Today marks an important day in Brightcove’s history. The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences has recognized Brightcove with two Emmy® Awards for excellence and creativity in technology and engineering! We are proud to join a distinguished group of honorees that have had a material impact on television and video viewing experiences.
For video technologists, an Emmy® is the highest technical achievement award that exists. Only a handful of organizations in the history of television and television arts have been honored with an Emmy®, and for contributions of major importance. We’re talking about the people and companies who invented CCD camera sensors, LCD panels, and even streaming. In that context, it is extremely humbling.
Here at Brightcove, we live and breathe video every day, and we’ve always stood behind our technology and our talented team of engineers, developers, and innovators. This recognition proves what we’ve always known: We are shaping the future of the most powerful means of communication ever invented.
While these Emmy® Awards were given to Brightcove, our customers are the real winners. It is because of them that we reach farther and push harder to extend the boundaries of what’s possible with video. We could accomplish nothing great without their support. So to all of our customers, on behalf of everyone here at Brightcove, thank you.
Now, you may be asking, what exactly did Brightcove win? Let me break it down for you.
Emmy Award #1
Our encoding technology (Brightcove Context-Aware Encoding) won an Emmy® Award in the “Development of Perceptual Metrics for Video Encoding Optimization” category.
For our customers, this patented technology enables dramatic reductions in media distribution costs, such as network-, storage-, and CDN-related costs. It also eliminates guesswork, manual entry of encoding parameters, and any possibility of human error. For audiences, this technology enables the delivery of higher quality video, increasing viewer engagement and satisfaction. You can learn more about this technology here .
Emmy Award #2
Our transcoding technology won an Emmy® Award in the “Development of Massive Processing Optimized Compression Technologies” category.
This technology is at the core of our Brightcove Video Cloud and Brightcove Zencoder products. Zencoder enables our customers to quickly compress and convert thousands of videos in parallel, with minimum delays and high reliability. Our Video Cloud helps to securely and reliably manage extremely large amounts of video content at scale. In other words, this technology helps our customers save precious time and money. You can learn more about this technology here .
While we may have won these Emmy® awards in 2021, this recognition has been years in the making. In fact, some of our researchers have been thinking about and working on this technology since the early 1990s. Since the mid-2000s, Brightcove has been pioneering cloud-based transcoding and cloud-based online video platforms as categories of products.
We didn’t need another reason to keep pushing our video technology to new heights, but these awards are certainly motivation to continue to create new innovative technologies for our customers, and to make video encoding and delivery as robust, efficient, and easy to use as possible.
Everyone at Brightcove looks forward to virtually celebrating at the 72nd Annual Technology & Engineering Emmy® Awards ceremony on Sunday, October 10, 2021.
Namita Dhallan leads the product management, engineering, and operations functions at Brightcove. Bringing deep engineering experience and market insight, Namita is responsible for driving Brightcove’s product innovation and delivering world-class video solutions to organizations around the world.

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It’s no secret that 2020 was a year full of challenges. But, for people who knew where to look, it also brought with it opportunities. Our virtual panel discussion, Bright Spots, Big Thoughts, brought together a handful of those amazing people:

Ben Rabner, Head of Experiential Marketing at Adobe
Natacha McLeod, Senior Director of Marketing at the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra
Elise Swopes, Photographer and Visual Storyteller

The conversation unintentionally, but unsurprisingly, shifted to focus almost exclusively on virtual events – how to have great ones, the unexpected opportunities they offer, and why they’re here to stay.
Here’s what they had to say – and how you can put it to use as you’re thinking about your own virtual offering:
To make a virtual event great, connection (human and internet) is key.
Yes, video allows you to stream your virtual event. But it also allows you to go deeper with storytelling.
Our panelists saw the biggest success when they used video to:

Facilitate the types of spontaneous meetings and side conversations that happen at in-person events through breakout rooms.
Offer exclusive and behind-the-scenes content – in-depth interviews to get to know speakers and up-close-and-personal footage of performances to make attendees feel like they’re more fully immersed in the experience.
Make the experience interactive by giving attendees the opportunity to ask questions of the speakers through a live Q&A or chat with fellow attendees throughout sessions.

To continue the experience of your event beyond the virtual, you can experiment with non-video ways to create moments of connection with your attendees. Some ideas that our panelists shared:

Use snail mail to send thoughtful packages to attendees ahead of the event that’ll bring your experience off the screen and into their home. Include things like inspiring books, treats or recipes, notebooks, or a small art project to reset during breaks.
Share music playlists to set the vibe.
Send along printed pre-reading or follow up reading materials on topics attendees might want to go deeper on.

When it comes to your video strategy, start small and build from there.
For some of our panelists, video was only a very small part of their strategy before 2020. They knew successfully utilizing video would be crucial moving forward – but felt overwhelmed by the opportunity.
Their advice? Start with simple video projects you can accomplish quickly and easily. Over time, as you gain confidence, expand your video offering.

