I can't say enough good things about image transcoding in App Cloud: It's a snap to use, it saves bandwidth, it speeds up your apps, and it makes users happy. We just added two new features to make it even better:

Cropping

You can now crop images on the fly! To crop an image, just add crop=x,y,w,h to the transcode URL, where x,y is the top left coordinate. Take the following image (originally 425x282):

Like great cars and great fruit, App Cloud takes a "hybrid" approach to app development, combining the power of native device platforms with the flexibility of HTML5 as a development framework. For cross-platform, content-centric apps, this approach saves time and money—and the results can be astounding. Consider the areas where each platform shines:

In the past few months, there has been a raging debate about the relative merits of native vs. HTML5 applications. Obviously, Brightcove is a supporter of the hybrid application model.

What do macaroni and cheese, peanut butter and jelly, and franks and beans have in common? Yes, they're all delicious. But more importantly, in each case the whole is greater than the sum of its individual parts. Peanut butter by itself is delicious, but it's made better with jelly. I feel the same way about video and apps:

• Video breathes life into apps while apps provide a contextual framework for discovering and delivering video.

As a web developer and designer for thirteen years, I've jockeyed from one hot technology to another with relative ease. First Java, then PHP, then Ruby. I rode the Flash train for a long time. I kept up with every major UI library, from Prototype to jQuery, and kept pace with rapidly evolving web standards.

Following on the heels of our developer kitchens in Cambridge and Sydney, the App Cloud team hit the road (and the rails and the skies) to train another 30 web developers in Paris, London and Munich. Three cities in three days, with barely enough time to stop and sample the local cuisine!

In late June, Brightcove hosted a one-day developer kitchen for 30 intreprid beta testers of App Cloud, our new content app platform. After a few hours of training and a few drinks—and armed only with HTML5 skills—the developers set off to build some apps.

Today I'd like to announce the launch of Open Source @ Brightcove, a community-supported initiative to host a variety of applications, SDKs and tools for the Brightcove platform in one central location. Created to help Brightcove customers and developers meet their growing needs, Open Source @ Brightcove is run by a group of Brightcove employees with the help of a wide variety of developers from customer organizations, contractors and the general open source community.

A new article in the Brightcove Developer Center, written by Brandon Aaskov of Brightcove's Professional Services group, presents a player plug-in you can use to control ad logic for long-form video. With ad-supported long-form video, you often want to use mid-roll ad requests. The ad logic in the plug-in handles what to do if the viewer skips forward or backward over an ad break, making sure that the ad isn't skipped altogether or annoyingly repeated.

If you want to monetize your mobile videos in an iPhone app, Apple's iAds ad network is the only way to go. We have a new article that describes how to integrate iAds into an iPhone app created using the Brightcove App SDK for iOS. Using iAds is not too complicated: you can add iAd banners to your app the same way you would add a button, label, or any other UI element to your app in the iOS SDK. For details, read Monetizing your iOS app with iAds.

We have released version 2.0 of the Brightcove App SDK for iOS. The new version includes new APIs that support sharing videos by e-mail and Twitter. Read more.

We've got a pretty cool new article in the Brightcove Developer Center that shows how you can use cue points in a video to create calls to action, like "Add to cart" links, based on what's happening in the video. This example, written by Tim Walling from our Professional Services group, takes advantage of the way you can store metadata in a cue point. You can easily add cue points to your videos in the Brightcove Studio Media module.

Today, we released an updated version of the Brightcove iOS SDK (version 1.2.1).

We recently announced that the BrightcovePlayerAPI.swc will be compatible with bc_ads.swc. Well, that time is now here! In order to start working with both SWCs in your ad features, you only have to add a few things to your current implementation:

Since our last release, we have been busy adding more support to the Video Player-Ad Interface Definition standard (VPAID) in the Brightcove Player.  Previously, we added support for Non-linear ads and now you should expect support for Linear ads in the near future.  If you are reading about VPAID for the first time, we invite you to read about our previous announcements and developer documentation.

