Welcome to the Brightcove Developer Center

Welcome to the Brightcove Developer Center! Here you will find important resources that show you how to build applications and integrations with Brightcove’s online video platform. The developer center includes technical articles and whitepapers written by members of Brightcove’s engineering and services teams, a blog with the latest information for developers and forums that are monitored by our product support and development teams. The developer center is the best resource for keeping up to date with the latest best practices and techniques used in building online video solutions with Brightcove.

Welcome to the Brightcove Developer Center

In October 2008, Brightcove released the next generation of the Brightcove online video platform – Brightcove 3. In Brightcove 3 we made several important investments to enable you to build online video experiences including:

  1. Accelerated Workflows: After extensive usability studies with hundreds of publishers, designers, and developers we completely redesigned our user interface to be more task focused. The Brightcove Studio now provides tools that simplify development and styling of custom players, ingestion and management of media assets and allows for integration with leading ad serving platforms, networks, and formats.
  2. Dynamic Delivery: As online video viewership has increased so to have viewers’ expectations about the quality of content delivered over the Internet. With use cases like ‘catch-up’ TV, breaking news stories and product promotions viewers of Internet video now expect online content to be equivalent to what they watch on network TV. Dynamic delivery enables viewers to watch the highest-quality content possible based on the resolution of the client application and the bandwidth available to the viewer.
  3. Simplified Custom Players: In Brightcove 3 we introduced a declarative XML-based player templating framework called BEML (Brightcove Experience Markup Language). BEML provides complete player layout and visual styling control through an XML mark-up syntax. BEML includes a robust visual component library, layout managers and an extensibility framework for integrating customized Action Script components or libraries into your Video players. Using BEML, web developers can create completely customized players without having to write any Adobe Flash or Action Script code.
  4. Contextual Publishing: As part of Brightcove 3 we have enabled new software development kits (SDKs) that allow developers and solution providers the ability to use Brightcove’s publishing, player and advertising capabilities through open web programming mechanisms like REST, Web Services and XML/MRSS. Using these APIs developers can create immersive client experiences that blend media, data and contextual content in applications that increase time spent on-site and viewership.
  5. A Partner Ecosystem: We recently announced the Brightcove Alliance which is a global ecosystem of leading technology and distribution partners who work with Brightcove to enable online video solutions. The Brightcove Alliance includes both technology partners who have integrated with the Brightcove online video platform, as well as solution providers building customer websites and video applications using Brightcove.

Brightcove’s Community

Brightcove 3 was developed over a year-long period with an extensive product beta where customers were able to not only test new features but also deliver production quality applications using Brightcove 3 Beta. It was incredible to watch as customers and solution partners built and deployed compelling and engaging experiences using the Brightcove platform. As developers worked with the beta they recognized key capabilities that were missing or needed modification to be able to deliver a compelling video solution. Some of these new requirements included the ability to interact with additional system meta-data. Others required an ability to ingest and playback specific renditions of content using Dynamic Delivery. Still others asked for the ability to automatically share content across a large group of sub accounts. What we learned from these interactions guided the development of our Media APIs, dynamic delivery features and the Brightcove Studio which ultimately made Brightcove 3 better. The community interaction we had during the Brightcove 3 beta was critical to the development of Brightcove’s product line as well as enabled our customers to be more successful.

Next Generation Experiences Today

For the last four years Brightcove has defined a category, built a technology platform and lead the online video platform market. Applications built with Brightcove 3’s platform are really incredible. Broadcasters are delivering video content transcoded and delivered for specific viewing experiences. Major news organizations have standardized on Brightcove 3 as their video publishing platform. Leading music entertainment companies use Brightcove to deliver and syndicate compelling music video content. Many enterprises use Brightcove for a number of video solutions including employee and partner training, product marketing and community outreach. Much of our success has been because of the custom applications and integrations that the Brightcove developer community created. We want to continue to enable you to build the most innovative video solutions possible.

Welcome to the Community

This new developer center is designed to be a resource for the community to learn more about best practices when building applications with Brightcove's platform. We also want to provide easy ways to interact with our development teams in meaningful ways so they can learn from you. Finally, we want to provide a forum where you can meet and communicate with your peers increasing the community's knowledge.

Please take a look and tell us what you think. We look forward to your participation and seeing the exciting things you do with Brightcove!