Brightcove Media Studio

My main use case for Brightcove is the integration in Adobe Experience Manager. I had a use case to display the videos from Brightcove on Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) pages, so I completed this integration.

A specific example of how I used Brightcove with Adobe Experience Manager is that I installed the package that is compatible with a CMS such as AEM. The package I installed was for the 5.6 version. After installing this, I had the component which I could use on my pages and the template to configure the Brightcove videos.

I have more to add about my main use case and how I worked with Brightcove and Adobe Experience Manager. I had a separate Brightcove team from the customer side who used to upload and publish the videos. Using the video ID and URL, I used those videos in the Brightcove component on the AEM pages.

Brightcove has positively impacted my organization and my client's organization in terms of improvements in workflow, productivity, and business outcomes. There are a lot of analytics being tracked using Brightcove, including click events on the videos, and this helped the customer's business team to make informed decisions based on the data captured on the videos.

I can share specific outcomes or metrics that highlight the positive impact. Customers were able to see which videos are being viewed the most, and based on that, they can make the decision of which video they should place on the homepage near the banner. This kind of analytics helped them to make informed decisions.

In my experience, the best features Brightcove offers are its ability to provide proprietary and secure videos. Customers' proprietary assets will be secured and not publicly accessible. This is one of the best features in Brightcove, unlike YouTube videos.

This security feature has benefited my projects and my client's workflows because clients have proprietary assets and they do not want them to be disclosed to their competitors or in the open market. They wanted these videos to be secured, and Brightcove is the platform that provided the security for their assets.

I would add more about the features, particularly around usability, analytics, and integration capabilities. Brightcove provided this as a package that I can install in the AEM package manager. There is a component, a Brightcove component, that defines the rendition or the rendering capability on the HTML webpage. It also has its own CSS and JS, which control the video player widget. That helps the developer to control the dimensions of the video player.

There are many improvement areas for Brightcove. One is that some customers do not want to have the video hosted on a platform where it requires authentication and authorization, and it is costly. Brightcove is not publicly accessible. In terms of customization, especially in AEM, the package that they have given requires a steep learning curve to customize on top of. The developer who does not have experience with HTML and CSS or AEM finds it difficult to modify the out-of-the-box feature in the Brightcove package.

I would add more about the needed improvements, particularly around documentation, support, or other technical limitations. I tried this in AEM on-premise, which was version 5.6. I have to see if the same package can be supported in AEM as a cloud service. This feature I am still exploring, and I have yet to deploy this package in AEM as a cloud service.

I chose 7 out of 10 for Brightcove because of the cost and another reason being the steep learning curve and the complexity in configuring it in AEM on-premise. This is especially true when I am required to customize the video frame and the height and width of the video area, which requires technical expertise, especially around HTML, CSS, and JS.

I have used Brightcove for more than a year.

In my experience, Brightcove's scalability is definitely impressive. It can handle increased loads or more users easily. The moment our marketing team uploads the new videos, publishes them, and provides me with the video ID, it immediately reflects in our Brightcove component in AEM.

Customer support from Brightcove has been satisfactory. I had a dedicated marketing team who were uploading the videos. So I needed to be in constant touch with the marketing team about which videos they wanted on a specific page or a specific area on the page. I needed to have close collaboration with the marketing team.

I previously used a different solution for video management or integration with AEM. I was using some of the videos in AEM DAM (Digital Asset Management), but those were not very efficient because DAM is not considered a specialized platform for hosting videos. I also used a couple of videos from YouTube. But again, YouTube is a publicly accessible platform and does not provide security. So that's the reason to value the customer's security and especially valuing their asset security, I moved to Brightcove.

I rate Brightcove overall a seven out of ten.

Regarding Brightcove's AI capabilities, I have not yet explored the AI capabilities in Brightcove.

Regarding Brightcove's AI capabilities, I think its accuracy and reliability of output are areas I have not used.

