Let's say a viewer discovers your video content, and they enjoy it so much they share that video with their friends. Those friends then view your content, and share it with their social network as well. Each successive "round" of sharing increases the number of viewers exponentially. This is the nature of viral sharing; by leveraging the power of your viewers’ social networks, you dramatically raise the visibility of your content. Tweaking the hosting options in your Brightcove players lets you take advantage of this increased visibility by ensuring that new viewers are driven to your site rather than a generic link.brightcove.com page.
Why Change the Hosting Options?
By default, the link your viewers share looks something like this:
http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpidYOUR-PUB-ID?bctid=YOUR-VIDEO-ID
This link sends viewers to a blank page hosted by Brightcove, with your player and content embedded on the page. The player below is an example of Brightcove's default settings — click on "get link" and paste that link into a new browser window to see the default behavior.
Ultimately, however, you want to drive this viral traffic to your own site instead of a Brightcove page. Changing the hosting options ensures that, when a viewer shares your video with their social network, his or her friends are directed not just to your video content but to your website as well. This has two positive effects: new viewers can now be engaged by the rest of the content on your site, and the increase in inbound traffic makes ad or sponsorship areas on your site more valuable and attractive.
For example, in this player I added "http://blog.brightcove.com/en/2010/04/feature-highlight-hosting-options" to the hosting options. Check out the get link functionality now:
Customizing the Hosting Options Through the Studio UI
Through the player settings in the Studio, you can specify the URL to display in place of link.brightcove.com when a viewer wants to use the player's viral sharing capabilities. Simply follow these three steps:
- Create your player in the Studio's Publishing module.
- Determine the URL of the web page on which you will embed the player.
- Add that URL in the box below "Host on your URL" in the hosting options area of the player settings.
Customizing the Hosting Options with the linkBaseURL Parameter
Changing the hosting options through the Studio works great when your player is only live on one URL. But what if you have a player that appears on multiple web pages? While you could create a duplicate player for each individual page, you can also change the hosting options when you embed the player by including a linkBaseURL parameter in your player's publishing code, which looks like this:
<param name="linkBaseURL" value="your-URL-here" />
So, for example, the embed code for a player on this page would look like this (I've highlighted the linkBaseURL parameter in red):
<!-- Start of Brightcove Player -->
<div style="display:none">
</div>
<!-- By use of this code snippet, I agree to the Brightcove Publisher T and C found at
https://accounts.brightcove.com/en/terms-and-conditions/. -->
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://admin.brightcove.com/js/BrightcoveExperiences.js"></script>
<object id="myExperience69509571001" class="BrightcoveExperience">
<param name="bgcolor" value="#FFFFFF" />
<param name="width" value="486" />
<param name="height" value="412" />
<param name="playerID" value="YOUR-PLAYER-ID" />
<param name="publisherID" value="YOUR-PUBLISHER-ID"/>
<param name="isVid" value="true" />
<param name="dynamicStreaming" value="true" /
<param name="@videoPlayer" value="YOUR-VIDEO-ID" />
<param name="linkBaseURL"
value="http://blog.brightcove.com/en/2010/04/feature-highlight-hosting-options" />
</object>
<!-- This script tag will cause the Brightcove Players defined above it to be
created as soon as the line is read by the browser. If you wish to have the
player instantiated only after the rest of the HTML is processed and the
page load is complete, remove the line. -->
<script type="text/javascript">brightcove.createExperiences();</script>
<!-- End of Brightcove Player -->