VIDEO STRATEGY &HOW TO USING VIDEO CLOULD

VIDEO STATISTICS

In 2012 internet video has grown at a very fast rate and companies investing in the platform got huge ROI based on their strategy towards internet video. Below are some interesting statistics:

• Online video grows at 52% being the fastest growing ad format in 2012

• 52% of consumers say that watching online video makes them confidence in their

online purchase decision

• 9X increase in retail video views

• Consumers willing to invest 60% of time on videos during online purchase process &

are 52% less likely to return product after watching a video

• Online retailer Living Direct found that online videos boosted conversion as well as

increase time on site by 9%

• Mobile video users would reach 54.6 million in 2012

• Smartphone video viewers will reach 51.2 million in 2012

BRIGHTCOVE VIDEO STRATEGY FRAMEWORK

Brightcove video strategy framework helps organizations understand & develop an idea & role of online video strategy in the business and identify measures that can be taken to increase success. The VSF (Video Strategy Framework) address every part of a complete video strategy as:

• MIX

• QUANTITY

• QUALITY

• DISCOVERY

• DISTRIBUTION

• DEVICES

• MONETIZATION

• ANALYTICS

MIX

MIX refers to the blend of on-demand & live video offerings for a publisher or a business on their online properties.

On demand video traffic has seen tremendous growth in recent years, live streaming has also increased rapidly. On demand and live event steaming delivers the highest growth in traffic, engagement & return on investment.

THE CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST OF LATTER-DAY SAINTSTo increase reach and impact, the church added HD live streaming to its video mix. The broadcast of a recent General Conference delivered more than 2 million steams.

AOLBroadcast live “pop-up” concerts by Southwest festival within a video experience in a customized, branded player. Innovative advertising units enabled AOL to monetize the resulting traffic.

US DEPARTMENT OF STATEUses video to communicate the policy positions of the US government on the State Department website as well as via Facebook etc. Able to live stream directly to Facebook help reach new audiences.

QUANTITY

This aspect of video strategy refers to the amount of video you have in your library as increase in quantity is one simple way to build online video success

Insufficient video quantity is one of the most common obstacles to success with online video strategy. Its essential to reach critical mass to attract, engage an audience and keep them coming back. Publishers typically draw video from below:

IN-HOUSE PRODUCTIONVideos produced by in-house videographers and video producers refer to in-house production is kind of a unique productions publishers can come up with.

LICENSED CONTENTGetting content from 3rd party providers would be a quick way to get both large amount of videos in a short time and a wide variety of video than most organizations can produce in-house. How to videos pull a lot of visitors!

PARTNER CONTENTVideos from partner companies doing business with the organization could be very useful to compliment the organization’s in-house content.

USER GENERATED CONTENTUGC videos play a different role than a premium high quality produced videos. It rely heavily on engagement that organization builds with the community and much less control over the production. Due to social hype UGC is becoming an integral part of organizations video strategy.

Sites like 5 Min Media(http://www.5minmedia.com/) & Internet Video Archive(http://www.internetvideoarchive.com/IVA/Home) provide videos both on revenue sharing & subscription based. Brightcove is partnered with 5 Min Media which is one of the most extensive libraries of instructional, knowledge and lifestyle video content on the web.

QUALITY

Comprises of the quality of the video content and the quality of the experience it provides to the viewers.

The quality of the experience the video provides to its viewers is very important to compliment the quality. If the organization’s videos is HD with nice crisp picture quality but if it does not provides a good engaging experience to the visitor it would not have any impact of having them coming back for more.

Quality of delivery should be assured automatically, regardless of the connection speed or screen size. Brightcove does provides the service of optimization of the video based on the device viewing.

The video itself requires a lot more attention the production quality should be in way providing better experience to the visitor. The video should not give user an idea of boredom etc.

THE BOSTON GLOBEBoston globe has won several Emmy awards for original video content that aired via Brightcove Video Cloud on its boston.com property.

STVGetting content from 3rd party providers would be a quick way to get both large amount of videos in a short time and a wide variety of video than most organizations can produce in-house. How to videos pull a lot of visitors!

DISCOVERY

Discovery refers to the ways the audience find your website. This can be on-site search, search engine optimization(SEO) for public sharing & discovery via social sharing.

The primary way video is discovered today is via public search engine. Also search engines give preferences to the pages containing video content, so SEO best practices for video should be followed that help identifying and surfacing the video page in SERPs.

Brightcove is working closely with Google to improve the effectiveness of video search and ease the burden SEO currently poses for publishers. On social front Brightcove already offers many rich tools by letting you easily add and remove email, link & social network share button right in player to boost the social sharing aspect.

THOMAS PINKThis London-base clothing retailer, offers rich video experience on its own site, including in-player calls-to-action that let you click through an buy the clothing featured video.

KMARTUses their original player inside the Facebook fan page. Every time a Facebook user shared the video the retailer gains both visibility and a new opportunity to interact with customers.

DISTRIBUTION

This involves reaching out beyond your own properties to third party sites through syndication and marketing partners.