My advice to others looking into using Brightcove is that if anyone, especially a customer who wants security for their video assets, Brightcove is the right platform that provides security and protected resources. So a customer can go ahead and use Brightcove for these kinds of requirements.

My main use case for Brightcove involves creating or maintaining a webpage where we also get video assets. To display the video, we need to upload the video into Brightcove and publish it by filling in the required fields, the metadata, and the necessary options to enable. All that back-end work happens in Brightcove, then we publish the video. Later on, we come to AEM, search for the video, and implement that video on the page, and then we publish the page. That's how we make the Brightcove video live on our page and upload the video asset into Brightcove platform.

Recently, I worked on a big project where we had eleven pages under a single parent page, and each page has multiple videos to accommodate, so I had to upload all the videos to Brightcove while adding the necessary metadata and options. First, I published all the videos in Brightcove. Then, we came to the AEM platform, selected the published video because AEM and Brightcove app have been integrated. This integration makes it easy for us to search for the video through AEM and display it on the webpage. This is how I used Brightcove to upload these multiple videos at once and publish them on the webpage. Additionally, since I was handling multiple videos, Brightcove was very useful for uploading multiple videos at a time and filling in the required necessary details, such as metadata and the required options.

I would say the best features Brightcove offers include the different user experiences, such as interactive videos, playlists, and the video player, with the interactive video experience being my favorite.

Brightcove has significantly impacted our organization from a business perspective. Since I'm working in a marketing team, we deal with a lot of new product launches, campaigns, page revisions, and new page creations, so video holds significant importance for displaying our products and demonstrating our services for customers. It is mandatory for us to display at least one video on a page when we design an AEM page for our marketing purposes, highlighting the crucial role video plays in our business.

In terms of specific outcomes, I would point to higher conversion rates, as our analytics reports indicate a lot of clicks and views on the videos on our webpages. For example, in the last week, we achieved a forty-five percent click-through rate, which translates to good conversion and improves the overall page performance and sales.

I would like to share a few observations about my experience with Brightcove platform. Overall, my experience has been quite positive, and I think it is a good platform, especially for enterprise websites. One thing I appreciate about Brightcove is that it provides multiple options for media storage and management, making it relatively easy to find and manage different types of videos. From a website visitor's perspective as well, different options and experiences are available for presenting videos, which is useful for enterprise websites with various business requirements. However, I feel there is an opportunity for improvement in the user experience for those uploading and managing the videos. Sometimes, quite a few buttons, options, and settings are presented on the interface, making it difficult for users to clearly understand which option they need to use. Especially for someone not using the platform every day, the number of available options can feel overwhelming. If the interface could be simplified or the options organized in a more intuitive way, it would make the content management experience much easier and more efficient. Overall, I would say Brightcove is a strong platform for enterprise video management, with the main opportunity being simplifying the experience for video uploaders and content managers.

I believe the user experience is an area for improvement as I have already mentioned. The reason I choose eight out of ten is that I sometimes face difficulties when interacting with Brightcove to upload videos. Even with five years of experience on the platform, I found that Brightcove recently changed the interface to Prisma or something similar, and I do not remember the exact name. It took some time to get accustomed to the new platform, so I believe if the interface could be simplified even more, it would greatly enhance the user experience.

I have been using Brightcove for the past five point two years.

We use a public cloud for Brightcove. We all have one credential to access and upload videos, activate and deactivate videos, edit videos, and publish videos to YouTube and other channels. I think we use another provider for Brightcove, but I am not certain which one.

My advice to others looking into using Brightcove would be positive, as it is user-friendly, multi-channel integrated, and makes it easy to find the videos we upload. The video ID feature is very helpful, and the options provided by Brightcove are truly useful for anyone looking for enterprise-level web management. All these aspects make it a strong recommendation for new users who want to get started with Brightcove. I rate Brightcove eight out of ten.

My main use case for Brightcove is that our application is a fully video-based application with reels-kind of videos, live videos, and normal videos, and everything plays with the help of Brightcove.

