Since its founding in 1960, the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) has been committed to delivering its message of hope to 159 nations and territories around the world. More recently, the CBN digital team made the shift from traditional broadcasts to the digital TV space—realizing that they had to adapt to shifting viewer preferences and audience demographics to stay one step ahead. 

With Brightcove Beacon™ , CBN was able to quickly and easily launch premium OTT experiences across devices. Read on for a preview of their story —and more information on Brightcove OTT solutions.

CBN reaches new audiences

When the CBN team decided to enter the OTT space, they quickly realized that they needed to do more than simply build a new web experience. After all, today’s viewers have growing appetites to watch content on an ever-growing list of devices—and it’s more important than ever for content owners to find a way to reach their audiences everywhere. 

Here’s where Brightcove Beacon came in: The CBN team was able to launch a new OTT service through a simple, intuitive workflow built across their existing systems—and publish their content to smart TVs (Android, Samsung Tizen, and Amazon Fire) and connected TVs (Roku and Apple).

“We chose Brightcove because we know our audience viewing preferences will continue to evolve, and with Brightcove Beacon, we can update the user experience across all platforms from one interface and add additional platform reach without having to build from scratch,” said Michael Stonecypher, VP of Digital Media/Broadcast at CBN.

Launch premium OTT experiences across devices

Are you ready to captivate your audience? Learn more about Brightcove Beacon —our new product that empowers you publish apps on multiple devices in record time.

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The pool of OTT viewers is growing, and the market is becoming increasingly crowded. Over the coming months, heavyweights from Disney to Apple are entering the ring, making today’s streaming wars the most competitive yet.

So, how can you capture your market share? In order to build and retain a loyal audience, you have to do more than keep up: You have to stay one step ahead. That’s why we’re launching a new OTT content hub—packed with the insights and information you need to maximize your OTT potential . And we’ll be continuously updating the hub with industry trends and best practices to ensure you’re set for success. Read on for a preview of what you can expect, and download the ebook to learn more.

Understand today’s streaming trends

It’s clear that the “lean-back” experience is back. In fact, the findings from our 2018 Global Consumer Streaming Habits Survey indicated that the majority of video consumers (57%) use a TV to stream content more than once a week. As such, it’s more important than ever that connected TVs and smart TVs are part of your distribution strategy. Make sure you’re ready to reach your audience everywhere.

Interested in more industry stats? Download our infographic for global, data-driven insights into:

• Why consumers are most likely to try a new streaming service

• How streaming consumers identify themselves (browsers vs. decisive vs. indecisive)

• The top reasons consumers abandon a live stream

Maximize your OTT potential

It’s more important than ever that you keep your viewers’ attention by understanding their preferences, providing high-quality content, and offering a frictionless user experience.

Our OTT ebook details the following steps to stay one step ahead of your competition:

1. Define your content strategy.

2. Design a distribution roadmap that empowers you to reach your audience across devices.

3. Launch campaigns to build awareness around your offerings.

4. Choose the monetization strategy that fits your content catalog, audience’s location, and marketing budget. And test which ad experiences resonate best with your viewers.

5. A/B test to confirm your interfaces are easy to navigate.

6. Develop a compelling library of rotating content.

By defining the right OTT strategy for your business—and executing on it to achieve the best results—you can launch and grow a successful service in today’s competitive market. Download the ebook for more tips and best practices.

Deliver captivating OTT experiences

In an age when viewers have increased expectations and growing appetites to watch content on an ever-growing list of devices, it’s more important than ever for you to reach your audience—wherever they are. With Brightcove OTT solutions , you can deliver consistent experiences across mobile, connected TVs, and smart TVs with speed and ease—giving viewers the same look and feel, regardless of their device choice. By launching and scaling quickly, you can capture your market share.

Want more expert insights on how to reach and engage your audience? Check out our One Step Ahead content hub . And be sure to stay tuned for more updates to the page over the coming months! There’s more thought leadership and downloadable assets coming your way.

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The latest technology is ushering a new age of employee productivity and innovation, and it’s more important than ever that you can communicate with your teams effectively. But, this is no easy feat: After all, we live in a world where businesses operate across multiple locations and time zones—leveraging a complex network of employees, partners, and vendors. 

So, how can you connect and communicate in a clear, authentic manner? Video. This preferred communication vehicle empowers you to engage and unify your team, generate revenue, and build customer loyalty. If you take employee engagement and retention seriously, video should play a core role in your HR strategy.

Onboarding

Did you know that up to 20% of employee turnover occurs within the first 45 days of being on the job? It’s clear that creating a premium onboarding experience is crucial to retention—and video empowers you to do so in a personal, but cost-effective manner.

Consider creating the following types of videos to create an engaging onboarding experience:

• Welcome videos: Introduce employees to their new colleagues and share an overview of your company’s mission statement and values.

