Tech Talk

The Internet has proven an amazing tool for helping people communicate and for disseminating all kinds of information.  Perhaps nowhere has it been more useful than in propagating funny stuff.  At the vangard of producing and distributing and setting the bar for humor is Funny or Die.  Funny or Die made a big splash when they launched in 2007, marking their debut with "The Landlord", the hilarious video wherein Will Ferrell is berated by his 2 year old landlord, Pearl. The Landlord from Will Ferrell In the 6 years since its premier, "The Landlord" has garnered over 70 million views, and the Funny or Die site has grown to 19 million monthly unique viewers, with 62.5 million monthly video views.  By 2012, the technical team realized that they needed to update a their encoding backend to increase scale and efficiency, and rework the site and video player in HTML5 to better support cross-platform web and mobile viewing experiences. They turned to the Zencoder transcoding service and Video.js, the most widely-used open source HTML5 player,which is sponsored by Brightcove.

Hello Node Knockout devs! If you're doing anything with audio or video in your application, Zencoder is here to make things easier.

Today, we're excited to announce that The AOL On Network, the portal that houses all of AOL's video offerings in a central location, has selected Brightcove's Zencoder cloud-based encoding service to drive transcoding for the network's 15 video content channels.

Last week saw the end of a 16 day conference tour in Europe where we attended 3 conferences and a trade show in 4 different countries. The last two conferences we presented at were NordicAPIs, a conference all about APIs in Stockholm, Sweden, and the other was WebExpo, a general web development conference in Prague, Czech Republic.

Just before IBC 2013 we announced an exciting partnership with EVS to power their C-Cast service.  C-Cast allows live event broadcasters to instantly deliver complementary content to viewers on web and mobile devices during live events.  The service is used by major content providers, such as Canal+ in Spain (for La Liga). The technical implementation (some of which is detailed below) takes advantage of years of innovation in broadcast technology from EVS, and the industry-leading speed, scale and reliability that only Brightcove's Zencoder cloud-based transcoding service can provide. But no matter how nifty the technical details, the solution has to solve a real problem or create a new business opportunity.

When it comes to embedding video content on the web, the <video> tag in HTML5 is the bee's knees. It allows for native video playback in all modern browsers (including mobile!), which means a majority of viewers won't need a plugin like Flash. We covered this same topic back in 2010, but a lot has changed since then in terms of both browsers and devices. Although HTML5 and the video element have come a long way since 2010, a lot of the same tough choices for publishers remain. There's still no silver bullet of a codec that all browsers support, and improving mobile devices mean different levels of video support. In this post we'll go over what outputs are best for the web, mobile device support, and touch on bitrate recommendations. Ultimately the best outputs for you depend on your needs, but here's a basic guide for getting started using HTML5 video.

This is an exciting month of international events for Brightcove! We'll be starting things off in Amsterdam before heading to Stockholm and ending in Prague. If you're going to be attending any of the conferences below or happen to be nearby, we'd love to meet you!