On a day-to-day basis, I use Brightcove because our complete platform depends on Brightcove video platform. Our complete platform's video depends on Brightcove, and we have two kinds of use cases where we have videos that play from Brightcove cloud itself, and another use case is there are live videos which are also played from Brightcove cloud, but we have an option to play some videos locally and we use Brightcove player to play it manually in our application. The entire application depends on Brightcove video platform, and that is what we are working on, along with fixing bugs and implementing features with that.

Regarding my interaction with Brightcove, I usually integrate Brightcove SDK for iOS into our application to play videos. On a weekly basis, we receive analytics from Brightcove, which is very useful for us to know which video got many views and how the trend is going. I also work on building features on top of Brightcove, and that is my usual day-to-day work with Brightcove.

Brightcove has positively impacted my organization. Although I am not sure about visible changes, the analytical trend provides insights into how our video platform is being used by customers. I have mentioned before that analytics is the best part, along with the introduction of new features on top of it, such as linear DAI, which are already built into Brightcove and are easy to test. After implementing these features, I could observe good numbers in terms of views.

In terms of good numbers regarding views after using Brightcove, while we have been using it from the beginning, we see that including features of Brightcove for our application, such as linear DAI, has resulted in views increasing from 40,000 to 60,000 views. This shows a spike as we implement additional features to the normal streaming videos, leading to more customers utilizing those features, and thus the numbers are increasing.

The best features Brightcove offers, starting with analytics, is great as it helps us to view the current trend. For example, if a war is happening and we publish a video, Brightcove lets us know how many views are occurring. Another major feature I love is the reference videos, where if we upload a video to Brightcove cloud, it gives us a reference ID that we just need to provide to play the video instead of handling everything ourselves.

These features help me in my daily work. On a weekly basis, we extract the analytics to check the trend, comparing the current trend with the previous week's trend to see if there is a spike or if the graph is going down. With the reference videos, we just take the reference ID from the back end that is served to us on request, and pass it to Brightcove, meaning we do not need to manage the streaming, buffering, or loading, as those phases are managed by Brightcove itself.

There are many features available in Brightcove, apart from those I mentioned, including a preloading feature and a playback speed feature. I also worked on the preloading feature so that while you are watching the first video, the second video is already ready to play. Thus, if you move to the second video, you will not see any buffering or loading as it plays automatically, which is one of the cool features they have, but they need to improve a lot in that area.

Brightcove can be improved in several areas, starting with the pre-roll with the first frame issue which has been a longstanding problem for me. I understand Brightcove is built on top of AVPlayer, Apple's native player for iOS, and there are challenges due to AVPlayer showing the first frame, which causes disruption when an ad plays first, followed by the main video. I believe this needs a fix at Brightcove layer itself, even though their support gives workarounds. Another improvement area is video preloading, which has documentation, but it should be enhanced to allow for better handling of multiple preloaded videos without developer intervention. Lastly, during playback rate handling, the AVPlayer issue resets playback rates to default if I try to set the rate during loading, which should be handled at the SDK layer.

I have covered the main points regarding needed improvements, and I can add that when I start a player, as mentioned, it is handled by Brightcove during loading, buffering, and playing, which leads to challenges when pre-load ads are involved. If a video has pre-load ads, it opens with a black screen before showing the ad, and if the ad fails to play, it does not provide player events indicating the status, which creates a hectic situation for developers to manage.

I have been using Brightcove for the last two years.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Brightcove around seven due to facing these types of ongoing issues, although they are good at providing solutions without making us feel bad. Their support is commendable.

I chose a seven out of ten because if they can improve the preload issue, my rating will be eight, and if they fix the ad issue, it will be nine. I feel it is fair to not give a perfect score, as other players resolve these issues more efficiently and often at a lower cost, making seven the appropriate rating, with room for improvement to achieve a nine.

