Brightcove  Video Cloud is used by a wide variety of organizations, so it's always fun to see how these businesses are leveraging online video in even the most niche markets. Vital Choice, a seafood company that sells sustainable wild fish and organic foods, is one such company. The online store offers healthy wild seafood and other types of organic fare, but the ultimate goal is about more than simply distributing these foods. It's about illustrating the benefits of consuming wild and organic sustainable food on a large scale - and what better way to illustrate that than through video! 

Here at Brightcove, we are passionate about a lot of things, but one of the most exciting aspects of the work we do is getting to see all of the great content that our publishers create. We are in the business of helping our clients publish and distribute their digital media content efficiently, but sometimes it’s important to take a step back from the day-to-day work and simply appreciate all of the diverse types of content that our customers are making available to the public. 

Liberty Medical, which provides medical services and supplies to more than 1 million people with diabetes, is committed to offering its patients the best products and tools to help them simplify the management of their condition and to promote healthy outcomes. They were an early adopter of Brightcove’s online video platform and have been a customer for three years now.

This May, we're bringing together hundreds of Brightcove customers to share best practices, strategy tips, and to network here in Boston. The fantastic speakers and agenda we've already lined up should be enough incentive to come!

It’s my pleasure to introduce Taboola to our Express customer base. Taboola is an exciting technology partner who has been integrated with the Brightcove Professional Edition and is now available to Express $499 customers. Taboola presents Brightcove Express publishers with the opportunity to drastically change the way that viewers engage and interact with your online video.

 As a customer of Brightcove you have at your fingertips access to tons of resources to help you achieve your goals for online video.  I wanted to highlight today perhaps one of the more overlooked resources available to you: The Brightcove forums. On the Brightcove forums you gain access to speaking with other Brightcove publishers about their implementations as well as the ability to ask more technical questions to our team of developers and engineers who monitor the forums closely. The following is a breakdown of the Brightcove forums and the information you will find there.

 One of our new hires recently asked me “why on earth would you use video on a retail site?” I can’t help but smile when asked this question because I can’t figure out why on earth you WOULDN’T use video on a retail site. One of my favorite Express examples of an e-tailer using online video is Echo Inc. If you enjoy spending summer days edging your garden beds, or taking a chainsaw to low-hanging branches in your yard, you are probably familiar with this power-tool power-house.

This article will be short and sweet.  We on the Express Account Management team wanted to make sure that our customers knew how to run bandwidth reports to monitor their Brightcove account’s monthly bandwidth. Since all the Express plans are on a month to month basis, it is important to check your account’s bandwidth periodically throughout each month. At the very least, you should set a reminder to check your account towards the end of each month.

When we started the Express Account Management newsletter back in April, our goal was to provide you, our beloved customers, with relevant updates, sound advice, cool product feature releases, and nifty tricks for you to use to make the most of your account. But when we were planning the content for this month’s newsletter, we realized we had never asked you what you want to hear!

If you happen to live in the Denver area, you may have heard of VISTA TV, which airs on Comcast Channel 19. If you don’t, no problem – their content is available online at vistatvdenver.com.

A lot of our Express customers present video that caters to local niche markets. One awesome example is Thumb Magazine, a video magazine covering the people, places, organizations, and events in the Thumb of Michigan. Their ad-supported video features aim to build community by sharing positive and inspiring stories about the people and places in the neighborhood.

In my humble opinion, one of the most critical features offered in the Brightcove Studio is smart playlists. I also feel that smart playlists are often overlooked and underutilized. I am going to do my best in this post to shed some light on how smart playlists work and how they are best used. Some knowledge of how to build smart playlists is assumed so if smart playlists are new to you, have a look at the general knowledge document here.

In the modern online marketplace, the importance of advertising cannot be understated. Local businesses, when venturing into the online world, are often in dire need of brand awareness, visibility and thorough advertising plans that generate new customers. This is where Yodle steps in. Yodle is the fastest growing local online advertising company in the U.S. Yodle caters to the needs of local businesses, providing online advertising that is both convenient and cost effective.

A lot of my customers ask me the very broad question: “How do I make sure I’m making the most of my Brightcove account?” The truth is there’s no magic bullet that makes an online video campaign successful. However, you can take a few simple steps to maximize the possibility that your video initiative thrives. A successful video strategy does three things: it captures site visitors’ attention, engages them with relevant content, and keeps them coming back for more video goodness.

Have you ever loved something so much that you are willing to dedicate your life to making sure the world understands it? Well that is how Kyle Doyle feels about the car washing industry. Kyle is the President of Blue Sky Image Group. It’s a full-service car wash marketing firm whose goal is to improve the way the world looks at professional car washing. He’s also the producer of carwashTV, which delivers compelling videos about the people and ideas that are shaping the car wash industry.

Analytics are more than just numbers and data pulled together to create fancy line graphs and pie charts. They are bits and pieces of data that when pulled together instead tell a story. Here at Brightcove we are using our analytics to tell you the story of how users are consuming your content. We weave together character, setting, and plot in order to provide you with the most complete story with the most actionable conclusions allowing you to make confident business decisions regarding your online video initiative.