• IT trainings: These videos can show new employees how to conduct video conference calls, set up their email signature, book meeting rooms, and much more.

• Department overviews: Create videos that give an overview of each business unit and how the teams work together to achieve common goals.

No matter which type of videos you choose to develop, be sure to connect and engage employees at the beginning of their time with your organization.

Education

Of course, it can be extremely difficult to arrange all-company training sessions when your employees work across different time zones and locations. By creating on-demand video trainings, you can empower employees to learn at their own pace and make it easier for them to search for and find the specific trainings they need.

For example, video plays a major role in Wendy’s intranet portal . The fast food chain leverages video communications to provide trainings—and announce updates, news, and other vital corporate information. Wendy’s also live streams footage of general conventions, employee meetings, director meetings, and more. Wendy’s interactive instructional videos have had such a positive impact on employee learning retention that they’ve been able to decrease seat time in training courses.

Engagement

In order to engage and retain your valuable employees, you need to provide a consistent stream of communication. Doing so will increase the likelihood that your message is being delivered and digested effectively. And video—particularly, live-streamed video—provides the perfect channel to do just that. In fact, according to our 2018 Enterprise Video Survey , 94% of enterprise employees who have experienced live-streamed video at work prefer at least one event to be live streamed. And 49% who watch videos in the workplace find internal company meetings to be the most valuable use case for live-streamed video. Consider creating videos for company updates, event recaps, and executive messages.

It’s clear that video can play a vital role in helping to inform, engage, and inspire your employees—ultimately fostering deeper connections. Learn more about how to energize your culture with internal videos .

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We get it: Each piece of marketing content you create takes valuable time, effort, and money to get it just right. So, whenever possible, you should focus on repurposing this content to build larger campaigns—instead of creating “one-off” assets. Here are some tips and tricks on how to get the most out of your marketing materials by repurposing your content into captivating videos, engaging graphics, and more.

Breathe new life into whitepapers and blog posts

These two content types can often inform each other—as you can easily create whitepapers out of blogs posts and vice versa. If, for example, you have a series of blog posts around video marketing, you can incorporate them into a larger asset, such as our Video Marketing Master Class . Just be sure to tie these different pieces together in a cohesive way, and provide additional value through inserting new content. This may include survey data, relevant customer stories, worksheets, or checklists. Similarly, if you’ve created an informative, long-form whitepaper, consider how you can pull out valuable nuggets and build upon them to create standalone blog posts that can increase your reach via social and other channels.

Ready to take this content to the next level? Consider how you can turn your written assets into videos. Take the following steps:

• Dive into your analytics to see which blog posts are performing best—and which gated assets are driving the most leads.

• Refer to the results to create a list of video projects you’d like to launch, and prioritize them based on your company’s current goals and objectives.

• Determine which video format would work best for each initiative (i.e., interviews, talking-head videos, or graphic videos).

Once you’ve taken the steps above, you’ll be ready to kick off each project, which will involve choosing talent, writing scripts, and aligning on a production schedule. Overall, transforming your written content into videos will empower you to reach (and engage) new audiences—and boost your ROI. In fact, according to our 2018 Video Marketing Survey , 76% of consumers report purchasing a service or product after viewing a video.

Get the most out of your industry research

Have you recently conducted industry research? These stats and insights can drive a variety of different assets, including:

Data reports: Dive into the full survey results and what they mean for the industry by calling out key themes. You get bonus points if you can create these reports on quarterly or annual basis—as doing so helps to establish your brand as a thought leader. 

Need a little inspiration? Check out our Global Video Index .

Infographics: Choose one of the overarching stories found in your results and tell that narrative through highlighting a few key data points with engaging graphics. 

Interested in seeing an example? Check out our Video Advertising Trends & Preferences infographic—created in partnership with Watching That.

Whitepapers: If the data corresponds with topics you will be discussing in one of your upcoming long-form assets, incorporate charts and graphics with corresponding stats that further your thought leadership. 

Need a little inspiration? Check out our ecommerce whitepaper, Humanize the Online Experience .

If you really want to take this content to the next level, turn your valuable data into engaging video assets. Doing so will maximize your exposure and boost your ROI. Consider creating:

• Longer videos that give an overview of the results as a whole

• Shorter clips that highlight a particularly important theme or trend (and can be shared on social!)

• Graphic videos that present statistics in a visually engaging way

Turn your videos into (more!) videos

When you kick off a new video project, be sure to think about the big picture. Instead of just planning for the one asset, consider how you can leverage the footage you shoot or graphics you create in other materials down the line. Here are a few examples to inspire you:

• Live streams: Will you be live streaming interviews at an upcoming industry conference? Consider which footage could be leveraged to create video on demand (VOD) assets and plan out your questions accordingly.