The most widely used form of distribution takes place via YOUTUBE being the world’s most heavily trafficked video hub. YOUTUBE distribution provides a valuable way of generating first level awareness of the brand.

Its always a platform for the introductory content. By keeping a small clip of the actual video content on YOUTUBE and then referring the publisher’s site for the full video content helps visitors stumbling on your clip reach your actual video content and increasing traffic to your video content in specific & web property in general.

Brightcove Video Cloud makes it easy to leverage the reach to YOUTUBE through the YOUTUBE Sync feature. Only metadata can be used to designate videos that are intended to be shared via YOUTUBE. Connecting the Video Cloud to the YOUTUBE channel will automatically Sync both accounts.

AMERICAN STANDARD BRANDSA leading manufacturer of building products, synchronizes hundreds of videos to its YOUTUBE Brand Channel, a key element of its highly successful online video initiative.

THE HUMANE SOCIETY OF THE UNITED STATESRelies on their YOUTUBE Brand Channel to generate awareness of its different campaigns with new audiences using the Brightcove Video Cloud Sync feature.

DEVICES

The devices being used are in a wide spectrum of Desktops, Smartphones and tablets as well as connected TV platforms.

The profiling of device types makes it important to maximize your audience by delivering content not only on PCs, but also on touch screen Web browsers, mobile apps & connected TV platforms.

On mobile devices, video can be delivered in two ways: mobile web and mobile apps.

For mobile web there is a SMART PLAYER provided by Brightcove capable of detecting the device capability to provide enhanced user experience as per the device.

For mobile apps, the recently introduced Brightcove App Cloud simplifies development and management through an open HTML5 based development model with intelligent cloud services for the cross-platform compilation , automated app distribution, analytics & advertising.

FREEDOM COMMUNICATIONSUsed Video Cloud to launch 23 mobile apps to multiple platforms, as well as 23 iPad apps-all in a matter of months-to increase video views, traffic and revenue.

TVOThe public educational media organzation for Ontario, Canada, uses multimedia resources to support their strategy to get kids ready to learn, helping parents to be their kids first & best teacher.

MONETIZATION

Connects video strategy against business strategy through mechanism such as advertising, calls-to-action and premium content.

There are various options to align video strategy to business strategy:

1. Advertising-supported content. To maximize the value of your ad inventory, make sure you can run ads from a large number of ad networks, as well as ads you sell in-house, and that you can go beyond traditional pre-rolls and overlays to support the advanced ad formats brands are now using to achieve higher viewer engagement.

2. In-player calls-to-action. These can help convert viewers into buyers, donors, or qualified leads - whether for advertisers or your own organization.

3. Premium content. To implement this strategy, you’ll need to be able to handle DRM and authorization for pay-per-view (PPV), subscription video on-demand (VOD), rental, and download to own.

Video Cloud’s extensive partner ecosystem enables publishers to integrate with the top ad servers, video ad servers, ad networks, and rich media technologies, decreasing time to launch and minimizing the need for technical resources.

Video Cloud also supports in-stream video ads and in-player text ads, which combined with the fast-growing partner ecosystem, enables customers to create immersive, cutting-edge advertising experiences that include a blend of ad formats. Video Cloud’s advertising SDK contains the most advanced and in-depth set of advertising APIs in the online video space today.

Additionally, the rapid spread of HTML5 and mobile video consumption has posed new challenges for publishers and advertisers, as they seek to operate across both Flash and HTML5- based platforms without increasing ad operationsComplexity.

ANALYTICS

Provides vital data and insight to help you evaluate and optimize your online video performance.

Analytics helps to answer questions that matter most to the business:

1. What is the impact of the quantity of video in our library on overall site activity?

2. Which content is most effective at engaging users?

3. How does quality of service relate to the time people spend on our site?

4. How are people finding our content—search engines? Social media sites? Directly, via our own site?

5. Which of our syndication partners provide the most incremental viewers for our content and the most value for our

business?

6. How effective is our reach on different devices and platforms?

7. How does viewer activity differ on each?

BRIGHTCOVE DOCUMENTATION

Brightcove has a great documentation providing usage guides and technical documentation in textual content, how to & hands on training videos.

The support documentation is divided into Video Cloud & App Cloud. The complete documentation repository can be found on the link below:

http://support.brightcove.com/en/docs

The Video Cloud documentation starts with a Getting Started Guide http://support.brightcove.com/en/docs/quick-start-video-cloud providing in detailed documentation & how to in a mix of textual and video content. All general tasks required to get working with Video Cloud from Navigation Inside, Uploading Videos, Adding Tags to Assigning Playlist to Player and Generating Publishing Code. Also provides you sample video clips to get you started!

The documentation also provides detailed information both in textual and video content on Encoding best practices, Video Source file Specifications & Recommendations and Setting transcoding options. Follows with in depth documentation on Media Management from Metadata, Playlists, Social Sharing, Distribution and Feeds, Media Sharing & Media API Specifications.

PLAYER TEMPLATES

Standard Player Templates are pre-build video player templates that can be used to publish video content for distribution.

