Powering media online is our specialty. We focus a lot of effort and brainpower on delivering fast-loading players and on delivering rich and almost endlessly customizable viewer experiences. There's a natural trade-off between these goals, though: broadly speaking, the more features and contents you pack into a player, the bigger its footprint, and that can increase player load time. We've developed sophisticated caching layers and optimizations to minimize player load time, but if you pack content and enable a ton of player features, there will be a cost to pay in player load time. That's just science.
Fortunately, our players are flexible enough to put a lot of control in your hands when it comes to finding a balance between rich features and fast player load. You can read more details about Brightcove's modular player architecture in this recently posted article.
Here are three quick tips to help you make a fast and effective player:
1. Don't load up the player with a ton of content, especially on high-traffic pages on your site where fast-loading players are key. Instead, publish a single video or small playlist of content on these pages to show you have great content and get the viewer hooked fast. Our built-in Related Videos end screen can help viewers find more content to watch once they're done snacking on the samples.
2. Use the viewer engagement data in the Brightcove Analytics module (or in your third-party Analytics integration) to gain insight into how and where your content is being consumed and help guide your decisions on content placement on your site.
3. Disable player features that you don't use. All players are created with advertising off by default but you can double-check this to be sure it was never enabled accidentally. Also, check your player settings in the Publishing module. Do you really want the overlay menu to appear on load? Do you really need the player API enabled? If the player is on a busy page, and is teaser or short form video, are viewers really likely to use full screen? If not, disable it.