Brightcove Platform 3 Launches, A Visual Mess
Brightcove, the Cambridge, MA. based video tools company has launched their 3.0 platform to publishers, this after several months of testing by beta users. The system which is totally different in look and system flow from the prior version uses tabs and overlays to navigate between some key functions and while somewhat eaiser to move between uploading, managing and other aspects of the process, the platform is a visual mess.
Uploading video content was easier and seemed faster then with version 2. As with players, version 3 has fewer default players available however, there is support for user created players via XML which you can then add to your list within the application.
Interestingly, I.E. which had been the only browser that supported uploading of video content is now considered the slowest by the company. "Brightcove Studio loads more slowly in Internet Explorer than it does in some other browsers, If you are using Internet Explorer and find the Brightcove Studio load time annoying try Firefox, Google Chrome, or another browser"
I did notice some performance improvement specific to load times using Firefox when moving between sections however, it was not huge.
Users can take advantage of batch uploading of video content and playlists however, this can not be done via the UI but rather a user created XML file which according to their documentation "requires a high degree of precision" Certainly for companies with this in-house scripting capability and a need for batching of media it should not be a significant hurdle.
Automation will become a key element for larger companies and features like media API's which will allow for hooking out to external applications for file ingestion and server-side transcoding are important and I'd be interested to hear from people who've adapted these features specific to how well they integrate into their work flow.
One of the issues with version 2 which is a concern with the new version is will it take the same amount of time to produce one video clip through the entire process verses five or six clips? With version 2, it was frustrating when you had one video you wanted to post rapidly, say in a few minutes but had to step through the entire process. I'll do some time based testing and report back on this question.
As noted in slide six, I was not able to load any analytics on streams viewed and gave up after three minutes of waiting, no doubt a short term bug however, I'd like to see how analytics are graphically presented, say verses Google or other tools.
Also of note the uploader does not currently support .Mov HD files from the DVCPro format.
Brightcove has changed its buisness model several time and recently closed its consumer portal dumping thousands of producers using their free service. Now having moved upstream the company is currently focused on large media outlets.
For Indie filmmakers and other small producers, Brightcove is too expensive a platform for distribution especially with low cost or no cost solutions from companies such as Veotag among others