All standard player templates are based on a XML based markup language developed by Brightcove called as BEML. However while using the standard player templates following points should be kept in mind:

• Maximum & minimum size• Aspect ratio• Controls required e.g. player control bar, player chrome, title, short description & publisher logo etc.• Branding requirements

Credits:For more details on how to choose & customize a player please visit: http://support.brightcove.com/en/docs/player-templates. The link provides detail instructions of how a specific player looks like, what kinds of features it has and how it can be used in certain scenario. The important aspect going through player templates is that it will help understand at least the min-max size in terms of dimensions supported by a player template.

PLAYER TEMPLATES – Player Configuration

Player Configuration Parameters provides a way of dynamically altering aspects of player using publishing code generated by Brightcove.

Brightcove recommends using the JavaScript based publishing code as default. As Brightcove smart players can only work with JavaScript based publishing code and not with HTML Embed based and neither with Flash Propriety object code. In the JavaScript publishing code by providing the below parameter makes sure that HTML5 fallback player should be provided to platforms supporting HTML5 video and does not have support for flash or do not have the flash player installed.

<param name="htmlFallback" value="true" />

Credits:For more details on custom parameters please visit: http://support.brightcove.com/en/docs/player-configuration-parameters

CUSTOM PLAYER TEMPLATES - BEML

BEML is a XML typed markup language specifically created to serve a highly customized player based on the organizational need and requirement.

The creation of custom players using BEML is only supported for Video Cloud Pro & Enterprise customers. It allows to have a player with various aspects of look and feel and also functionality customized to the liking of the organization need from Data Binding, Themes, Custom Skins, Player Fonts to Layout Elements & Localization.

Credits:For more details on BEML and creating Custom Players on the links below:

1. http://support.brightcove.com/en/docs/customizing-players-beml2. http://support.brightcove.com/en/docs/developing-player-templates3. http://support.brightcove.com/en/docs/themes-and-styles-player-templates

VIDEO CLOUD API

Brightcove provides a REST-based API to query content and other information in your video cloud account.

Being an API wrapper provides various methods of accessing the content both via client-side in the likes of JavaScript etc. but also on the server-side using PHP, ASP.NET & Python etc.

A token needs to be generated for specific purpose either read or write and can be used as a parameter for the Media API calls. The Media API returns the results in the form of MRSS-formatted XML or JSON. JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight method of data transfer of complex objects as strings.

The URL to use for querying is http://api.brightcove.com

Credits:For more details on Media API & API wrapper provided for a number of popular languages please visit:

1. http://support.brightcove.com/en/docs/getting-started-media-api2. http://support.brightcove.com/en/docs/brightcove-sdks3. http://support.brightcove.com/en/docs/themes-and-styles-player-templates4. http://docs.brightcove.com/en/media/ (Reference)

MOBILE VIDEO DELIVERY

Provides details on how to best optimize the video transcoding for a better experience of video delivery to mobile devices irrespective of connection speed and device capability.

Different mobile devices support different mobile delivery mechanism. Android OS from version 2.2 to version 4.0 support flash video delivery where as from OS version 4.1 and higher Adobe has stated they will not support flash delivery option.

Apple iOS does not support flash video delivery at all.

For maximum mobile delivery the video file should be either H.264 or MP4 both formats support a large spectrum of mobile devices including Blackberry OS.

Credits:For more details on Mobile Video delivery please visit:

1. http://support.brightcove.com/en/docs/category/mobile-video-delivery2. http://support.brightcove.com/en/docs/topic/mobile-video3. http://support.brightcove.com/en/docs/topic/smart-players4. http://support.brightcove.com/en/docs/topic/video-for-android-os5. http://support.brightcove.com/en/docs/topic/video-for-apple-ios

OTHER VIDEO DELIVERY SERVICES

There are certain other platforms providing the some or closer to features provided by Brightcove. Might not as extensible as Brightcove but do provide the ability to upload video, encode it, view it, serve it & share it online with analytics tracking.

1. 23Video: is a Danish startup and one of the newer players in this market. One of its differentiators is price. 23 Video has a single plan: $675 per month for 1TB of bandwidth and $250 a month for each additional TB. Brightcove offers tiered and custom plans. The largest non-custom plan from Brightcove is $499 for 250 GB of bandwidth.http://www.23video.com/

2. Kaltura: is the company behind an open source video platform of the same name. It offers its own hosting service, as well as an on-premise version. In addition to video hosting, Kaltura offers a collaborative video editor. Like Brightcove, it has an HTML5 player. Community Edition: http://www.kaltura.org/Platform: http://corp.kaltura.com/

3. OOYALA: is another well established video platform vendor. It was founded in 2007 by ex-Google employees. Ooyala is focused on consumer facing video, and includes an advertising platform. Like many of the others, it offers an HTML5 player.http://www.ooyala.com/solutions/online-media

4. VIMEO PRO: is another well established video platform vendor. The pro account like Brightcove has features of HTML5 Player, Mobile, Tablet & TV compatability. Player customization, Advanced Stats & Custom Portfolios.http://www.ooyala.com/solutions/online-media