tried to run a live event using a popular B2C video app—only to have it completely melt down because the platform was never built to handle anything more than a small family reunion. And the rest cancelled their events altogether, making the decision that running a terribly-executed virtual event was worse than not running one at all.

The point is in 2020 buyers of virtual event technology lined up to pay for all kinds of half-baked, ill-fitting and mostly unproven virtual event solutions, because it was the only option they had. But the good news is this year will be different. As all of these one year contracts organizations signed come up for renewal in 2021, virtual event technology buyers are taking a more measured approach to evaluating needs. And most of them have already found there are more scalable, secure, and reliable solutions out there—some of which are easy to use and come with a ton of valuable features.

For example, did you know that organizations can run new product rollouts and customer events with the same platform that just won two Technology & Engineering Emmy® Awards? Are you aware the platform that delivered the first fully virtual South by Southwest® (SXSW®) Festival can also flawlessly execute your company’s next internal educational conference or external user summit? Brightcove customers knew this, and over the course of 2020 maintained business continuity by running thousands of virtual events on our award-winning video platform.

If you’ve already moved on from your 2020 platform to something you believe is better, take a minute and compare Brightcove to what you’re using now. Alternatively, if you’d like to speak with an expert or talk more about your virtual event use cases, please fill out this form on our website and someone will get back to you shortly.

5 THINGS TO KNOW BEFORE PLANNING A VIRTUAL OR HYBRID EVENT

bsp-admin-1 on April 15, 2021

I recently had the pleasure of participating in an event that was very much a sign of the interesting times we’re living in. Sponsored by CXOSync, moderated by Somi Arian, and featuring Wired Executive Editor Jeremy White in addition to yours truly, it was a virtual discussion of everything that goes into successful virtual and hybrid events.

Now that so many companies have seen for themselves the benefits of virtual events (or adding virtual components to in-person ones), there’s no doubt that virtual and hybrid events are here to stay. Here are a few things to keep in mind if you’re planning one for the year ahead.

1. AUDIENCES ARE EXPONENTIALLY LARGER – BE READY

If you’re used to drawing a thousand or so people to an in-person event, don’t be surprised if a virtual component attracts ten times that number. With virtual, travel time and expenses are no longer a barrier for attendees, so suddenly anyone who wants to attend, can. When you’re choosing a video platform for the virtual elements of your program, be sure to pick one that can handle your maximum likely audience. The last thing you want is for technical problems to ruin first-time attendees’ experience of your event.

2. LIVE OR PRERECORDED? THE ANSWER IS A LITTLE OF BOTH

There’s no one-size-fits-all answer to this question. Live sessions have their own energy and excitement, but they present time zone challenges if you want to attract a global audience. Prerecorded gives you more control, but viewers miss the chance for interaction. A great middle ground is the simu-live format, where a prerecorded session is followed by a live Q&A with the speaker – it feels live (especially if the speaker wears the same clothes she wore when she was recorded!), but it’s much less demanding if the local time is 3:00 AM.

3. KEEP CONTENT SHORT

In person, a presentation of 45 minutes or even an hour is fine – but that’s way too long for a virtual one. The small screen just can’t hold someone’s attention the way a live speaker on a stage can. (Not to mention all the distractions that surround us at home.) Break things up into segments that are 20 to 25 minutes long. If an hour is allotted for a session, consider making it a 25-minute talk followed by a 15-minute panel discussion and 10 minutes of Q&A.

4. FLAWLESS PLAYBACK DOESN’T JUST HAPPEN

In an ideal world, everyone would be watching on the same device and with the same amount of bandwidth. In that case, a standard webinar platform would work just fine. But the real world offers no such predictability. People will be attending your event via any number of devices and under a wide range of bandwidths. And your platform has to be ready for that, or you will have a lot of frustrated attendees. A video player like Brightcove’s has adaptive streaming that will detect each viewer’s bandwidth environment and automatically switch to the best resolution with no buffering delays, which viewers hate. So your audience will have a flawless playback experience that won’t distract them from all the fantastic content at your event.

5. WITH GREAT DATA COMES GREAT INSIGHT

Virtual and in-person are two very different things, with their own strengths and weaknesses. The number one area where in-person can’t touch virtual is in the data-driven insights virtual events give you into what your audience cares about. Data can tell you what your viewers are engaging with in unexpected ways. Did someone rewind a portion of a VOD session and watch it again? That could be a powerful insight into their interests. Combine that information with the sessions they started vs. those they completed, what questions they asked in Q&A sessions, etc., and you can build a much clearer profile of this attendee than you could if they were at your event in person. Badge swipes just don’t tell you that much.

Last year, organizations found themselves scrambling to transition to virtual events, and as you might expect, results were mixed. In 2021, people are ahead of the curve and are planning virtual and hybrid events that maximize their considerable strengths. If you’d like to talk about what one could look like for your organization, I’m always here to help. By the end of this year we will begin seeing repeating hybrid events that are informed by the learnings from the last one, and the results will be amazing, I’m sure.