For others looking into using Brightcove, my advice, specifically for iOS, is to discuss better workarounds with Brightcove team regarding the preloading of videos. They need to address the first frame of the video showing before pre-load ads because having a better workaround can facilitate integration, but if they do not improve, it may present challenges when going to customer-facing applications. My overall rating for Brightcove is seven out of ten.

Our main use case for Brightcove is uploading videos and using the Brightcove link on our websites, as well as embedding the Brightcove link in our YouTube channel.

We primarily use Brightcove for informative videos and self-explanatory videos that are easy for the audience to understand. Additionally, we upload leadership interviews about brand awareness using the platform.

We also use Brightcove analytics to determine how the videos are performing content-wise.

The best features Brightcove offers include the ability to easily replace the video at any point in time and a self-explanatory platform where anyone can easily upload videos without any knowledge transfer.

The video replacement feature has helped me significantly because when corrections occur in existing content or videos, we can change the video from the back end without touching the websites or YouTube channel, so it will not disturb the audience's visibility and will not create any quality issues. It will not impact the URLs either.

Regarding workflow, when juniors join our team, once access is provided to particular team members, all the functions and features are self-explanatory, allowing everyone who newly joins the team to easily manage Brightcove and the video content for the brand.

Brightcove has impacted my organization positively by making it easy to handle video content, easy to publish in our website ecosystem, and easy to use in marketing communications and newsletter publications. We can easily share the links with stakeholders so they can add or embed them into their external communications effortlessly. From the organization's perspective, Brightcove is a great asset for building brand awareness and market share.

Currently, I do not see any significant drawbacks with Brightcove, as it is performing well.

I chose the rating of eight for my overall assessment of Brightcove since the platform can be expensive compared to other platforms in the industry, such as Vimeo. The analytics are strong, but some advanced reporting or integrations may require improvement so that marketing leaders can make decisions based on those analytics. This would be helpful for them as well.

I have been using Brightcove for seven years.

In my experience, Brightcove is stable.

Regarding Brightcove's scalability, I do not see any issues. However, one challenge I observe is that when embedding a video into AEM Cloud, some high-resolution videos take some time to load in a hero banner or promotional banner in the ey.com ecosystem.

I am not certain about the details of customer service as we depend on the EY admin. We have an internal team, and for any technical issue, they connect with Brightcove directly, not from our side. We are the front-end of the team that manages EY content.

The switch to Brightcove depends on organizational policy, and when the organization changes the platform, we need to use it. I did not have input regarding the previous solution.

I do not have proper insights on the return on investment with Brightcove from the brand's perspective as I am only managing the brand and their content in the digital area, so I do not have insights on that.

I am not directly involved in pricing and setup, but when we request the license from the admin, they often say that the cost of the Brightcove license is very high.

My advice to others looking into using Brightcove is that it is very easy to manage the content from an EY perspective. The tool is also very self-explanatory.

Regarding Brightcove's AI capabilities, I currently do not see any issue with its governance and security as we are following all the protocols related to it from an EY perspective, so it is all good from the platform side.

I find the accuracy and reliability of Brightcove's output to be quite good, especially the translations and captions, which we can easily use. Brightcove's AI capabilities help optimize streaming quality while reducing delivery costs.

I give Brightcove an overall rating of eight out of ten.

For Brightcove, we use all of their video products, including video storage and management. We performed a huge migration from a legacy, analog, manual platform. It was not even a platform—it was just manual video consisting of hundreds of thousands of videos to Brightcove.

We were converting analog video files to archived files from Georgia Public Broadcasting, which is part of the National Public Broadcasting Network. I live in the state of Georgia and was an executive at the state of Georgia. Brightcove won the contract through a colleague named Missy. We moved hundreds of thousands of videos from an old legacy platform into Brightcove, and they still use it today. Georgia Public Broadcasting uses that platform, and all of the state of Georgia's video assets are archived and streamed either live or as repeats where you can view something from yesterday or twenty years ago or fifty years ago in that platform. The whole idea was trying to get everything stabilized in a digital world rather than on this analog system that was deteriorating over time.