• Event footage: Shooting some b-roll of your annual company event? Be sure to collect some footage that isn’t too timely or specific to this year’s theme. That way, you can incorporate some shots into your promo materials for next year’s event.

• Promo videos: Creating a video to announce your latest ebook, whitepaper, or larger campaign? Cut a series of shorter clips that you can incorporate into your social calendar over the coming weeks.

Whether you’re writing a new ebook or launching a new data report, there’s no question that creating compelling, engaging content takes time, effort, and expertise. Don’t waste your valuable assets by creating one-off pieces of collateral. Incorporate video into everything you do to maximize your ROI, boost your exposure, and take your marketing campaigns to the next level.

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Have you ever finished an interview, only to wonder if you even got the soundbite you really needed? It turns out, there’s a pretty fool-proof way to avoid this situation, and it doesn’t involve rolling up to your interview set and crossing your fingers that the subject says exactly what you need them to say. After all, if you want to be the next Terry Gross or Barbara Walters, you’ve got to put in some work.

Here’s our step-by-step process for ensuring that you walk out of your next interview with soundbite gold.

Video interview tips from start to finish

1. Create a story outline

The first step is understanding the type of story that your interview will be part of. Every story has its own narrative and sequence of events. But generally speaking, you have an overall structure that fits into a story archetype. For example, in customer storytelling, the story is often about your customer overcoming challenges with your product or brand as a partner—so you want to explain the challenges and the steps your customer took to overcome them. To make it compelling, you’re looking for conflict: what were the roadblocks in the beginning? What issues came up throughout? That’s where you get to talk about how your brand is a true strategic partner to its customers. 

When your structure is in place, you research every aspect of your story to add depth. Just like a job interview, you absolutely don’t want to show up unprepared—you should already have an idea of what the answers might be, be familiar with any technical concepts, and know the story backwards and forwards so you know how to communicate with your subjects and ask the right follow-up questions. Your subject will open up a lot more if they recognize that you know what you’re talking about.

2. Conduct pre-interviews

The story you mapped out in step one likely has a few characters. You next have to figure out who those characters are, and who lived through each part of the story. Think of this step as casting your video. When you have a list in mind, you want to talk to those people over the phone or video chat. This is a pre-interview—think of it as an audition and a fact-finding mission rolled into one. 

You’ll find out who speaks clearly and who gives one-word answers, learn background details on your story, discover areas where you need to do more research before actual interviews begin, and build rapport with your subjects. Gauge what is going to get them to talk: are they touchy-feely and want to approach things from emotions? Are they tech-focused and want to approach things from the implementation or technical side?

3. Create a list of questions 

Now that you’ve done all the necessary research and filled out your story outline with details from your pre-interviews, you use that outline to create your interview questions. With each milestone in your story, you should know who you’ll be talking to and what you need them to describe. Here’s an example of how I map questions to my story outline using a tool called iThoughts :

The list of questions doesn’t have to be super prescriptive, and you may not stick to it 100 percent. But it should give you an idea of the must-have information that you’ll need. 

4. Conduct your interview

Alright, it’s time for your interview—take a deep breath. You’ll want to be relaxed so that your subject feels at ease. When they arrive, engage them in small talk and be friendly—if you cut straight to business, they may feel rushed and get defensive. Because they’ll be on camera, it’s important that they feel comfortable.

When they get on set, help them get situated, then take your place. Explain what they should expect during the interview, tell them where to look (at you? At the camera?), and remind them it’s okay to restate an answer or ask for clarification. Ask them a couple easy questions, like what they ate for breakfast. This not only helps them get settled, it also gives your crew time to test audio and set focus. 

When you’re ready to get started, keep the tone conversational and give your subject plenty of room to answer. If you take nothing else away from this post, make this your golden rule: wait a few seconds after your subject finishes speaking before you respond. It may feel awkward, but it’s essential—it ensures that you don’t interrupt or speak over them, making the audio unusable, and it also gives them room to add more information. That’s often where I’ve gotten some of the most compelling stories. If you feel tempted to acknowledge or interact while your subject is speaking, stick to silent cues like nodding and smiling.

If you’re not getting an answer that you need, feel free to move on and circle back to it later (just make a note so you don’t forget). Rephrase questions, or fall back on open-ended follow-ups like “Why?” or “How did that make you feel?”

I like to close interviews with forward-looking questions like “What are you excited to do next?” That puts people in a good frame of mind, even if it’s not useful to your final product. You want your subject to leave the interview feeling happy with the result.

5. Send a thank-you email, reinforcing key information

Follow up in a timely manner. Thank your subject for their time and resources, and reinforce the key details they’ll want to know. This can include the next steps in your production process, how the footage will be used, and the agreed-upon approval process.

That does it! Follow these steps and you’ll become your company’s go-to interviewer—not to mention your editor’s hero when it comes time to pull soundbites. Want more tips on video strategy? Check out our round-up of video resources.

