October 14th, 2008
Brightcove overhauls UI with Brightcove 3
Today Brightcove is rolling out a new application as part of their web platform for content creators (Update: here’s a post by one of the Flex developers who worked on it). The new user interface and features are some of the coolest things that I’ve seen in the ever popular rich media space. There are a few highlights of the new platform but the biggest takeaway for me was that Brightcove really wants to put people in control of how their content is displayed. To that end one of the things they’ve done is overhauled how people can create new video players. Using a XUL-like language anyone can create a template for video players that includes things like a horizontal list of related videos, meta data, and various other aspects of the video player experience. That can be saved as a template and then used across an entire network of sites. What’s nice is that you can then build on top of that template to customize the experience even more. In the demo I saw they used a nature show to demonstrate how you could add a playlist of rainforest videos and skin the original template with rainforest assets. You could then take that same template and customize it for an ocean themed show. They really nailed the branding aspect of video while allowing reuse of assets and a ton of control with the XUL-based interface language.
A couple of the other highlights include new APIs and dynamic streaming. The new APIs are expose in both Flash and JavaScript so that regardless of the technology you’re using, you can still get in and manipulate or access various parts of the video. Using the APIs you can pull out metadata, make changes to the playlist, or even alter how the video plays. It’s going to mean that developers and site creators can easily customize what and how they want things to appear on their sites. Dynamic streaming lets content creators encode multiple versions of a video at different bitrates so that the user gets the highest quality version available. Brightcove detects the bandwidth and then based on settings that the content creator establishes, the user gets the best possible quality video stream.
All in all Brightcove 3 is a big leap forward in giving the people who create video a ton of control over how that video behaves. It’s a good step for the rich media world and a great example of where the industry needs to go.
Ryan Stewart, a Rich Internet Application developer and industry analyst, recently joined Adobe's Platform Team as a Rich Internet Application Evangelist. full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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