I recommended it for a client who was a government entity, and I cannot disclose too much because I am under an NDA, but I am a big fan. Brightcove is a fantastic platform. They are doing much more than just video now. There is such a wide variety of content management capabilities. One of the features we really liked was their forward-thinking approach, especially from someone I worked with who came from the AP Newswire, which gave me a lot of respect for her recommendation and her strategic thought about how we should approach moving all this content over. Her team was amazing. I had a very good experience with the product.

Studio is the Brightcove feature I recommended. The Designer piece was also really the two pieces that the client was most interested in. Being able to control layout and video layout was important. One aspect they really liked was the vector video features. Cross-browser mobile capability was one of the most important aspects, which they have revolutionized. Produced video shows up in high quality no matter what kind of device you are on, whether it is an Android or an Apple product or a desktop or a tablet. For this particular client, that was very, very important. They were also producing training videos, which was crucial, including onboarding HR video production and how-to videos. They also did compliance videos, including the required behavior at work training and OSHA training for work safety. Being a federal government entity, they were highly regulated. The ease of use of the platform was critical. Back when I used it years ago, the user interface was easy and required very little training. You could bring in a novice professional marketing person, video production person, or even an administrative person and it did not take a lot of effort getting people up to speed.

I once worked on a Coca-Cola project to migrate and consolidate their websites to Adobe AEM, which was a complex transition. It is partly technology and partly managing human behavior since we are changing mindsets about producing engaging video content.

I know companies include ITA Group that engage Brightcove for managing live feeds during virtual events. They register people through Cvent, but they utilize Brightcove to deliver quality live feeds for attendees.

This feature has become crucial post-COVID for events so that if attendees cannot be physically present, they can still participate. It is more complicated to set up than your typical conferencing software such as Zoom.

One of the features we really liked was their forward-thinking approach, especially from someone I worked with who came from the AP Newswire, which gave me a lot of respect for her recommendation and her strategic thought about how we should approach moving all this content over. Her team was amazing. I had a very good experience with the product.

Studio is the Brightcove feature I recommended. The Designer piece was also really the two pieces that the client was most interested in. Being able to control layout and video layout was important. One aspect they really liked was the vector video features. Cross-browser mobile capability was one of the most important aspects, which they have revolutionized. Produced video shows up in high quality no matter what kind of device you are on, whether it is an Android or an Apple product or a desktop or a tablet. For this particular client, that was very, very important. They were also producing training videos, which was crucial, including onboarding HR video production and how-to videos. They also did compliance videos, including the required behavior at work training and OSHA training for work safety.

The integration of Brightcove with Adobe was very seamless. I liked that there were people at Adobe who knew Brightcove very well, and vice versa. That made it easy for both to communicate and made the client feel comfortable about the integration pieces that needed to happen. I am not technical. I am more focused on business strategy and marketing.

Brightcove is known for its high level of hands-on support. You get an account manager and training if you need or want it. There are a lot of benefits to using a platform such as Brightcove, so it was a no-brainer for me that they would choose this product. Their pricing was relatively good. I do not remember the specifics of the package, but we ended up choosing either the enterprise or enterprise plus package.

For analytics, I do not have a lot of experience with advanced analytics. I know it is a capability, but part of the reason we chose them was I have not used that piece of their product, so I would not be able to speak to that.

Brightcove's content security is best of breed. It is why the government uses it a lot. They are in the government's SAM exchange in the United States. Any government agency wanting to use them finds contracting with them easy because they are already in SAM. Everyone pays the same price, and they use it primarily for security.

People at Adobe knew Brightcove very well, and vice versa. That made it easy for both to communicate and made the client feel comfortable about the integration pieces that needed to happen. I am not technical. I am more focused on business strategy and marketing.

Brightcove is undeniably reliable and stable. It is the best of breed, likely in the top one or two platforms available. There is really no other competitor delivering at this level. Their reliability encompasses both technology and personnel, which are crucial. Technical issues can be fixed over time, but it can be challenging to resolve personnel issues as that requires time for training and development. They hire excellent people, and I believe they have strong leadership within the company.

