As a senior product specialist at Brightcove, I’m very excited to have the privilege of attending this year’s NAB Show , an annual event that brings together industry leaders and innovators from around the world to discuss the latest groundbreaking technology and today’s disruptive trends.

While I’m here, I’ll be creating daily vlogs that will give you a firsthand peek into what it’s like to attend NAB.

Check out my first NAB vlog to see me touching down in Las Vegas, and hear my thoughts on the benefits of vlogging for marketers:

Be sure to follow along the rest of the week for more daily vlogs that will give you a behind-the-scenes look into the NAB live stream, our team’s interviews with industry experts, and more!

To view our Partner blog, click here

As time goes on, more and more regional publishers are seeing the value of incorporating video into their content strategy. Doing so comes with a variety of benefits—such as reaching their audiences in engaging new ways—but also brings new challenges. Read on to hear how Condé Nast Italia and Italiaonline learned to overcome these hurdles to increase video monetization and provide a better viewer experience.

Condé Nast Italia

Italy’s leading media publishing company, Condé Nast Italia , has 10 successful print properties—as well as six digital properties for its most popular brands. The company’s most recent brand acquisition, La Cucina Italiana, is already one of its most successful digital properties, receiving three million unique visitors each month.

When Condé Nast Italia made its first foray into digital publishing, its entire monetization strategy revolved around display advertisements. The team quickly realized the downfall of this approach: It prevented them from earning any additional ad revenue from their video content. And, unfortunately, the company was losing up to half of its annual advertising revenue due to ad blockers.

Marco Viganò, digital chief technology officer of Condé Nast Italia, considered the challenges at hand and sought out a solution that would enable him to mitigate ad blockers, maintain an effective ad monetization strategy, and streamline workflow. He found that solution in server-side ad insertion (SSAI) , a mechanism that dynamically stitches targeted ads into your content—delivering one continuous stream. The three main value propositions of SSAI are ad blocker prevention, increased device reach, and improved user experience. By leveraging Brightcove’s SSAI solution, Condé Nast Italia is on track to reduce its ad inventory loss by a whopping 80 percent.

Italiaonline

Italy’s biggest internet company, Italiaonline , dominates the country’s online publishing scene. Though the company was originally ahead of the curve by making video a cornerstone of its business, the rest of the industry eventually caught on. Soon, Italiaonline needed to do more than simply deliver video content. Viewers started demanding a top-of-the-line experience, while advertisers called for publishers to improve click-through rates, completion rates, and viewability.

By partnering with Brightcove, Italiaonline was able to continue to lead the way with monetization and viewability. With Dynamic Delivery, the publisher was able to implement an effective solution to their video latency challenges. This technology ensures that all viewers see content that is optimized for their viewing device and bandwidth—with minimum delays in playback.

In addition, Italiaonline developed an efficient, streamlined advertising stack solution. Doing so empowered the publisher to optimize their fill rate across both programmatic and direct channels, and increase competition amongst demand sources.

In an effort to improve viewability, Italiaonline also developed a custom plugin to handle floating/anchored video player features and video start/pause when the player is in view and out of view—as well as a smart adapter for managing autoplay features. By introducing these video playlists, Italiaonline was able to boost their user engagement metrics.

For regional publishers, video represents a major opportunity area, but comes with its own unique challenges—from ad blockers to video latency. But, by putting the right solutions and strategies in place, companies like Condé Nast Italia and Italiaonline are overcoming the hurdles that stand in the way of their video success. Get inspired by their stories and learn more about how to provide beautiful, profitable video experiences .

For more ad strategy best practices, check out the recordings of our two recent webinars: Jumpstart Your Video Advertising Strategy and Let’s Talk Fill Rate .

To view our Partner blog, click here

Brightcove PLAY is just over a month away, and we’re announcing new sessions every week. Perhaps the most exciting development is the full day of hands-on workshops on Tuesday, May 14. This year, for the first time ever, PLAY attendees have the chance to really get their hands dirty with video strategy, coding, and even a production boot camp. This is just a preview—there’s a full menu of workshops to choose from. Check out the full PLAY agenda  to see them all.

Tech-a-Thon

Come join us for a full day, hands-on developer workshop. You’ll get the opportunity to solve unique problems working alongside Brightcove’s top engineers — utilizing the latest API and product technologies. This workshop is designed for software developers and technical integrators who are interested in building customizations and integrations that enhance Brightcove’s products and services within their organizations.

If you have interesting technical problems you’d like to solve during this workshop, please submit your ideas to play@brightcove.com. Ready to sign up? Click here to register .

