The international Broadcasting Convention (IBC) finished up last month, attracting a record crowd of over 55,000 attendees to Amsterdam. This renowned event allows attendees from all over the world to learn about developments that are shaping the industry, interact with the latest technology, and experience world-first product demonstrations.
Brightcove was again at IBC in force with team members attending from across the globe. This year we had some exciting news to unveil with the launch of our new player, which will form the basis of all of our player experiences going forward, and also launched Perform, a stand-alone player service that is built around that industry leading player. We were also able to get updated on the state of the market of the dynamic broadcast and digital media industries.
After collectively reflecting on the event, we compiled the team’s perspective on the top three emerging trends coming out of IBC:
Ecosystem Convergence
The inevitable convergence of conventional broadcast and digital video is accelerating, with media companies across the world evaluating how to address the changing nature of content workflows, programming strategy, advertising, organizational models, technical infrastructure, and much much more. While the shift to a digital-centric paradigm has been forecasted for some time, 2014 seems to be the year that the broader industry has really embraced the coming reality. While the transition is underway, there are still a large number of media customers -- across broadcasters, operators, publishers and media conglomerates -- that are just now getting serious about significant digital investments, recognizing the risk of being left behind.
The Need for Simplification
Media executives and their organizations are feeling the pain of complexity as they wrestle with operating, maintaining, supporting, and updating multiple digital video implementations that have been developed disparately over time for consumer experiences across a range of platforms and devices. For providers of premium video, creating a beautiful, seamless experience that replicates or exceeds the expectations consumers have for linear broadcast adds even more complexity. Broadcasters and publishers want and need simplicity in order to be successful in a world where device proliferation, platform fragmentation and audience expectations remain dynamic variables.
Multi-Screen is Now the Norm
Multi-screen and multi-platform are now the messages spoken by all product and service providers -- across both digital and broadcast companies. While it seems that everyone is now speaking the same language, the reality is that the varying requirements from media companies means that the words mean different things to different people. Providing the best content experience to consumer audiences on every screen -- from TVs and desktops to smartphones and tablets, and game consoles and set-top boxes -- while driving profitable revenue growth is of paramount importance to every media organization today. But, for each of them the questions of streaming formats, unified workflows, asset management, optimized advertising, managing content rights, seamless playback, and many other requirements creates a dizzying array of capabilities necessary for multi-screen success.
For Brightcove, the evolution of our products and services over the last two years has been driven by the understanding that our media customers need to deliver beautiful video experiences to audiences on every screen, enabled by technology solutions that are powerful, elegant and flexible. Click here for more information on our services.