During the PLAY 2012 Innovation keynote presentation, Brightcove President and COO David Mendels offered attendees a sneak peek at Brightcove’s forthcoming real-time analytics platform that will include an open API.
According to Mendels, the platform is designed with big data technology that’s intended for massive scale. “When I say massive, I mean the ability to process 60 GB of data a day in real time. I’m talking about collecting 20,000 events per second.”
The platform will offer users four key benefits Mendels noted:
- Increased efficiency
- Real-time insights
- Better understanding of content performance
- Availability on any device
Brightcove President and COO David Mendels previews Brightcove's new real-time analytics platform at PLAY 2012.
In a virtual tour of the new features and functionality the platform offers, Mendels demonstrated how users are immediately greeted with high-level view of their account upon logging in. Critical information such as a utilization summary breaking out total stream starts, active title count and bandwidth usage for the month is all readily available. Other key data on the main dashboard include top videos, players, traffic sources, usage platforms and viewing locations.
Brightcove’s next-generation analytics platform will also introduce new metrics designed to give publishers even deeper and more informative insights into the performance of their content. This includes an Engagement Score, a new concept that divides total percentage of minutes viewed by total video views, resulting in an easy-to-understand score that can be used to benchmark engagement across an account. Mendels explained how the Engagement Score can help drive programming decisions such as placement of strong-performing content and adjustments to content isn’t performing as well.
Another new metric is Video Conversion Rate, which is calculated by dividing video views (how many times a video was watched) by video impressions (how many times a player loads video). This gives publishers the ability to evaluate the effectiveness of their player thumbnails and overall player placement.
The platform was built using HTML, meaning users can access a rich analytics UI on any device.
Mendels also highlighted the winning project from Brightcove’s analytics hackathon, in which the Brightcove engineering team was challenged to build their own application using the new API. Created by Adam Mark, Brice Stacey, and Jesse Streb, the Video Cloud Media Monitor app offers an elegant interface through which users can:
- see total video views and impressions over a 12 hour, 24 hour and 7 day period along with the ability to drill down to see traffic for your top five videos within the charts.
- see the actual video file associated with traffic within the context of the reports.
- gather insight into an account’s overall bandwidth usage.
- set push notifications to that alert users if any of their top 10 videos have gone viral.
Brightcove’s real-time analytics platform and open API is scheduled to gradually roll out to customers in the coming months.