Brightcove could improve by making its pricing clearer. I am not a current user, so I do not want to comment extensively on the user interface, but everyone I have spoken to loves it. It is tough to reach a consensus on usability. Often you get a mix of opinions from technical users and those who are not. From a consulting perspective, clearer pricing would benefit them. There were indeed a few features in their product offerings that competing free platforms, including YouTube, offer, although I cannot recall the specifics.

The biggest concern revolved around locking down pricing. The elusive request a quote box could frustrate potential users who just want straightforward estimates rather than to involve another person to clarify costs. My primary concern with Brightcove is the reluctance to publish clear pricing. When faced with their request a quote options, I take a step back because I want to know how much I might be spending upfront based on specific needs, including the volume of videos I intend to manage.

I probably last used Brightcove in 2015, so it has been a while. It has probably been ten years. I have not actually been a user since probably 2016.

Brightcove is undeniably reliable and stable. It is the best of breed, likely in the top one or two platforms available.

Georgia Public Broadcasting uses that platform, and all of the state of Georgia's video assets are archived and streamed either live or as repeats where you can view something from yesterday or twenty years ago or fifty years ago in that platform.

Georgia Public Broadcasting wanted Brightcove because back then YouTube and other free services could not scale enough.

Brightcove is undeniably reliable and stable. It is the best of breed, likely in the top one or two platforms available.

Brightcove is known for its high level of hands-on support. You get an account manager and training if you need or want it. There are a lot of benefits to using a platform such as Brightcove, so it was a no-brainer for me that they would choose this product.

My customer was extremely happy from the sales process through implementation. In my past experience with them, it is a total ten. They did everything they could because they wanted that account really bad due to its size and how costly it was.

Their service model is very hands-on, but the platform is so easy to use that you do not need a lot of support. If you can use Instagram or Facebook, you can pick it up really easily, which prevents people from being left behind or slowing down progress.

From my perspective as a consultant, I find the initial setup of Brightcove totally straightforward and easy. It was not so back ten years ago. While it was not bad, it was new to everyone. Ten to twenty years ago, content management felt fresh and complex to many of us.

Brightcove was ahead of its time, and the implementation process for the federal client I worked with was simple. They successfully migrated their content without significant complications. They really had a great implementation team and a client that believed in the need for this system.

The integration of Brightcove with Adobe was very seamless. I liked that there were people at Adobe who knew Brightcove very well, and vice versa. That made it easy for both to communicate and made the client feel comfortable about the integration pieces that needed to happen.

I had Missy on the Brightcove side and a person named Jane on the Adobe side, along with three technical and business strategy people supporting the integration.

Everyone uses it a lot. They are in the government's SAM exchange in the United States. Any government agency wanting to use them finds contracting with them easy because they are already in SAM. Everyone pays the same price, and they use it primarily for security.

They do not want to be the most expensive but do not want to give it away for free either. The more you used it, the cheaper it got per piece.

Brightcove was a little smaller back then, but they were still enterprise-level for us. With a government contract, you have to go through very complicated procurement processes, so it was a long, about a year-long process to win the deal and then two years to get us operational. That was due to the sheer volume of videos we were trying to produce.

The biggest risk lies with security and privacy, and Brightcove excels in that aspect. Huge government agencies use them, and knowing that they handle significant clients like banks and financial institutions is worth any extra expense for a service that ensures your content is trusted and compliant with relevant laws. They have had decades to build and develop that security, supported by high-paying customers.

Based on my comprehensive experience with Brightcove, I would rate them an eight or nine. They serve certain businesses exceptionally well, particularly large clients with considerable content, security, or privacy needs, including government agencies or significant corporations such as Walmart. Other solutions might be more suitable for smaller clients or those without extensive media needs. My overall rating for this review is an eight out of ten.