The path of a video ad from the advertiser to a viewer is long and winding. There are many parties in the supply chain, and each plays a role in ensuring that the right ad is delivered to a certain viewer at a certain time on his/her particular device — and quickly, since s/he is eager to get (or return) to the content. More often than we’d all like, there are issues along the way. Demand providers may not be able to find buyers for the inventory, a web page may have too many scripts running, an ad blocker may be installed, etc., leading to latency, abandonment and fewer monetized opportunities. Publishers, including our customers, are left wondering:

• Why is my ad fill rate lower than I expect?
• Why do video plays not match my ad server-reported impressions?
• Am I charging the right CPM for the quality of my inventory?
• Who are the high performing demand providers?

Today, I’m delighted to announce our partnership with video intelligence company, Watching That . Watching That’s platform aggregates and analyzes a wealth of disparate and often hard to correlate video and ad data and reports in real time on video ad performance. Its integration with the Brightcove Player has empowered our joint customers to use these insights to tackle questions like those above and find solutions to maximize the value of their video content.

Watching That’s Founder and CEO, Cameron Church, explained, “Watching That is able to provide a holistic view of video ad performance, and we’ve built an easy-to-use reporting dashboard so that publishers can drill down into specific issue areas. We’re excited to make Watching That’s platform available to Brightcove customers so that they can more easily diagnose ad-related issues and identify new opportunities that, when addressed, can improve user experience and revenue.”

Alan Whiteley, CTO of Brightcove customer Express Newspapers , can attest to the value of Watching That’s platform. He shared, “The error analytics are incredibly useful and have helped us go beyond general fill problems to the root causes of genuine issues that have plagued performance.” He added, “Watching That has allowed us to dig into the details of our video ad activity like never before. Certain metrics, like geography, domain and device, have really helped us understand our overall performance. We have been able to identify new low-hanging fruit, which we are monetizing, increasing overall revenue with little extra effort.”

By taking action to address ad-related issues and capitalize on potential new opportunities exposed by Watching That’s platform, Watching That’s customers overall have seen a 50%+ lift in their ad fill rate across their key markets and devices, and customers typically see a 30%+ lift in the first 30 days.

To learn more about Watching That’s platform and integration with the Brightcove Player, check out the video below. Better yet, see a live demo next month by registering for Brightcove PLAY where Watching That is an exhibiting sponsor. Plus, you can hear from Alan Whiteley and Cameron Church in a session on AVOD strategies, and engage with Brightcove’s ad tech manager, Ilya Degtev, as he and Cameron host a workshop on video advertising.

We are very excited to welcome Watching That to our partner ecosystem, and we hope that more customers will see meaningful results using the integration to diagnose ad issues and uncover ad opportunities. To gain access to Watching That’s Brightcove Player plugin, which is for client-side ads and to be implemented alongside Brightcove’s Google IMA plugin, customers should navigate to the plugin setup details in Watching That’s dashboard here or reach out to their Watching That account manager.

To view our Partner blog, click here

We’re thrilled to see the strong early reception for Context Aware Encoding (CAE), our groundbreaking video compression technology that lowers the cost of storing and streaming video. Building a scalable, engaging video product requires world class technology and expertise. While Brightcove can and does help with this, we’ve consistently heard from our customers that we should also focus on helping them to reduce the cost of storing and delivering video content and improve the end user video experience. This is precisely why we’ve built CAE.

Using powerful algorithms, CAE analyzes the content of each video, takes into account the context of the viewing experience by looking at network connectivity and the types of devices consuming content, and generates the optimal bitrate ladder. This process optimizes the number of overall renditions and the bitrate for each rendition while maintaining video quality which, in turn, means lower storage, lower delivery costs, and higher quality video at lower available bandwidth. For content owners managing hundreds of videos and millions of streams, CAE delivers compelling cost savings on both storage and bandwidth while improving the viewing experience. And by creating a custom encoding profile tailored to the combination of each individual video’s content complexity, CAE enables higher quality video that starts up faster and buffers less. 

Young Hollywood Reduces Bandwidth Use, Forecasts Future Savings

The proof, as they say, is in the pudding (and performance). We’re pleased to see some of our customers generating strong early results by using CAE. For Young Hollywood , one of the leading producers and distributors of celebrity-driven digital media, delivering top-quality content in the most efficient way possible is a top priority. The company enabled CAE to accelerate internal cost savings while improving playback quality.

