Like all great films - and awards ceremonies honoring those films - there are plenty of behind-the-scenes players contributing to their success. In the case of the 2012 Orange British Academy Film Awards, one of those players was of the more literal variety: Brightcove’s Video Cloud Smart Player, which the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) used to display a wide-ranging assortment of video content leading up to and following its annual awards ceremony in London.

I recently had the opportunity to participate on a panel at the Business Video Expo (BVE) in Miami Beach. The topic, Video in the Cloud: Leveraging Hosted Solutions for Enhanced Communications, allowed me to share some best practices for online video strategies with an audience that was clearly eager to amplify their own initiatives.

We are very excited to announce that registration for Brightcove PLAY 2012 is now open! Visit play.brightcove.com to learn more about the event and to register today. If you register before May 1st, you can take advantage of our early bird pricing rate and save $500, so make sure you act fast!

Earlier today we announced that Matrix, the digital company of Telecom Italia, has chosen Brightcove Video Cloud to support its online video initiatives for the consumer news and entertainment website, Virgilio.it. Virgilio is one of the largest consumer sites in Italy with 15 million Web users per month, providing email, media sharing, news and location-based services to Italian-speaking users around the world.

We are happy to announce that smartycontent, a multimedia communication aggregator in Spain, has chosen Brightcove Video Cloud to power its i_smarty multimedia content player. smartycontent's service was launched with more than 7,000 video and has grown to reach an audience of 12 million unique users. 

We’re thrilled to announce that Brightcove App Cloud has been shortlisted for a GSMA Global Mobile Award in the Best Cloud-Based Technology category. The awards, which honor excellence and innovation in mobile communications, will be presented at a ceremony during Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Tuesday, Feb. 28.

The ringing in of every new year brings with it emphatic resolutions from across the globe to exercise more, get in shape, eat better, lose weight, etc. It also ushers in a host of articles, newscasts and blog posts - like this one - addressing those often hollow proclamations. Interestingly, online video is quickly becoming a tool that can help people keep those resolutions.

Mobile apps are proven to be effective in generating business value. But unless you are satisfied with a cookie cutter app from one of those app generators (I suspect that most reputable and respectful organizations won’t be), developing and managing your custom mobile apps could be very expensive and involve a lot of hidden costs. This is the case whether you are building an army of native app developers in-house or outsourcing the project to external development agencies.

Growing faster than any other segment of online advertising, online video advertising generates hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue each quarter for publishers from major media companies to special-interest websites.

It’s no secret that the amount of online video being produced and consumed is skyrocketing, with hundreds of millions of Internet users watching billions of videos every month. Ironically, the popularity of online video creates both tremendous opportunities along with some challenges for marketers and communicators to attract and engage audiences.

One of the most significant trends at CES 2012 this week in Las Vegas is the continued expansion of connected TV initiatives by numerous consumer electronics manufacturers.

We recently published a new Video Cloud customer case study with Cars.com, one of the Internet's largest automotive classified websites. Cars.com generates more than 10 million monthly visitors that use the site to browse, research and purchase new and used vehicles. The site began to feature editorial video content in 2007 as part of its commitment to giving car buyers the information they need to make confident buying decisions. 

Video: Following a new initiative, reporters throughout the newsroom, powered by the launch of a new video system (Brightcove Video Cloud), offered readers more story-related videos than ever, leading the way to our highest-trafficked month ever, with 514,650 streams.

A new Brightcove case study, “2,000 Years in the Making – Brightcove Helps Bring The JESUS Film Project® to Millions Via the Internet,” outlines how the ministry responsible for distributing the film, “JESUS,” transitioned from physical media to online video as its primary distribution channel.

Earlier this year we announced that NHK for Schools became the first Brightcove customer to implement online video digital rights management (DRM) using Video Cloud’s support for Adobe Flash Access. Numerous content owners around the world have since implemented the Video Cloud Flash Access option to reinforce their own online video streaming security measures.

Agility content management system (CMS) users now have the option of managing and publishing their user-generated video through Brightcove Video Cloud. This new functionality comes courtesy of a recent integration between the Agility User Generated Content (UGC) engine and Brightcove’s Video Cloud online video platform.

The available options for online video streaming security are wide and varied, often creating an arduous decision process for publishers evaluating how to best protect their valuable content. With those challenges in mind, Brightcove has launched a new Online Video Security page in the Brightcove Learning Center portion of our website.