At Brightcove, we’re constantly striving to introduce new features and functionality that drive real value for publishers, helping them realize greater value from their online video investments. Our most recent Video Cloud release continues this trend, with features that promise to help our publishers create even higher quality video experiences and drive viewer engagement.
Re-Transcode Assets in the Media Module
We’ve introduced a re-transcoding option that lets publishers send an asset through our transcoding engine after it has been uploaded. Previously, if a publishers tweaking transcoding settings in an effort to boost playback quality, accommodate the increasing number of viewers accessing video cotntent through mobile devices, and/or take advantage of new encoding formats offered by Brightcove would have been required to upload the new asset, delete the old one, and make the necessary changes to playlists and players to have the new video appear in place of the old. With the new re-transcoding feature, all of this can be accomplished with a simple click of a button, and publishers no longer have to re-upload content to pass it through the transcoding engine. Read more about re-transcoding in our support documentation.
Drive Engagement With the Overlay Player API
Additionally, a new overlay player API lets you add any content as a player overlay to further engage viewers. Our existing logo overlay feature is a great option for publishers looking to brand video content. As the logo overlay can be clickable, it also provides an opportunity for distributed content to drive traffic back to a corporate website, further engaging viewers and driving conversions. However, the standard logo overlay feature has a few limitations – the logo size is static and doesn’t change if the player is resized or the viewer goes full screen, and logos do not appear in HTML5 players.
Overlays created through the overlay player API bypass these constraints. Logos will scale dynamically based on the size of the viewing window, ensuring that the logo always occupies a certain percentage of the screen. Additionally, logos created with this method can appear in HTML5 player instances, ensuring publishers can display branded content regardless of viewing environment. Click here to learn more about the overlay player API.
Provide Streaming Quality Details to Viewers via APIs
Finally, we’ve built APIs that allow publishers to obtain the available bandwidth, current bitrate, and current framerate for a video stream in real time and surface this information to viewers either in the player or elsewhere on the page. This enables an increased level of transparency that helps viewers understand why they are viewing streams at a specific quality and can lead to reduced complaints from viewers receiving lower-quality streams as a result of reduced bandwidth environments. Read more about the APIs to access streaming quality details here.
These are just a few examples of our recent Video Cloud innovations. Head on over to the product updates page to read up on all of the details surrounding our latest release, and be sure to subscribe to the product updates RSS feed to make sure you’re informed of new features as soon as we release them.