The engineering and product teams at Brightcove are busy! Our recent Video Cloud release includes a suite of new and updated features designed to make your life as a video publisher easier and more productive than ever. I’ve highlighted some of the features below, but make sure to visit the product updates section for a full list.
Universal API
Building custom player experiences that work in both Flash and HTML5 traditionally requires implementation of different APIs, entailing a much greater workload for publishers that care about consistent experiences across devices and environments. To combat this complexity, we recently released a suite of HTML5 improvements for Video Cloud, the latest of which is a Universal Player API that enables the use of a single API to build custom video player components that work anywhere, regardless of device, runtime, or browser.
Enabling HTML5 players when Flash is not installed
Video Cloud Smart Players are able to automatically determine if a site visitor has Flash installed and fall back to an HTML5 player to ensure they get a high quality, stylized video experience regardless of their device or operating system. While this feature has been in production for a while for iOS devices, we’ve now extended this HTML5 capability to include any device that does not have Flash installed to ensure your content is always accessible. This is an opt-in feature, so check out the support documentation to learn how to turn it on.
HLS Encryption
Delivering content in HTML5 environments presents a challenging problem: the content is delivered via HTTP and security options available in Flash environments cannot be implemented. To solve this, we've released HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) Encryption. HLS Encryption lets you send encrypted video over HTTP for playback on iOS-based devices—including iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, and Apple TV—and on desktop computers (Mac OS X). HTTP Live Streaming supports multiple alternate streams at different bit rates, and the client software can switch streams intelligently as network bandwidth changes. HTTP Live Streaming also provides for media encryption, allowing publishers to protect their content. HLS Encryption is an add-on, so contact your consultant or Account Manager if interested.
Metadata Assurance also available for Media Sharing
Video Cloud's Metadata Assurance feature helps publishers with quality control by ensuring that content missing required data can be uploaded, edited, and even inserted into playlists, but will remain in an “inactive” state and thus will not display in players on the Web. The feature can also be applied to content that is shared into your Video Cloud account, further guarding against the possibility of publishing errors caused by lack of metadata.
Advanced Search is now on by default
Advanced Search makes it much easier to find specific content or groups of content by enabling customers to search for a collection of video properties and providing access to create powerful queries using complex searches. Look for videos by playable status, creation date, scheduled start and end dates, update date, and more. Read more about Advanced Search and tips for using it here.
Download Rendition URL for UDS accounts
Hard drive crashed and you lost all of your video content? No problem – with the Download Rendition URL feature you can easily retrieve your source files from your Video Cloud account. Previously this required a complex API call, but now we've included it right within the Video Files section of the Video Settings menu. Some limitations apply – for example your account must be set up to use Universal Delivery Service – so learn more here.
Again, there is much more in the latest release, so head over to the Product Updates page to read up on the rest! And be sure to check up on that page often, as we are releasing great features faster than ever before. You can also subscribe to the Product Updates RSS feed to get the latest updates.