CONTENT DELIVERY
Brightcove Shines a Beacon on OTT BRIGHTCOVE INC., the provider of cloud services for video, has announced the general availability of Brightcove Beacon, a new SaaS-based OTT platform. According to Brightcove, Beacon empowers customers to deliver captivating OTT experiences on a breadth of devices, with the flexibility of multiple monetisation models to fit any business need. As consumers continue to shift their viewing habits, broadcasters, content owners, and Pay-TV providers are seeking new business models and technology in an effort to stay relevant to their audiences. The continuously expanding list of viewing devices is a challenge for many content owners, and Brightcove Beacon addresses this by allowing customers to launch content to multiple platforms simultaneously. Additionally, with multiple paths to monetization, including advertising, subscription, freemium, and
authentication models, Brightcove Beacon helps customers to launch and monetize video content across mobile, web, connected TV, and smart TV all from one platform. Brightcove Beacon allows customers of all industries to deliver content to multiple devices and platforms to increase audience reach. With Brightcove Beacon, new and existing customers are seeing the advantage of quickly launching multiple apps across platforms and devices with the added benefit of staying up to date with the latest app store requirements.
customers to scale their businesses costeffectively, reaching viewers on the devices and platforms they favour faster than ever before. By utilizing Brightcove Beacon, customers can focus on securing the content viewers crave.
Brightcove Beacon also supports flexible monetization models enabling customers to see value from their content in a way that works best for their business and provides more options for advertising partners to reach viewers.
“We are excited to see our customers launch content quickly and easily across devices and platforms with Brightcove Beacon,” said Charles Chu, Chief Product Officer, Brightcove. “The OTT landscape is evolving and isn’t a one size fits all category anymore; viewers have increased expectations and appetites for watching videos while consuming content on a growing list of devices. Brightcove Beacon helps customers reach new viewers across more devices and expand their ability to protect and monetize their video content.”
Furthermore, Brightcove Beacon helps
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Is Australia’s Internet Infrastructure Up for the Video Challenge? By Jason Rau, Media Expert, Brightcove Australia
WE ALL KNOW AUSTRALIANS are hungry for video content, and publishers and brands have not disappointed, publishing endless streams of content to feed our insatiable appetite. In fact, Australians spent a fifth of their digital entertainment time watching streamed video content (Deloitte Media Consumer Survey 2018). But if we continue consuming video at this pace, our internet infrastructure will struggle to keep up with demand. For consumers, it will mean more buffering and sluggish starts when watching video content online. And for the content owners themselves, it could have a direct impact on revenue and audience share as Aussies tune out to find a better viewing experience. In fact, a recent Finder survey found that almost half of Australian respondents experienced connection or streaming issues while watching content online in the last year. The truth is, despite upgrades to the country’s internet infrastructure, these issues will only worsen as new OTT providers like Apple and Disney enter the market, and cord cutting rises, placing even more demand on our internet’s bandwidth. Now is the time for content owners and publishers to act.
CONTENT DELIVERY
BEAUTY AND THE BEAST
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The age-old challenge with video is the size of on-demand files, and the subsequent bandwidth required to deliver content to end users. With increasing video consumption and an overburdened internet infrastructure, it’s no surprise that almost half of us are experiencing viewing issues when watching content online.
Good news is, there is new technology that content owners and publishers can implement to alleviate these internet woes. And it starts with video encoding.
By reducing the size of on-demand files, you’re reducing the bandwidth required to deliver content to end users, answering the age-old video challenge.
RETHINKING ENCODING
As a by-product of fewer and smaller renditions, video storage and delivery costs for publishers and content owners are also significantly reduced — a massive win for media companies tasked with growing content libraries, while budgets continue to shrink.
We’re all familiar with video encoding — the process of converting a video into a digital format compatible with web players and mobile devices. But the problem with traditional approaches is that you are encoding an entire content library based on an “average” profile, rather than considering the broader context of the video experience. Not all video is the same — the content of a sports video versus current affairs programming, is vastly different (think scene to scene motion), so encoding every video in the same way is simply ineffective and only adding to our bandwidth woes. We need to take a more tailored approach that considers the content of a video.
BEING CONTENT AWARE Content-aware or context-aware encoding is an alternate technique that takes a per-title or per-scene approach to encoding videos. Algorithms are used to analyse the video content itself, creating a custom profile tailored to the combination of each individual video content’s complexity and predicted viewing environment — for example, analysing content on the premise of being watched on a fixed network or wi-fi, mobile devices, or smart TVs. Simultaneously, this process reduces video files to the fewest bits necessary meaning it requires less bandwidth to store, download and stream content without jeopardising the video quality. Herein lies the power for content owners and publishers.
NEW HORIZONS We know consumer demand for video content will only continue to rise. The real question is whether our internet infrastructure will weather the storm as we demand more bandwidth. Content and publishers need to act now, leveraging the latest encoding solutions, which will effectively reduce the burden on our internet infrastructure, and enable better viewing experiences for Australians. There is no silver bullet, but taking a contextaware approach to encoding is a step in the right direction that can benefit us all. Visit www.brightcove.com