The new Smart Player API that works for both HTML5 and Flash players brings many benefits, including the ability to display captions or subtitles for you videos.

Brightcove recently announced the release of Brightcove 4.2, a substantial revision to our platform. Among the product changes (which you can read about here), there’s one in particular that is tremendously valuable for Express customers: HTML5 smart players.

Let's say a viewer discovers your video content, and they enjoy it so much they share that video with their friends. Those friends then view your content, and share it with their social network as well. Each successive "round" of sharing increases the number of viewers exponentially. This is the nature of viral sharing; by leveraging the power of your viewers’ social networks, you dramatically raise the visibility of your content.

If you're publishing video on the World Wide Web, it's great if you can make your video player welcoming to the whole wide world. Publishing players with labels on the player's controls that match the language of your audience really enhances the video experience for your viewers.

These days, just about anyone can create a blog and build a substantial following. Generating content for a blog isn’t easy, and bloggers are always on the lookout for engaging content to display to their viewers – like your videos, for example.

You can make it easy for these bloggers to display your videos using Brightcove’s blog this/get code feature. In doing so, you’ll increase your viewership, as the blog’s entire audience will be exposed to your video.

Our tabbed playlist players allow your viewers to easily navigate through a large library of content, making the players a fantastic choice for dedicated video portals or centralized media libraries. Our original tabbed playlist player choices were restricted to a single size and optimized for 4:3 videos, and we received a wealth of feedback from customers who wanted the functionality, look, and feel of a tabbed playlist player but also wanted to resize the player and/or optimize the size for 16:9 video content.

Let's say a viewer discovers your video content, and they enjoy it so much they share that video with their friends. Those friends then view your content, and share it with their social network as well. Each successive "round" of sharing increases the number of viewers exponentially. This is the nature of viral sharing; by leveraging the power of your viewers’ social networks, you dramatically raise the visibility of your content.

The domain restriction feature can help you limit where your video can be seen. You can configure a player so that it can only be displayed in the domain or domains you choose. For example, if you have a player that you want to show only on your corporate intranet, you can configure the player so it will only load on your intranet's URL. Or, if you syndicate your content, you can create a separate player for each affiliate, and configure the player so it only loads on the affiliate's domain.

So we've blogged about this special relationship we have with Facebook here and here and now we have a practical real world example of the integration!

One of my favourite emerging player publishing models is what I like to call 'The Hook and Bucket'.  This model tends to be of tremendous value for omni-media infotainment publishers like La Vanguardia in Spain and the OMS network in Germany.

We're always interested in hearing from customers and partners about new and unique ways they are using the Brightcove APIs and our markup language, BEML, to build highly customized online video experiences. The flexibility of our platform enables organizations of all kinds to deliver customized user experiences that match the overall design and feel of their site and help them to deeply integrate video with the rest of their Web content.

Our latest release introduced a new feature that the design team here is particularly excited about…custom player skins! Now, in addition to our existing styling capabilities, you can replace elements of our players with custom images, providing more fine-grained control over the look and feel of your players. Learn more.

In the following example, I have skinned a number of elements to illustrate the flexibility that custom skins provide. Here is the before and after:

Quick update to my post last month, a couple of our customers have already updated their Facebook Fan pages to include Brightcove video! Check it out:

FX
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Dexter-on-FX-UK/66266495963?v=app_4949752878

US Army
http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/USarmy?v=app_6009294086&viewas=783147299

Want to add video to your Facebook Fan Page? Here are the steps to get you there:

The Player API's Experience Module has a new method named getStage() that returns a reference to the player's Stage. This opens up all kinds of possibilities. Chris DeGrace examines some of them, including how you can use getStage() to access the configuratiom parameters (like publisherID and @videoPlayer) in the player's publishing code. Read all about it.

A quick one for the Friday afternoon (glorious sunshine in London today!) about Player level security.

It's a absolute must that you protect your content and your rights and Brightcove offers great features to lock things down on all levels.

At the player level don't forget to lock your players to your web domain.   This will prevent your publishing code being screen scrapped and taken away without your consent (a massive security hole in many DIY and commercial video platforms out there).

We all know that inbound links are good for SEO!

One of the key ingredients for creating a successful brand requires consistency.  Yet when it comes to video, branding the player often gets overlooked.

Maybe you have detailed guidelines that describe exactly how and where your branding should be used or you could just have a logo and color palette.  Either way you can gain value in extending your brand language to your video player.  By following these tips you can help increase your brand awareness and take advantage of the many places your video will appear online.

I have recently been discussing video player capability with a major UK-based client as a part of a launch management project. Before the advent of BEML (Brightcove Experience Markup Language), the primary choice was between adoption of a pre-built template or creation of a completely custom player experience using Flash and/or JavaScript.