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Walking the tightrope of maintaining high viewability while trying to maximize the number of ad impressions is not a new process to the majority of publishers working with video advertising. However, that tightrope just got a bit trickier to navigate—the Media Ratings Council (MRC) has recently released their updated guidelines on what they consider to be a “viewable ad impression.” 

The previous definition of “viewable” was that 50% of the ad needed to be in view for at least 2 seconds. Under the new guidelines, for “combined and deduplicated cross-media video measurement,” the ad has to be 100% in view for 2 seconds or more. The other large change is that this requirement will also be used for Over the Air Programming (OTA), Over the Top Programming (OTT), and connected TV (CTV) platforms in addition to just desktop and mobile. In this blog post, I will outline the potential impact this definition may have, as well as offer some suggestions to ensure you can meet (and exceed) this new challenge. 

Why is the new definition needed?

 It’s important to understand that while this change may seem somewhat unfriendly to publishers, it will also be positively received by brands and advertisers. There is no doubt that tracking viewability on  ad impressions is one of the most effective ways a brand can verify that its message is reaching human eyeballs and also weed out potential cases of fraud, which is still prevalent in digital advertising. To combat this, agencies that represent many of the largest brands target their ad spend on impressions that are verified to be viewable.

In addition, many of the largest ad agencies have already moved beyond the MRC’s previous definition and are using their own criteria for viewability. For example, GroupM’s standard for “viewable” ads has been stricter than the MRC definition since 2014, requiring 100% of the pixels to be in view. This allows agencies like GroupM to provide its customers with additional assurance that their ad dollars are not  spent on fraudulent or underperforming impressions. As such, the buy side will see the MRC’s revised definition as playing “catch up” to expectations that have already shifted. 

Impact on publishers

Publishers may not see this new definition as favorably as agencies. Much of the struggle comes from the methods by which viewability is currently measured: VPAID that executes JavaScript. This method is prone to causing errors on mobile platforms and does not function in an OTT or in-app environment. Furthermore, VPAID is not supported by Server Side Ad Insertion (SSAI), completely nullifying viewability measurement applications of that ad format. All of this means that the traditional method by which viewability has been measured works only on desktop and mobile web, and is not completely reliable. Publishers have been forced to look to direct deals or private marketplaces to fill their OTT inventory while struggling with troublesome VPAID scripts on desktop and mobile.

Of course, VPAID is not the only viewability challenge. Examples can include an interstitial banner ad that blocks a video from sight, a website prompt that takes precedence over the content, errors with autoplay, or poor player implementation, among many others. Viewability has a clear impact on a publisher’s fill rate and CPM so a stricter criteria combined with hiccups in measurement can negatively affect the bottom line. 

Best practices

Publishers need to be careful and constantly check their online properties for elements that may cause their viewability to drop, such as the aforementioned interstitials or pop-ups. However, they can also use Brightcove player implementations to improve viewability. 

The first option is to use a player that automatically resumes and pauses when the user scrolls in and out of view. This prevents it from continuously playing in the background while no one is looking, which can have a detrimental effect on viewability. Here’s a code example for this type of player. A second option to guarantee a high viewability player is to use a “floating” player, otherwise known as a “picture in picture” plugin. You can find a sample here . The plugin makes the player hover on the bottom right corner of the display area when a user scrolls past it, ensuring it is always in view. Do note, however, that this may be a more controversial method among the end users as it is often considered intrusive or annoying. Despite that, many publishers find the floating player to be extremely valuable.

Beyond player and website implementation, there are several emerging technologies that can make reaching the new viewability standards easy. VPAID, and the issues it presents, should eventually make way for the Open Measurement Software Development Kit (OM SDK) and VAST 4.2. In tandem, these technologies should alleviate many of the current challenges in the ecosystem, including the difficulty of measuring in-app and OTT ad impressions and the fragmentation of measurement methodologies. In addition, the emerging Automated Content Recognition (ACR) technology is able to read pixels on a smart internet-connected device (such as Roku or Apple TV) as it delivers video content to a TV consumer. This allows for insight into real-time data previously inaccessible on traditional TV platforms and bridges the gap with digital video technologies. The challenges ahead for all of these technologies will be in getting wide adoption as well as gathering end user consent and “opt-ins” in order to adhere to regulations such as GDPR and CCPR. 

The new MRC guidelines may add some challenges to publishers in the short term, but the impact may be quite minimal due to the extent to which the ad industry already emphasizes viewable impressions. There are steps the sell side can take to ensure better performance, whether by optimizing their properties or using one of the suggested plugins for the Brightcove player. Finally, the future looks bright as new verification solutions become commonplace in the market, helping to bridge the divide between digital ads and the traditional TV space—while also helping brands make more informed buying decisions.

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