ComScore's 2010 Digital Year in Review presents some interesting stats on the state of online video advertising. The report suggests that by the end of the year, 16% of videos watched (in terms of titles) were advertisements, compared to only 12% just six months prior.

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.

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.

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.