With the release of native live streaming support in Brightcove 4 the question is not if you should take up live streaming but when.

Live streaming offers a video initiative bags of possibilities but true Live Streaming can be costly.   We do work with many partners that can complete this value chain very seamlessly, or for simple projects there's the very easy to use and free Adobe Live Media Encoder that can connect any camera to the servers via a PC.

I've been reading a great post by fellow Brightcove Blogger Chris Little over at our Ecosystem blogroll about how Brightcove Players have been whitelisted by Facebook. 

This essentially means that a user can share a video from your player/site and have it appear in their FB Newsfeed for immediate inline playback.

A new article in the Brightcove Developer Center by Jesse Streb demonstrates a custom SWF component that a tracks when a user has changed the audio volume setting in a player and stores that volume setting in a Flash shared object, otherwise known as as Flash cookie. Using this custom SWF, the next time users load a player, the player uses the volume setting they chose previously. Read all about it.

Alex Kieft, from DigiNovations, created a custom component and custom player template for a player that shows the number of times the currently-playing video has been viewed. The component code has been written as the document class for a Flash CS4 or Flex 3 ActionScript project, but it could easily be adapted to work in other circumstances. Read all about it.

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

We have a new article and code sample in the Dev Center. Chris DeGrace describes how you can use the linkBaseURL player configuration parameter, as well as the getLink() and setLink() methods of the Player API to automatically append the playlist ID and video ID to the "get link" URL in order to support deep linking.