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Introducing Brightcove Ad Monetization

CMMA Blog

Brightcove’s customers have more opportunities than ever to monetize their content. They can sell subscriptions and rentals, offer influencer campaigns and sponsorships, or generate revenue through video advertising. But tapping into the $210B video ad opportunity has become far too complicated for many of our customers. As we analyzed the billions of video views we manage every month, we found suboptimal data configurations, unfilled ad avails, and CPMs we believe should be better. Between the ad servers, SSPs, DSPs, data clean rooms, header-bidding configs, and a myriad of other system connections, it’s easy to see how the entropy crept in.
It’s against this backdrop that we are announcing the Brightcove Ad Monetization service: an end-to-end AVOD solution designed for media companies to stay competitive, earn more money, and grow their businesses. This unique video ad marketplace is supported by our strategic partnership with Magnite, helping Brightcove customers maximize the opportunities that video advertising holds.
What to Expect from Brightcove’s Ad Monetization Service
Unlike other video ad marketplaces, Brightcove’s Ad Monetization service is designed to make it as easy as possible for you to offer your inventory to advertisers.
Brightcove Media Studio customers will receive full white glove service from the start, with an onboarding experience that we’ve designed to be effective yet efficient. While the technology that fuels the video ad service can be complex, we’ll handle the advanced setup, integrations with the direct ad servers, and configuration for filling remnant inventory.
Once you’re live on the platform, our in-house industry experts will help you make the best decisions to grow your business. That includes working with you directly to fill ad spots or digging into your data to maximize your CPMs.
Perhaps best of all, the nature of Brightcove’s customer base creates a superior platform for monetization to help you truly maximize your earnings. Our robust network of brand-safe clients with their high quality content is aggregated into one ecosystem, providing more opportunities for ad placement and attracting premium advertisers. In other words, Brightcove offers much more than traditional ad marketplaces.
There are several key elements to Brightcove’s Ad Monetization service.

Ad server. We have chosen SpringServe as our ad server for this service. This includes ad policy management, data and ad routing throughout the ecosystem, and analytics to help manage and optimize the campaign.
SSP access. Magnite is our first SSP partner. We’re working with them closely to ensure Magnite’s direct ad sales team and integrated demand-side platforms place a premium value on our clients’ inventory.
Ad insertion. Server-side ad insertion (SSAI) creates a seamless user experience with smooth transitions from content to ads and back again. This high-quality ad insertion process provides an effective way for media owners to monetize long-form content without interrupting the viewing experience. Client-side ad insertion (CSAI) gives publishers more flexibility and control of the type of ad experience they offer, including companions, overlays, and sponsorships.
Consultation. Our Ad Ops team is committed to supporting our clients and maximizing ad revenue. With decades of experience, they can optimize your data and policies to increase fill rates and return better CPMs.
Built on Video Cloud. Our monetization solution is built with the scale, security, and support you can expect from Brightcove. This includes Brightcove Player V7, allowing publishers to offer a variety of video ad strategies and built-in viewability support.

The Brightcove Ad Monetization service is our first standalone advertising offering, allowing our customers to stay competitive, earn more money, and grow their businesses. As an end-to-end AVOD solution, we are positioned to support our customers’ ad strategies from onboarding to optimization. Contact your account manager to learn more.

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IBM Video Streaming 2023 Price Increases

CMMA Blog

Please note upcoming price increase on Silver, Gold and Platinum plans: This blog post provides a notification of a price increase that will go into effect April 3, 2023 for the IBM Video Streaming Silver, Gold and Platinum editions only. The new price will apply to all new orders as well as upgrades and downgrades.

The post IBM Video Streaming 2023 Price Increases appeared first on Streaming Video Blog .

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Cybersecurity: Five Digital Hygiene Practices That Protect Your Customers

CMMA Blog

If you’re a production company with expensive gear, you lock it up well and insure it. You keep your wallet or purse close to you while you’re in public. Unlike tangible items though, we can’t keep our identity, data, and personally identifiable information (PII) in our sight or locked up with a key. Cybersecurity requires a different approach. Businesses have extra responsibility because they have access to their workers’ personally identifiable information. Every time you engage an employee or a temporary worker, some level of personally identifiable information changes hands. Just think about how many social security numbers pass through your system. If those stay on your hard drives, you are putting your customers’ information at risk! This is one reason, among many, that it’s so important to have a high level of data security on a company level and to train staff in digital hygiene practices.