Young Hollywood initially configured the technology for two of its brands—Young Hollywood and Young Hollywood TV.  In the early innings of using CAE, the brands have seen reductions of up to 35% in bandwidth and 23% in storage. To learn more about how Young Hollywood is succeeding with video, read the case study . 

Strong Showing at NAB

CAE also received multiple accolades at NAB including “Best of NAB 2018 ” by Streaming Media as well as “Best of Show 2018” by NewBay Media.  We are thrilled that CAE is being recognized by industry publications and look forward to more awards in the future!

Contact your Brightcove account manager or talk to us today to start delivering a better viewing experience with lower bandwidth and storage costs.

To view our Partner blog, click here

Last week, Brightcove was honoured to attend Vietnam Television Corporation’s (VTC) launch event to debut its new OTT app, VTC NOW. Chaired by Mr. Nguyen Kim Trung, General Director of VTC, the event was attended by 120 Vietnamese senior leaders from the media, broadcasters and partners of VTC. After the unveiling, audiences downloaded and tested out the app, featuring comprehensive content offering that combined VTC’s content library with programming from radio broadcaster Voice of Viet Nam (VOV). The app was a milestone achievement for VTC whose mission is to stream breaking news, TV shows, exclusive original content, movies and stream radio shows and audiobooks – all designed to engage their viewers across various fronts, from watching to reading and listening.

Founded in 2004, VTC is one of the leading broadcasters in Vietnam, initially tasked to building television stations across the country as the national free-to-air broadcaster. Fast forward to 2018, VTC initiated the roll-out of its digital transformation strategy with an objective to extend its linear broadcast experience to online.

Powered by the Brightcove video platform , VTC NOW delivers 16 linear channels online, available in both VOD and Live streaming formats, catering to millions of local and global Vietnamese diaspora audiences.

Across Asia, linear broadcasters are launching OTT services to take advantage of the mobile-first phenomenon, as mobile devices become the most entertainment device. The smartphone is the new TV device in most countries. Brightcove is passionate about shaping the future of TV in Vietnam with VTC, as the company evolves its strategy to respond to shifting TV consumption trends and deliver linear and online TV experiences to 69 million audiences across Vietnam and 4.3 million worldwide.

The service is available on Web, iOS, Android and Android TV platforms, including Tizen devices. Viewers can access VTC NOW by downloading the app from Google Play and the Apple App Store .

Read our press release here .

To view our Partner blog, click here

“It’s alive… it’s moving… it’s alive, it’s alive, it’s alive, it’s alive, it’s alive!”

Over five years ago, Felix Baumgartner fell almost 24 miles from stratosphere to ground. As a Midwest kid who watched the stars from my backyard, this was a jaw-dropping stunt. Earlier this year, SpaceX launched Falcon Heavy. I watched on YouTube along with several million others. That Elon Musk sent into space not only a Tesla but also another “spaceman” was more fascinating than the event being YouTube’s second largest live streaming event as measured by concurrent viewers.

Live streaming at this scale was … expected. Compared to five years ago, the business and technology of live streaming has gone through multiple phase shifts. For consumers, the choices for watching digital live events and linear broadcasts keep increasing: YouTube TV, PlayStation Vue, Sling TV, fuboTV, Twitch.

How large are these digital audiences? As Spinal Tap would say, it goes to eleven. Super Bowl 52 reached 3.1MM peak concurrent viewers. Dr. DisRespect’s return to Twitch broke the platform with almost 400K peak concurrent viewers. And despite the controversy about the physical crowd size at the Presidential Inauguration, Akamai measured over 4MM concurrent viewers across multiple providers. And we’re all fascinated by the stars and the sky, as over 12MM unique viewers watched the lunar eclipse on NASA TV.

Over the years, Brightcove has been fortunate to work with a wide variety of customers around the world to enable their live streaming initiatives. Global broadcasters have launched dedicated 24/7 news and entertainment channels. And the breadth of professional sports events has been nail biting. Our customers have been able to serve – punned intended – tennis fans (Australian Open), professional golf fans, and boxing fans watching Mayweather-McGregor and Pacquiao-Horn on digital PPV. Viewers had access to almost 50 hours of the World Table Tennis Championships, fantastic matches of ICC Cricket, fast and furious professional drag races, and the thrill of victory – and the agony of defeat – of PyeongChang 2018.