UPDATE: Twitter has pushed off the date for this authentication API change until August 2010. We expect we'll be able to update the Twitter feature in the Brightcove App SDK for iOS (formerly the Brightcove iPhone SDK) before then, so this issue shouldn't cause anyone any problems after all.

We've updated our JavaScript-based solution for HTML5 on mobile devices. The new version supports Android OS devices. We've tested Android support on the Droid and Nexus One smartphones, but it should also work for other mobile devices. If you downloaded and deployed the JavaScript for HTML5 before May 17, we recommend that you download this new version and use it in place of the previous version. Read more about the Brightcove Experience for HTML5 and get the new JavaScript file.

Presentation Focus: Brightcove goes Mobile!

Live Broadcast Link: (Presentations start at 7pm ET)

http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid73672450001?bctid=73678119001


More information about the agenda:
http://www.meetup.com/Boston-Brightcove-Developer-Group/calendar/13170056/

This is the second in a series of articles on video advertising.  I'll be writing about what VAST is, why this standard is so important, and what's happening with VAST 2.

This is the first in a series of articles on video advertising.  To start this series off, I wanted to give a general overview of how video advertising works from the point-of-view of a Brightcove player.  The slides below are adapted from a presentation I gave at 360Flex a few months ago.

Over the next month or two, I'll be writing a series of technical articles on video advertising.   You'll learn more about how the ad lifecycle, the standards that have emerged for video ads, and what's in the video ad future.  If you're a developer who doesn't know much about advertising, this is a great time to learn!  So, before you install Adblock on this series, here's a few reasons to read more:

Brightcove moves ahead with its commitment to video in the social web. A new article in the Brightcove Developer Center shows you how to use a simple SWF plug-in to add a Facebook "Like" button to your Brightcove players, using BEML. The article also describes how to integrate the Facebook Recommendations plug-in. This integration means that the social plug-ins travel with the video content, wherever it goes. Read the article.

Today, we released an updated version of the Brightcove iPhone OS SDK (version 1.2.0). Download the newest version of the SDK. The updated version includes support for Apple's iPhone OS 3.2 and the iPad. We've also split the SDK into three separate libraries for greater flexibility.

Live Broadcast Link:

http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid73672450001?bctid=73678119001

For more info on tonight's event:
http://www.meetup.com/Boston-Brightcove-Developer-Group/calendar/12746366/

Until recently, ad feature developers have been unable to use the BrightcovePlayerAPI.swc for API code hinting and strong typing while developing ad display SWFs, ad translators and ad rules SWFs . Developers using both BrightcovePlayerAPI.swc and bc_ads.swc reported seeing various run-time errors during ad feature load, which made developing using both SWC files impossible.

We're happy to announce the release of an updated version of the Brightcove iPhone SDK (version 1.1.0). Download the newest version of the SDK. If you have deployed an application to the iTunes app store or have created ad hoc builds for others to check out your app, we recommend updating your Brightcove iPhone SDK version in use and rebuilding the app. Read more about what's included in the updated version.

Ashley Streb has updated the article and JavaScript code we previously provided that describes a solution for delivering video to mobile devices using HTML5 and JavaScript. This approach uses JavaScript for device detection and automatic swapping of the Flash Player with an HTML player. The updated code now includes additional support for:

Sam Robbins has a new article in the Brightcove Developer Center that shows how to use the Brightcove iPhone SDK to load a playlist and render the text metadata for the videos into a UITableView.

Making a good-looking screencast can be a challenge. When the main of the point of a video depends on the viewer being able to read what's on the screen you're showing, you need to account for whether your viewers will be watching full-screen or in a smaller embedded player. In a new article, Mikey Carreiro from Brightcove Customer Support gives some tips for how to capture an effective screencast video and how to publish it in your Brightcove player. Read the article.

Brightcove's external ad feature opens up a wide world of possible ad formats. John Huebner's new article in the Developer Center gives one example: banner ads that appear to fly out from behind the player when they're displayed.