Current Threats

It seems every week, a major company, city, or hospital experiences an alarming security breach. Each error compromises something, whether it’s privacy (hacked laptop/phone cameras or Zoom calls, for example), data, or PII. Credit monitoring companies, phones, hospitals, and entire cities have been compromised or even taken hostage. The government has identified the cyberworld as its own domain (after land, air, water, and space). As such, it requires businesses and individuals to have a strategy and implement measures to keep countries, businesses, and people safe.

Businesses and consumers increasingly rely on apps and software to get their everyday work done. Customers, employees, and sometimes patients trust companies with their information. This comes with a responsibility to handle that information well.

So What’s a Company to do?

It’s kind of scary, sure, but there are solutions. While some require third-party software, many of them are basic.

  1. Password Management: There are tools that offer super secure ways to make sure your company passwords are accessible only to whom you want them to be. If you’ve ever tried to access a company account after the person who managed it is no longer with the company, you see the value here. Aside from the convenience, it’s a way to keep information super secure.
  2. Make Your Policies And Procedures Airtight: Prevention is always ideal. Train employees on good security etiquette. For most organizations, human error is by far the most likely source of mistakes that lead to breaches.
  3. Check Your Insurance Coverage: Should you experience a breach, having solid insurance coverage in place can make it a lot less painful by covering the financial loss. Talk to your insurance provider about your current coverage and where there might be gaps. 
  4. Conduct Penetration Tests: Have third parties perform monthly security checks and an annual penetration test to ensure that anyone that tries to come after you will have a tough go of it. 
  5. Encrypt Customer Information: Encrypt all information at multiple levels. Encryption scrambles data so that it’s unreadable without the encryption key. 

Conclusion

Any investment in your security is a wise investment indeed.

The post Cybersecurity: Five Digital Hygiene Practices That Protect Your Customers appeared first on PayReel .

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Building a Better Portal for Employee Training Videos

CMMA Blog

If there’s one thing that most business owners and managers realize, it’s that happy, engaged employees provide higher quality work. They’re also less likely to quit and, perhaps most importantly, they actively contribute to an overall positive company and workplace experience.
It’s also clear that employees want to work for companies that offer both personal and professional fulfillment. Office perks still play an important role, but more and more employees expect companies to offer a robust learning culture.
Training Enhances the Employee Experience
Learning and development (L&D) has proven to be a key driver of employee engagement. By providing tools and resources to strengthen employee skills and knowledge, companies can build a more capable workforce while showing investment in their employees. Furthermore, addressing skill gaps not only allows the business to grow, it lets employees grow, which improves the employer brand.
From an employee perspective, they want to feel like their current job is helping them build their career by preparing for their next role. Many are eager to continue building skills and staying competitive within their fields. In fact, they’re much more likely to stay with companies who they feel are supporting this.
From a company perspective, learning opportunities offer a competitive advantage and help them stay ahead in a constantly changing landscape. It helps the organization retain top talent, attract new talent, and maximize the potential of their existing talent.
And while there are various learning methods such as instructor-led training, on-the-job training, simulators, job shadowing, and case studies, training videos remain a top choice for employees.
Video Enhances Employee Training
According to our “Using Video to Improve the Employee Experience ” study, employees prefer video for policy training (76%), product demos (75%), and product training (68%). Also, 45% say training videos for systems and tools would increase their confidence in their employment decision.
There are numerous benefits for companies to deliver their learning and development programs through video.
For starters, it can be much more cost-efficient, especially for companies with multiple offices in different cities. In addition to reduced expenses like travel and materials, video also has a longer lifespan. Once produced, it can be reused and viewed by employees around the world in the comfort of their own homes or offices. Finally, video can also help you significantly reduce the amount of overall employee training time and even provide microlearning experiences .
There’s also the fact that video is more engaging than other forms of delivery. Multiple surveys have shown that employees prefer video to text , and the visual stimulation helps employees retain the information much longer. For HR teams who have strong learning initiatives, it’s not a matter of if they use video, but rather, what’s the best experience.
A Better Portal Enhances Employee Video
It’s important to remember that the videos themselves are but one part of a comprehensive training experience.
As you develop, update, or optimize your learning initiatives, you’ll want to consider all aspects of the user experience. This ranges from how easily they can find, access, and navigate the training to implementing active learning within the videos. The branding, layout, and functionality will also play an important role.
Similarly, you’ll want to make sure your program is as efficient and easily manageable as possible for content managers. A holistic and successful training program must consider the experiences of both the end user and the person responsible for maintaining it.
Where will your video training programs live?
One of the first steps in creating a video training program is to determine where the videos will live and how employees will access them. There are several common ways that businesses house them.

