There has been a lot of buzz recently about the importance of leveraging social networks to drive video discovery and inbound traffic. Of course, the buzz is well founded: Facebook recently became the second-largest referrer for online video streams behind Google. What’s more, viewers who discover video through social media are much more engaged, watching more video for longer periods of time. But there's another side of the social story that's equally important and doesn't get its fair share of attention - fostering engagement and discussion with in-page comments.

The BBC iPlayer is regarded as one of the best catch-up TV services in the world. The reputation is well-deserved. But a similar or at least comparable experience is well within reach of smaller organizations. In a recent usability study of catch-up TV services in the UK, reported in the Telegraph, the quality of Scotland's STV user experience ranked just behind the BBC and ahead of the Sky Player.
 

Search Engine Optimization is only half the story when trying to maximize traffic to your video site. It's been great to see many Brightcove clients adopt strong video SEO strategies over the past few years.

I really enjoyed this article over on Silicon Alley Insider, the commentary and Henry's sweet double-negative quote which pretty much says it all. "I see almost no chance that this is NOT the future of the TV business." Similar to something our founder Jeremy Allaire said to me in late 2004 when he convinced me to leave Comcast for what would become Brightcove. TV of the near-future, which is already here for some, will look a whole lot more like the rest of the Internet than TV of today.

Our friends at STV have taken full advantage of Brightcove's ability to handle high quality, dare I say, HD video with the new four-parter, Scotland Revealed. I'm a big fan of what STV has done with their video library as a whole and I'm really happy to see the team take full advantage of Brightcove's capabilities. The videos are in 720p and there will be several additional episodes coming over the next two weeks. The videos are available for 90 days, so watch them now. 

Our friends at MTV's Atom.com have launched Dutch West Short Shorts, a fun new "video wall" featuring over 60 super short comedy clips. Some are borderline NSFW. Happy clicking. 

The overall user experience is kind of neat. Years ago when my colleagues and I were playing around with crazy circular players on Comcast.net, we learned that usually - the more thumbnails the better in a video UI.

Scottish Media Group's STV was one of our first launch partners in Europe. I'm delighted to see them enhance their successful year-old experience with a new "catch-up TV" site. We had the good fortune to work with Alistair Brown, David Low and team last year in building the main site. It was one of the first SEO-focused video experiences we built, driven off of Brightcove Media APIs. That site is different from a "traditional" monolithic Flash player or video ghetto, in which all of the videos play on one page.

Mashable has some nice stats today on the popularity of various viral sharing services and email. Here in Professional Services land at Brightcove we've integrated with Clearspring's AddThis widget quite a bit, which is a nice one-click way to post a link to just about every viral/social/bookmarky service out there.

Our friends at JS-Kit have a very exciting announcement today. They used the Brightcove 3 player framework to integrate comments into a standard Brightcove player template. Brightcove video publishers can deploy comments in their players without writing a line of code.

When we had a few free moments, a couple of us on the Proserv team cooked up a pipeline adapter to integrate with some of our mutual customers. There have been several requests over the last couple of months from customers that want their video indexed alongside other content types. The adapter is now a Packaged Application in the same vein as SEO, iPhone, and Closed Captioning.

1am, a case of red bull and no deadline. I'm beyond lucky to get to work with this team.

Brightcove Professional Services does a lot of work with Sun in support of the superb ChannelSun offering.

In a previous post about building mature online video businesses, I wrote that SEO usually becomes important to a video business after the "hey kids lets put on a show" phase of getting some clips up on a website. This used to take 18 months or so, but is now happening right at the start of a new engagement.

Brightcove Pages combines a set of proven best practices to maximize your site traffic. Brightcove Professional Services will work with you to customize and launch a video experience optimized for search engines. The site will incorporate a variety of best practices to drive traffic and hold onto your viewers, such as comments, ratings, most popular videos and more. The best part - the site will run on your own systems and blend into your existing site design.

Example:  http://www.wired.com/video

The Brightcove iPhone Video Site package is a quick way to get all or part of your content library ready to watch on an iPhone or iPod Touch. Brightcove Professional Services will work with you to customize, develop and launch a specially-formatted website that renders perfectly on an iPhone. You can deliver your full content library or a selection of playlists. After launch, no added development or additional steps in your workflow are required to update your iPhone site on an ongoing basis.

The Brightcove Closed Captioning player can help make your video experience more accessible to people who are hearing impaired, or broaden your audience globally. Brightcove Professional Services will customize and implement a "bottom third" transparent overlay at the bottom of your video window that automatically displays subtitles, in the language of your choice, for your videos.

Thanks to our favorite Amsterdam-based client for the wonderful (and giant) thank you cake.

I will be at Streaming Media East in the Brightcove Booth on Tuesday. I look forward to seeing you there, and showing off to you some of our newest customer launches!

As I mentioned in a previous post about maximizing viewership, closed captioning and subtitles (same technology, more languages) is an easy way to reach a wider audience.

Over the past few years we've watched online video businesses mature from the hey-kids-let's-post-some-videos phase to video playing a central role in an online business. In the first year of the video adoption curve, we find our customers focused on production, basic user experience and general setup. By the 18-month mark or sooner, we see three main themes emerge. This is fairly consistent -  be it an enterprise, government agency or media company. 

Team looks great. Franklin, Peter, Kate and KMac looks like they just cleaned up at a Monte Carlo baccarat table.

(L to R) Nat, Matt, Kate, Peter, Kristen, Jesse, Tina and agent Franklin.

It's great to see so much bloggy activity here at Brightcove, with literally dozens of people getting into the act around the company. Consider this a belated introduction and mission statement if you will. 

The 'More Eyeballs' blog will be (or at least try to stay) focused on how you can extend the Brightcove platform to grow your audience. Our posts, when on topic, will try to illustrate some of the best practices that we have been putting into action on some big projects from the Brightcove Professional Services team. 

Have you ever walked by a restaurant and decided not to go in because you saw nobody sitting down? There's a similar effect with websites. 

Comments and ratings are an easy way to give your website or video library a heartbeat. Suddenly, your viewers know they are not alone. The videos are changing all the time - and so is the discussion. Comments and ratings, as well as other viral sharing tools, are a proven way to retain your existing viewers and get more people to come back to watch your videos. 

It's a treat to get to use something you've worked on in your personal life. A designer from the iPhone team or the person at IDEO that did the stand-up toothpaste dispenser must get this kind of rush on a daily basis. On the Brightcove Professional Services team, I dare say that's starting to happen to us on a regular basis. We and millions of other people get to touch our work each day on great sites such as Showtime and The New York Times.