Video Marketing Makeover: Transforming Boring Case Studies and Testimonials into Stories That Inspire Action

In this fast-paced, three-hour long workshop, former television writer, producer and agency executive Andrew Davis will makeover your marketing videos. He’ll show you how to re-work your case studies into actual stories. He’ll show you how reality television producers write, shoot and edit. But most importantly, you’ll learn the secrets to transforming video duds into dynamite.

So, bring one of your worst case studies (even if it’s not video, that’s fine) to this workshop, and you’ll leave with a re-worked story and a shooting script.

Designing the Right OTT Model from A to Z

In this 3-part session, industry experts will share practical advice to help design or evolve your OTT service model, covering topics from content preparation, UX best practices, to understanding your viewers for efficient monetization.

First, we will share consumer data to help inform your OTT model. Next, take a dive deep into the world of UX with an interactive session on best practices in UX design and UX testing techniques. Finally, you’ll get a monetization and measurement master class.

Corporate Video Production Boot Camp: Practical Tips and Techniques from the Trenches

This workshop will be a live demo walk-through of video production techniques and practical tips to help both enthusiastic (and reluctant) corporate video makers get up to speed and achieve greater production value across the board. Anthony Q. Artis will serve up detailed practical tips and advice on equipment, camerawork, interview lighting, audio practices, production strategies and other practical lessons learned from decades of hard-won experience in the corporate video trenches.

We have even more workshops covering script-writing, live streaming, and more. Want to see the full list? Click here to see the full PLAY agenda , including keynotes, panels, and tech talks.

To view our Partner blog, click here

PLAY 2019 is officially underway! For the first time ever, we started off the event with a full day of hands-on workshops. Today’s agenda included a series of targeted sessions—covering everything from establishing your OTT service model to overcoming today’s developer challenges. Here are a few highlights from these thought-provoking workshops.

Developing your OTT service model

During the three-part session, Designing the Right OTT Model From A to Z, industry experts from Brightcove, Cleeng , and Altman Vilandrie & Company shared practical advice on how to design and evolve your OTT service model.

In part one, the team provided data-driven insights into how to offer content that connects with your target audience. Jonathan Hurd and Matthew Rivet of Altman Vilandrie & Company explained how their team analyzes demographics, key OTT behaviors, and programming preferences for each consumer segment. To break it down, they use their detailed survey data and simulators to develop content acquisition strategies, quantifying the impact on consumer adoption.

Next, the team hosted an interactive session on UX best practices, and gave a monetization and measurement model master class—discussing everything from how to maximize revenue based on your platform and service model to how to design a measurement model that won’t leave you with analysis paralysis.

Our first Tech-a-Thon

Today we also hosted our inaugural PLAY Tech-a-Thon , a full-day developer workshop on utilizing the latest API and product technologies. Driven by a customer desire for more technical content, the team put together a hands-on program in which they introduced various Brightcove APIs, provided best practices on how to use these APIs, and offered insights into how to customize the Brightcove Player.

During the Tech-a-Thon, which was sponsored by Fastly , attendees broke into teams of two to three people and chose the specific developer challenges they wanted to work through together—some of which were submitted beforehand by members of the group. Topics ranged from optimizing video upload workflows to customizing Gallery experiences and setting up an MRSS feed for syndication.

Our Brightcove engineers were on hand to answer any specific questions or concerns; and they provided documentation samples, insights from previous labs, and other materials to ensure customers left feeling equipped to tackle their challenges and get the most out of Brightcove’s products and services.

While the Tech-a-Thon had a basic structure in place, the team empowered attendees to work on what interested them, and develop implementation strategies that best suited their specific needs and technology.

Overall, it was a great day of learning and networking—and there’s so much more to come! Stay tuned for more daily recap posts throughout the week.

To view our Partner blog, click here

Each year we look for ways to make our annual PLAY event bigger and better, and this year is no exception. The feedback we received following our 2018 event was loud and clear: You wanted more technical content—particularly for our developer audience.

With that goal in mind, we set out to make this year’s PLAY a must-see destination for any developer or integrator tasked with utilizing and consuming our products and services. We’ve expanded our technical tracks, added more hands-on developer activities, and provided more ways to interact with and meet some of Brightcove’s top engineers.

For the first time ever, we’re hosting a full-day Tech-a-Thon focusing on utilizing the latest API and product technologies—taking place tomorrow from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Sponsored by Fastly , this hands-on developer workshop will give attendees the opportunity to solve problems working alongside members of the Brightcove engineering teams. And you’re in luck: You can still register today or on-site at PLAY.

What will the workshop cover?