From our standpoint, in the last few years, live streaming has gone through a transformation in the three 3Ps: People, Price, Process.

• People: It used to require media experts to architect, setup, and operate live events. Not only are subject matter experts rare, they’re expensive. With the change in technology, it’s much easier for non-experts to manage the end-to-end process.
• Price: Capturing, encoding, and delivering live events used to require a formidable array of expensive cameras, mixers, on-premise hardware encoders, and utilization of first mile delivery and CDNs that were expensive by the bit. Today, many pieces in the workflow are now commoditized. If you still need “Ferrari” quality for live streaming and your wallet is deep enough, go for it. But now, you can get Mercedes quality at Hyundai prices.
• Process: The process for capturing, encoding, and delivering live content is much more simple and much more varied. Whether you’re simulcasting a broadcast feed captured from a bird or capturing the action of a sled dog race across 1000 kilometers of Nordic snow via outdoor cameras, it’s all within reach.

With the maturation of technology, modularization of capabilities, and minimization of complexity, we’re now at a stage where we’re seeing the democratization of live.

We want to be able to help you capitalize on this shift. We’re kicking off a new blog series to share some best practices and lessons learned from our experiences to help you navigate and succeed in this dynamic landscape. We’ll cover three main topics:

1. When live isn’t just “live”
2. Live at scale
3. Monetization

Check back early and often for new content.

To view our Partner blog, click here

We’ve changed how we communicate to each other, from Tweets to ‘grams to Snaps. We’ve changed how we pay each other, from cash to iPay to crypto. And we’ve changed how live streaming is created, distributed, and consumed.

Most people think about live in terms of linear broadcast, i.e., content (live events or prerecorded programming) distributed one-to-many to an audience unidirectionally consuming content in linear “real time.” But today, how we originate and distribute content within the definition of “live” has evolved with the capabilities enabled via digital. No, it’s not your father’s live streaming. And in some cases, it’s not even live.

So what else are companies doing to increase reach and revenue? Well… lots.

More Monetization – With the ability to more cost effectively live stream premium content to global audiences, companies are now taking advantage of live events for niche audiences. Even if these niche audiences are small compared to the traditional broadcast share, companies can lower the bar for determining the revenue potential, either through targeted advertising or sponsorship for an ad-supported approach or turning the content into a transactional opportunity a la digital PPV.

Destinations Beyond Your O&O – For many companies, the destination for their live content is their own O&O. However, we’re also seeing companies licensing directly to partners. Instead of companies transcoding live content into adaptive bitrate renditions and distributing that content to individual end users, these companies are distributing high quality live content directly to aggregators to include in their digital skinny bundles. And it’s not just broadcasters that are licensing content into skinny bundles; the door is open for pure play digital companies, changing how we think what should be included in a skinny bundle. It’s not just about choosing – or losing – broadcast and cable channels.

Getting More Social – In a similar manner, social networks have introduced live streaming as part of their offering over the past several years, and as a result, social amplification has become another alternative for distribution to purely O&O properties. As we’ve seen, social networks provide an immense opportunity to engage – and sometimes monetize – an audience that may not engage directly with their O&O. To this audience, the social network is the content.

Rethinking Simulcast – Often, we hear companies push live to the back burner because they think live requires actual live content or it is a format specific to traditional broadcasters. However, we have started to see a trend whereupon companies with vast libraries of archival content, snackable content, or seasonal content would think like a broadcaster and begin to program their content on a daily basis using the “traditional” concepts of dayparts and blocks but output the content as a digital linear stream. Viewers consume the content as any other live stream, and if the company desires, content can even be scheduled to align with traditional times “at the top of the hour” or “at the 30.” And with the capabilities of SSAI, this digital programming and playout approach can be monetized as effectively as any simulcast content.

To view our Partner blog, click here

It’s no longer a choice for media and entertainment companies to make their content available over the top. Now, it’s an expectation. Viewers around the world want to access and enjoy content on their chosen device and platform wherever they may be.

At Brightcove , our goal is to help content owners of all sizes capitalize on the exploding OTT market, whatever their needs may be. From companies just starting their search for a turnkey experience to sophisticated broadcasters seeking a more customized offering, Brightcove now offers a complete suite of solutions to meet the needs of everyone, at all ends of the OTT continuum.

To view our Partner blog, click here