The breakout sessions portion of Brightcove’s most recent NYC Publishers’ Breakfast kicked off with the goal of open, honest, self-reflection – where are we successful in our video businesses? Where do we need to be better? It’s a privilege to be able to pull together a talented and intimate group to focus on this important customer segment’s needs, talk product roadmap, and facilitate community. The answers to these questions, aggregated without attribution here, were illuminating.
They aligned, largely, with the topics we had chosen to focus on by having 3 different presentations to cover some of the hottest issues publishers are grappling with today.
Those topics were:
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Video yield management -- addressed by guest speaker, Jason Witt of Operative (as of this week part of Sintec Media, congrats!)
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Video revenue, viewability and user experience in a post-Flash era
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Social Video and Syndication
Here’s some of what I heard from the teams leading organizations like Rodale, Billboard, Upworthy and others in these areas:
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Success: We know now how important data is and we’re getting better at gathering it and managing it.
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Opportunity: We aren’t making use of the data effectively for better user experiences, content targeting or advertising.
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Success: We are happy with the volume of views we are getting when we post video on social channels (Facebook in particular).
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Opportunity: We need to find a way to scale this process to post more video there and do it more efficiently (although monetization remains a concern).
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The assembled pubs in the room had varying degrees of clout with media buyers. Some were sold out with direct sales. Others were struggling with balancing fill rate with user experience and how to optimize their waterfall of SSPs. The latter group wanted to talk to Jason about Operative’s tools in this area and Brightcove’s Andrew Broadstone about HTML5 VPAID and experimenting with player timeout settings.
These are meaty topics but I think our friends at IRIS.TV have some good solutions for the metadata optimization and personalization challenges mentioned in point #1 and we just brought Brightcove Social to market to help with #2. There is a ways to go to get to the scale and profitability that some publishers envision for their video businesses but having the open dialog – and for the pubs, a network of their peers to turn to – is an important part of the process. Thanks to all who joined us.