In December, the Video Cloud product team was hard at work releasing features to help our publishers increase engagement with their video content and streamline their publishing workflows. Read up on December’s release here, but don’t forget that you can always check up on the most recent release on our product updates page.

The engineering and product teams at Brightcove are busy! Our recent Video Cloud release includes a suite of new and updated features designed to make your life as a video publisher easier and more productive than ever. I’ve highlighted some of the features below, but make sure to visit the product updates section for a full list.

Removing the complexity behind Video delivery for you is one of the goals of Brightcove Video Cloud - and with our Video Cloud 11.11 release, we have taken that one step further.  We have released a new JavaScript player API that works with our Smart Players - whether they render as Flash or HTML5.  This allows you to build once, and use regardless if the player renders on a tablet or PC - saving you time and preserving the user experience you work hard to create.

Have you noticed the new location of search in Brightcove Video Cloud Media Module?  The search bar has not only become more visible, but has become more useful!  The base search now searches all metadata text fields.  Using tags to organize your content?  No problem, you can now search by tags.  Need to find the videos with a particular custom field?  Great, we search that too!  

We are excited to announce new features in our October Video Cloud release. In this release, we have added encryption to our HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), rendition URLs to the Brightcove Video Cloud Studio and the ability to failover to our HTML5 player if Flash is not installed. I am going to mention some highlights here but you can read about all our new features from our product update page. 

For many of our publishers, video metadata is an essential tool for content management and tracking. Whether they are using tags for video search engine optimization, assigning content to players programmatically with the reference ID, or using a custom metadata field for custom functionality, video metadata can be a crucial step of the content publishing workflow.

Our latest Video Cloud product update includes a metadata assurance feature (for Professional and Enterprise editions) to assist organizations like these in content publishing and quality control. The feature lets account administrators denote certain metadata fields as “required.” Content missing any required data can be uploaded, edited, and even inserted into playlists, but will remain in an “inactive” state and thus will not display in players on the Web.

The Brightcove Product Organization is very happy to report some feature releases that we hope will make our your video workflow easier. In today's release, we have included some tools to make assuring the quality of your meta data simpler, enhanced our Limited Availability Universal Player APIs, and improved our video playback experience. Read about all our new features, as I am just going to give you a preview of a few.

The Brightcove product team is excited to share some cool new feature enhancements that improve HTML5 playback experiences and expand support for Android devices. 

This Thursday, June 23 at 1:00 PM ET, Shiri Friedman, a Partner Manager at Brightcove, will be presenting at a webinar that takes a closer look at a new Video Cloud integration with Ektron, a Brightcove Alliance Premier Partner.

Using Omniture in conjunction with Brightcove just got easier. Open Source @ Brightcove, the community site for apps, SDKs and other developer tools, has added a new Flash plug-in for reporting events from within Brightcove video players to Omniture. Reports can then be rolled up using Omniture's SiteCatalyst.

Beginning May 15, 2011, Brightcove will no longer support Flash Player 9 for using the Brightcove Studio or Brightcove players. Brightcove Studio users should upgrade to Flash Player 10.

As you may have read the Brightcove Product team recently released the Brightcove Mobile Upload App for the iPhone. To support this awesome way to capture content and get it into your Brightcove account we've updated our transcoding system to better handle videos captured by devices such as the iPhone that may be held in different orientations while recording.

The Brightcove product team is pleased to announce the release of the Brightcove Mobile Upload App for the iPhone.  The Brightcove Mobile Upload App allows you to publish your content directly after capturing it on your device, giving you an edge on distributing your content and delivering your message.  

The Brightcove Product team is pleased to announce the release of Brightcove 5.2.2. We are excited to provide your end users with a better viewing experience on Apple devices.

The Brightcove product team is pleased to announce the release of Brightcove 5.2.1. We are excited to provide you more detailed information on your users’ viewing behavior of your videos and allowing you to make more informed decisions regarding your video strategy.

I’m pleased to announce that we have started enabling users of the Brightcove Studio to start synchronizing content in their Brightcove libraries with YouTube User channels and everyone should have access in the next few weeks.

At Brightcove, we work hard to deliver the best online media experience to our customers and their users. We are therefore very excited to demo the improved video performance in our Flash video player via Adobe's recently introduced StageVideo API.  Below you can try out a Brightcove Player that uses StageVideo so that you can see the dramatic decrease in CPU utilization. In some of our tests when using Adobe’s Flash Player version 10.2 beta with our improved video player CPU utilization dropped by as much as 65%!

The mobile team has been busy this Holiday Season at Brightcove.  We have released Brightcove iOS SDK 2.0.2 with support for iOS 4.2, and the source code for our One Planet application for the iPad.  You can now download this source code and use it to kick start the development of your own iPad video application.

We've enhanced the Brightcove Smart Player feature to now support players that include a playlist. Smart Players enable you to automatically deliver your video in Flash or HTML5, depending on your viewer's device capabilities. Using a single embed code, Smart Players automatically detect the devices viewing your video and deliver the appropriate format for that environment. Smart Players support all of Brightcove’s advanced styling features, including point-and-click style editing and BEML customization.

The full link to a Brightcove player can be quite long. Some applications, like Twitter and other social media platforms, can't handle very long URLs. To address this constraint, we've introduced shortened URLs for player links. Shortened URLs are created and delivered when a viewer clicks the 'share' or 'get link' options in the player; the full URL is used for the e-mail sharing option. In the near future, we'll also shorten URLs you get from the Media module's Quick Video Publish feature.

The Brightcove Product team is pleased to announce the release of Brightcove 4.2.1. Some features in the release are highlighted in this post. To read about all the new features and changes in the release, please read the complete product release notes for 4.2.1.

We've changed the behavior of the find_related_videos Media API command, and we think you'll like the results. Now when you make the call:

We’ve been working closely with Twitter to enable our customers to provide full video playback and sharing within Twitter. The launch of the new Twitter.com, enabling playback of embedded videos in activity streams, is a powerful new development for media companies and marketers alike. This new platform capability will help drive revenue, increase audience size and improve customer loyalty.

As of last week, Brightcove released an update to our iOS SDK that featured built-in sharing features. Twitter sharing was added in this release and the integration uses OAuth to sign in to your Twitter account to tweet about a video. The move to OAuth means increased security for users who tweet while watching videos in your video application.

Today we released an updated version of the Brightcove Android SDK (version 1.1.0). Download the newest version of the Android SDK. The updated version includes region support and disabling logging.

Today, we released an updated version of the Brightcove iOS SDK (version 2.0.0 -it's so good we had to go 2.0!). Download the newest version of the SDK. The updated version includes support for adding sharing functionality to your iP* app.

For years, Brightcove has been a leading voice in the industry promoting best practices and introducing platform features to help media publishers optimize video content for search engine discovery.

We released Brightcove 4.2 this weekend, read more about features we announced earlier.  Now I want to take some time to let you know about some exciting features we enabled today.

Another successful release out the door, jam-packed with features available now...and some more a little later on today - stay tuned! I'll have another blog post later with details.

For now, read on for highlights of the release below, or check out the complete product release notes on our Support site.

A few months ago, we rolled out our Adaptive Encoding Engine, which not only produces higher-quality H.264 videos than our previous encoding process, but produces them faster. In order to make sure that more of our customers get the full benefits of the Adaptive Encoding Engine, we plan to update the default transcode settings that are used when Brightcove transcodes the videos you upload. The new default transcode settings use H.264 encoding by default, and also include renditions optimized for mobile video delivery.