Led by 10 Brightcove engineers, the PLAY Tech-a-Thon is designed for software developers and technical integrators who are interested in building customizations and integrations that enhance Brightcove’s products and services within their organizations. In order to provide the most valuable experience, we looked through previous support requests and our most frequently visited documentation pages to figure out exactly what information our customers were seeking. These insights informed how we built our Tech-a-Thon program, which will include a hands-on directed study about specific APIs and how to customize your Brightcove Player experience.

The workshop will be broken down into three main parts:

1. An introduction to various Brightcove APIs, including the CMS and Analytics APIs

2. Tips and tricks on how to make the best use of these APIs

3. Insights into how to customize the Brightcove Player and include it in a web application

During the Tech-a-Thon, we’ll break into teams to tackle specific problems, some of which were submitted by attendees prior to PLAY. While much of the session will be focused on hands-on work, there will also be opportunities to network and technical talks presented by Brightcove and Fastly.

What other PLAY content will be available for developers?

This year’s PLAY agenda also includes a Q&A panel, Ask the Developers: Brightcove Developer Panel Discussion , as well as five other Tech Talks:

• Advances in Video Coding Technologies

• The Brightcove Player Toolbox and A/B Testing

• Monitoring the Internet at Scale and Advanced Playback Authorization

• Inside End User Testing

• Brightcove Native Player SDKs and the New SSAI Plugin

We’ll also be having some members of our engineering team available to connect at the Bright Ideas booth throughout PLAY. Whether you have questions about the Brightcove Player, Advertising, Gallery, or the Studio, we’ll have engineers eager to assist. Our top two requests for advertising and web players are listed below. A full schedule is available at the Bright Ideas booth.

You can stop by during the following time slots to discuss advertising:

• Tuesday

  • 4–6 p.m.

• Wednesday

  • 8–9 a.m.

  • 10–11 a.m.

  • 11 a.m–12 p.m.

• Thursday

  • 8–9 a.m.

  • 12–1 p.m.

We’ll also be available during these time slots to discuss our web player:

• Tuesday

  • 4–6 p.m.

• Wednesday

  • 8–9 a.m.

  • 10–11 a.m.

  • 11 a.m.–12 p.m.

• Thursday

  • 8–9 a.m.

  • 12–1 p.m.

I know that I speak for the entire team involved in the Tech-a-Thon when I say that I’m truly looking forward to talking to customers that use our services. We want to hear about your successes, and build a community of engaged developers who can work together to solve today’s challenges.

Register today , and stay tuned for daily PLAY recap posts this week to learn more about what’s new, what’s next, and what matters in the world of video.

To view our Partner blog, click here

Brightcove PLAY is just around the corner, and we’re literally counting down the days until next Tuesday. The agenda is packed with breakthrough workshops , networking opportunities, and keynotes …and the breakout sessions alone are worth signing up for! Here are the five breakout sessions we’re most pumped about, covering B2B marketing, OTT platform growth, video accessibility, and live streaming.

From Free Trial to Loyal Fan: The Life Cycle of a Subscriber

OTT providers have to provide free trials to get users on board…but how do they convert those users to a paid subscription? A star-studded panel of OTT service providers, analytics mavens, and more are sharing the time-tested strategies that have been proven to work.

Making Video Accessible to Everyone

Sweden’s always ahead of the curve, and the city of Malmo is no exception. Hear how their best-in-class communication strategy connects and informs citizens, including differently-abled viewers, ahead of the European Union’s 2020 accessibility directive. This is panel to attend if you want to see the new wave of public communication in action.

Connecting Across Channels and Devices

In this session, the audience will take a trip around the globe. We’ll hear how Hope Channel International, a non-profit television network with more than 50 international affiliates, has built a suite of modern, user-centered apps across devices. Plus, Republic TV shares how they revolutionized Indian TV coverage during general elections there. This session will be jam-packed with practical advice on growing an OTT platform.

Driving Attendance and Engagement with Live Stream

Live streaming is quickly taking over our screens, but how do media and marketers get the most from their streams? Hear from the brilliant minds at Deloitte, Fox Corp, Seven West Media, and Kaplan—they’ll spill their secrets for live streaming at scale and maximizing the impact of your live stream assets.

Getting the Most Out of Your Video Budget

B2B marketers often have a limited video budget to work with. In this session, the pros at Demandbase and TechSmith share their strategies for taking a single video production and leveraging it across as many campaigns as possible.

The PLAY keynotes will be live streamed, but the only way to access these breakout sessions is to be there in person. And it’s not too late to get tickets! Click here to get started.

To view our Partner blog, click here