The full link to a Brightcove player can be quite long. Some applications, like Twitter and other social media platforms, can't handle very long URLs. To address this constraint, we've introduced shortened URLs for player links. Shortened URLs are created and delivered when a viewer clicks the 'share' or 'get link' options in the player; the full URL is used for the e-mail sharing option. In the near future, we'll also shorten URLs you get from the Media module's Quick Video Publish feature.
Brightcove URL shortening is a big help for social sharing, but for some users, it will not be a substitute for other URL shortening services, such as bit.ly or tinyURL, which can provide additional benefits like analytics or human-readable URLs. You can use other URL shortening services in combination with Brightcove URL shortening to get the benefits of both.
For more details, read the documentation.