The Brightcove Product Organization is very happy to report some feature releases that we hope will make our your video workflow easier. In today's release, we have included some tools to make assuring the quality of your meta data simpler, enhanced our Limited Availability Universal Player APIs, and improved our video playback experience. Read about all our new features, as I am just going to give you a preview of a few.
For our Pro and Enterprise clients, we discovered that nearly ALL of you (our clients) were performing QA on the metadata of your videos. We want to help make this process easier, so we are now providing metadata assurance. This feature makes it easier to ensure you have the correct metadata for your videos. Through the Brightcove Video Cloud studio, you can now make certain standard and/or custom fields required for your videos. When one of your users uploads content, the user will be prompted to enter only the required meta data fields (no forgetting to enter meta data after the upload). If he or she does not have the meta data information, the user can still upload, but the files will be INACTIVE. When a user attempts to activate a video that is missing required information, he or she will be provided with a screen that allows him or her to easily enter just the required information. This process will ensure that you have the fields you need to ensure your videos make it to the site, are monetized, or tracked correctly while making it easier for the user to enter the most important data. The QA process is reduced as files missing this information will be inactive and easy to locate. Activating is also simplified as the user is only presented with the required fields when trying to activate a video. You can read more about this exciting new feature.
With the proliferation of devices that only support HTML5, we understand you are having to create multiple end user experiences for Flash vs. HTML5 devices. In an effort to allow you to write code once and use it on multiple platforms, Brightcove has released our Universal Player APIs. These are a series of player APIs that are supported in both the HTML5 and Flash versions of our players. While we still support our existing player APIs, using the new Universal APIs will ensure that the experience you build once will work on both environments — and we all like more bang for our buck! These APIs are in Limited Availability as we nail all the specifics — so contact your Account Manager if you would like participate.
Finally, we are excited about some updates we have made to our playback algorithm to improve the playback of higher renditions on all desktop devices. No changes or updates are necessary on your side. If you use Brightcove Video Cloud Players, you and more importantly your end users will just automatically see the benefits of the updates.
Check out our product updates page to read about all of our updates in this release.