With Brightcove update 4.2.1, we've pulled back the lens farther and allow you to see an even more complete version of your users’ experiences. We've now included the prologue and are helping you answer the question: how exactly are users getting to and finding your content? Check out these new tools now available to you!

One of Brightcove’s most impressive and interesting features is Multi-bitrate streaming. As an Express Account Manager, I find that many users are aware of the multiple rendition feature without fully grasping its significance. The first important item to note is that Multi-bitrate streaming is only available for non-FLV file types; we perform no transcoding for FLV files. In today’s online video market, a prominent variable one finds is Internet connection speed.

 Here at Brightcove, we get pretty excited about our product and its features, and it is great to hear the same excitement in a customer’s voice. We love nothing more than when our customers are actively engaged in the Brightcove community via the forums and user groups. Ben McElroy, of McElroy Films, is one of these excited and engaged customers. McElroy Films is a professional high-definition video production company specializing in corporate, educational, non-profit, wedding and independent filmmaking as well as music video production.

Brightcove recently announced the release of Brightcove 4.2, a substantial revision to our platform. Among the product changes (which you can read about here), there’s one in particular that is tremendously valuable for Express customers: HTML5 smart players.

In 2003, a nationally televised documentary exposed a relatively unknown sport, art form, and way of life onto the British public. The documentary, Jump London (Channel 4, 2003), introduced many to a form of urban acrobatics, derived from our Francophone neighbours, which formed the gateway for a new past-time to be infectiously taken up across shores all over the world. Its name is Parkour, from which Freerunning was derived, and from this recreational phenomenon was born a star in Sébastien Foucan.

No two websites are the same.  As businesses design and redesign their websites, they are always looking for that touch of individualism that will set them apart from their competition.  Whether it is a clean and modern look, an eye catching and unorthodox layout or somewhere in between, a website’s layout and design has a direct impact on how successful a tool it is.

Publishing videos via the Quick Publish tool in the Media Module is fast and easy. But for those of you with large content libraries and a large number of video players throughout your web properties, there's a trick that can save you time. Today I'll show you how to use the Reference ID feature of the Studio to simplify the process of programmatically assigning content to players.

There is nothing better than a good glass of wine after a long day at the office. How often, though, do we think about the story behind our wine? Bobby Wittenberg, of RKW Productions, shows us “the story behind the bottle” in vivid HD on his site, Vinestories.com. “A great deal of time goes into creating our stories. On the surface they’re about crafting artisan wines.

Happy Tuesday, Express users!

In case you haven’t heard the news through other channels, today we announced new capabilities for delivering video to Android devices. I want to highlight what this means for Express customers, but first you really must read Jeff Whatcott’s excellent blog post, which describes in detail the significance of our new developments.

For colleges and universities, it is more important than ever to create deeply engaging websites.  The modern day college website serves so many critical purposes for the entire organization.  It functions as an informational tool for current students, a way to keep in touch with alumni as well as a prospecting tool for future students.  With such a large ecosystem of people associated with the school, there is a great opportunity to create a website that promotes

The Express Account Management team holds a weekly webinar which is a walk-through of the Brightcove Studio.  For those interested in attending, you can register for one right on brightcove.com under the Free Webinars section.  However, if you are unable to attend, please do not despair!  We recorded last week's webinar to be watched and consumed at your own pace.  This online video thing is amazing isn't it?  Enjoy.  

These days, just about anyone can create a blog and build a substantial following. Generating content for a blog isn’t easy, and bloggers are always on the lookout for engaging content to display to their viewers – like your videos, for example.

You can make it easy for these bloggers to display your videos using Brightcove’s blog this/get code feature. In doing so, you’ll increase your viewership, as the blog’s entire audience will be exposed to your video.

Our tabbed playlist players allow your viewers to easily navigate through a large library of content, making the players a fantastic choice for dedicated video portals or centralized media libraries. Our original tabbed playlist player choices were restricted to a single size and optimized for 4:3 videos, and we received a wealth of feedback from customers who wanted the functionality, look, and feel of a tabbed playlist player but also wanted to resize the player and/or optimize the size for 16:9 video content.

Let's say a viewer discovers your video content, and they enjoy it so much they share that video with their friends. Those friends then view your content, and share it with their social network as well. Each successive "round" of sharing increases the number of viewers exponentially. This is the nature of viral sharing; by leveraging the power of your viewers’ social networks, you dramatically raise the visibility of your content.

Hi there, and welcome to the Express Track blog!

The forums and blogs in the Brightcove Community center have always been a valuable resource for publishers, developers, and content producers. But there's never been a hub fine-tuned to the needs of our Express customers - until now. We'll be updating this blog regularly with information and news we think is relevant to Brightcove Express and its users. The direct URL to our blog is http://blog.brightcove.com/en/express-track.