Start with short videos you can share on social media to build engagement.
Expand to longer-form video-on-demand content – interviews, behind-the-scenes footage, or storytelling around your product offering.
For your first virtual event, start with something pre-recorded or “simu-live.”
When you’re ready to go live, experiment with an hour-long panel discussion or two before committing to a full-day event.

Don’t miss the chance to expand your audience globally.
When you host an in-person event, there’s no denying the obstacles to scaling – location, venue size, travel limitations, schedules, and so much more…
When our panelists first pivoted their in-person offerings for virtual, their primary goal was to retain their current customer base. With their successful switch to virtual, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra retained 99% of their subscriber base – a huge success. They never considered they’d be pulling in new attendees too, until they dug into their analytics and saw that people were tuning in from other states and even other countries. So they evolved their strategy to expand that growth and reach beyond their immediate region with their world-class music offering. The result? They’ve seen subscriber growth in just a few months.
What started as a happy accident turned into a shift in strategy.
The lesson? Pay close attention to your audience’s viewing habits — in a virtual world, you have more access to analytics than ever before — and use that information to evolve your strategy for growth.
“Hybrid” is a word you’re going to be hearing a lot in 2021 as the world continues to shift. The question is no longer, “Is virtual here to stay?” The answer to that is a resounding, “Yes!” The question instead is, “How will we integrate virtual and in-person experiences in a way that is intentional and engaging?”
In the words of Ben Raber, “video is where the future is.”

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I recently had the pleasure of participating in an event that was very much a sign of the interesting times we’re living in. Sponsored by CXOSync, moderated by Somi Arian, and featuring Wired Executive Editor Jeremy White in addition to yours truly, it was a virtual discussion of everything that goes into successful virtual and hybrid events.
Now that so many companies have seen for themselves the benefits of virtual events (or adding virtual components to in-person ones), there’s no doubt that virtual and hybrid events are here to stay. Here are a few things to keep in mind if you’re planning one for the year ahead.
AUDIENCES ARE EXPONENTIALLY LARGER – BE READY
If you’re used to drawing a thousand or so people to an in-person event, don’t be surprised if a virtual component attracts ten times that number. With virtual, travel time and expenses are no longer a barrier for attendees, so suddenly anyone who wants to attend, can. When you’re choosing a video platform for the virtual elements of your program, be sure to pick one that can handle your maximum likely audience. The last thing you want is for technical problems to ruin first-time attendees’ experience of your event.
LIVE OR PRERECORDED? THE ANSWER IS A LITTLE OF BOTH
There’s no one-size-fits-all answer to this question. Live sessions have their own energy and excitement, but they present time zone challenges if you want to attract a global audience. Prerecorded gives you more control, but viewers miss the chance for interaction. A great middle ground is the simu-live format, where a prerecorded session is followed by a live Q&A with the speaker – it feels live (especially if the speaker wears the same clothes she wore when she was recorded!), but it’s much less demanding if the local time is 3:00 AM.
KEEP CONTENT SHORT
In person, a presentation of 45 minutes or even an hour is fine – but that’s way too long for a virtual one. The small screen just can’t hold someone’s attention the way a live speaker on a stage can. (Not to mention all the distractions that surround us at home.) Break things up into segments that are 20 to 25 minutes long. If an hour is allotted for a session, consider making it a 25-minute talk followed by a 15-minute panel discussion and 10 minutes of Q&A.
FLAWLESS PLAYBACK DOESN’T JUST HAPPEN
In an ideal world, everyone would be watching on the same device and with the same amount of bandwidth. In that case, a standard webinar platform would work just fine. But the real world offers no such predictability. People will be attending your event via any number of devices and under a wide range of bandwidths. And your platform has to be ready for that, or you will have a lot of frustrated attendees. A video player like Brightcove’s has adaptive streaming that will detect each viewer’s bandwidth environment and automatically switch to the best resolution with no buffering delays, which viewers hate. So your audience will have a flawless playback experience that won’t distract them from all the fantastic content at your event.
WITH GREAT DATA COMES GREAT INSIGHT
Virtual and in-person are two very different things, with their own strengths and weaknesses. The number one area where in-person can’t touch virtual is in the data-driven insights virtual events give you into what your audience cares about. Data can tell you what your viewers are engaging with in unexpected ways. Did someone rewind a portion of a VOD session and watch it again? That could be a powerful insight into their interests. Combine that information with the sessions they started vs. those they completed, what questions they asked in Q&A sessions, etc., and you can build a much clearer profile of this attendee than you could if they were at your event in person. Badge swipes just don’t tell you that much.
Last year, organizations found themselves scrambling to transition to virtual events, and as you might expect, results were mixed. In 2021, people are ahead of the curve and are planning virtual and hybrid events that maximize their considerable strengths. If you’d like to talk about what one could look like for your organization, I’m always here to help. By the end of this year we will begin seeing repeating hybrid events that are informed by the learnings from the last one, and the results will be amazing, I’m sure.
Justin Barrett is Brightcove’s Vice President of EMEA Sales

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