Anne Russell is attending her first PLAY. She shares her experiences from Day 1:
Most travelers know Boston for its rich history, famous high education institutions such as Harvard and MIT, the Red Sox, or chow-dah, but Boston is also Brightcove’s headquarters and home to its global annual customer conference PLAY.
Video has most definitely become a must-have content medium as part of today’s savvy marketers’ digital strategy to acquire and retain customers and continues to redefine the media space. This year, PLAY has over 500 attendees from various parts of the world, including Austria, Japan, Taiwan, Canada and Australia. This international event focuses on helping media companies, retailers, broadcasters, agencies and online marketers advance their video journey to successfully convert customers through innovative video technology.
Following an afternoon of seeing the Red Sox battle it out against the Houston Astros at Fenway Park - complete with hot dogs and beer - our customers were treated to an evening of Boston’s finest seafood at the iconic Barking Crab restaurant. What else could they expect on Day 1 of PLAY?
Well to start with, innovation was definitely on the agenda, with Brightcove’s CEO David Mendels keynote structured around 4 key pillars:
- Improving end-user experiences, using HLS across all browsers, accelerating the improvement on time to go live by 40%, introducing 360 video and high dynamic range, and, through Brightcove Gallery, allowing marketers to easily customize and create beautiful sites.
- Reducing complexity in your video workflow, via Brightcove’s next-generation media delivery platform. It is designed to reach viewers where they are, on the device they choose so you can focus entirely on your content and business.
- Business impact: social media managers should be extremely excited about an upcoming feature that helps them take control of their content distribution into YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.
- Platform and ecosystem: customers were shown a preview of Brightcove Live, its latest architecture forming the basis for live streaming across all of Brightcove’s solutions ( Zencoder Live, Video Cloud Live Module and Once Live). Brightcove Live will simplify operations, support secure streams, and deliver new clipping and distribution capabilities.
The day continued with various sessions split between Media and Digital marketing. If you were in the Media stream, you would have been exposed to leading media companies such as MediaWorks from New Zealand and NewsCorp from Australia sharing learnings and best practices on preserving critical revenue streams by providing optimal ad experiences. There were additional sessions on running a successful OTT service, with insight shared by Stan & RLJ Entertainment, and succeeding on Apple TV and Roku.
On the Digital Marketing side, lead strategists from Wiley and Oracle Marketing Cloud shared their insights on how they include video in their marketing lead generation campaigns. We also heard from European customer AO.com and TN Marketing on how they include video in their B2C strategies across multi-channels and different audiences and use analytics for greater ROI.
The afternoon closed with an extremely entertaining keynote, which sucked the audience in, before Brightcove customers, partners, and employees gathered for a reception.
Day 1 might be over, but will be back tomorrow to share all about Day 2 – stay tuned!
Join us at PLAY 2017!