Internal servers or cloud storage. This approach often aligns with a broader internal content management structure, particularly for working files and documents. However, internal drives or collaborative cloud platforms can be less intuitive and lack the branding that adds to the overall experience. Further, navigating folders to find the different training videos and series is designed for digital librarians, not diverse employees with different learning styles.
Digital Asset Management platforms (DAMs). DAMs excel at managing high volumes of internal digital content, offering meta-tagging and versioning capabilities that allow for advanced search functions. But they’re not meant for content consumption. Not only do their interfaces lack branding, most can’t support high volumes of concurrent high-quality video streams.
Unlisted YouTube channels. YouTube is used by some companies who want to organize training videos by playlists. In theory, the videos can only be accessed by users through an unlisted link. However, most companies want better security, robust video content management, or hosting destinations they own and fully control. For them, YouTube doesn’t quite meet their needs.
Company intranet. Company intranets are perhaps the most common destination for training videos. They often combine one or more of the preceding approaches and act as a navigation overlay that users are already familiar with. So users get a much better, branded experience, and content managers get a waking nightmare. They not only have to manage all the places the content lives, they also have to manage the interface—ensuring every link is up to date and in the right place.

Creating an effective experience for the user
While each of the above systems have pros and cons, let’s look at some of the features and benefits of today’s most effective learning experiences. With tools like Brightcove Gallery’s Immersion template, you can combine the best of the above approaches and create an all-in-one training portal that both the users and content managers will love.
The first consideration is the ease with which users can access it. An often overlooked but important part of the experience is a branded, customized URL that takes them directly to the training portal.
Once they arrive at the training portal, the layout should be a completely branded, intuitive gallery that features all of the videos in any particular series. With a layout similar to the streaming services they’re already used to, users can easily see, navigate, and watch all of the videos in a given series. Additionally, related series will be easily accessible with a single click—or, if needed, quickly found through a powerful internal search engine.
Keep in mind that training videos don’t have to be a one-way experience. To be truly effective, you’ll need to keep your viewers engaged. Through Brightcove Gallery, you’re able to add an interactive experience to any video. For example, quizzes will help to ensure they retain the information. You could also have different paths within each video to give the user a “choose your own adventure” experience.
Creating an efficient experience for the content manager
Beyond the end user, it’s also important to ensure the content manager has the features and functionality they need to make the program a success. This includes ease of use and efficiency for ongoing use on a long-term basis. Take into consideration things like how quickly you can publish videos and how easily you can organize them. Choosing and adding videos to each collection should be a simple task.
For example, through the Brightcove Gallery you can select the videos you want by tags, existing playlists, or custom fields like keywords and search criteria. Similarly, if there are videos you want to exclude, those can be managed by tags as well. Finally, when it comes to creating the full training portal, you’ll want to be able to fully customize the look and feel of the page without the need for a designer or developer.
All of these features are easily accessible through the Brightcove Gallery template, Immersion. It’s ideal for companies with significant training and development needs and who want to provide users with the best experience possible.
In addition to having an effective and efficient way to create training portals, it also offers insights into employee engagement that you haven’t been able to measure before. By reviewing the video analytics, you’re able to see how often the videos are being watched, the percentage of each one being watched, and which topics employees are most interested in. This information will be vital to use for future training programs to ensure their success.
Finally, like all Brightcove Gallery templates, Immersion comes equipped with critical business features like SSO and role-based access to ensure your content stays secure.
Brightcove Enhances the Employee Experience
Delivering your learning and development programs through video is a simple, yet effective way to remain competitive as a company while retaining and attracting top talent. Brightcove’s Immersion template for Communications Studio makes it easy to customize the experience and create intuitive pages that mimic many of the most popular streaming services. By combining the power of enterprise-leading streaming technology with the interactivity employees want and security organizations need, you can provide the best experience for everyone.

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