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.

But then there's the question of trying before buying.   Before investing in establishing what could be a hefty workflow and value chain why not make sure your users would find this of interest?

That's where Simulated Live Streaming can be a great tool.   Either used in a market research / transitional phases or to bring a cost effective Live-like solution to build a real-time viewership, Simulated Live Streaming is relatively simple to do and is available for most versions of Brightcove (Brightcove 499 Express minimum, Pro and higher preferable).

Simulated Live lets you use never before seen VOD content in a way such that all your viewers are watching the same thing at the same time.  Adding in a live chat app like Twitter / Facebook Livestream box and you've got a real time interaction for the community.

To do this you'll need:

• A Brightcove account
• Some content in a playlist
• A PHP server
• Your Brightcove Media API Read token
• Some JavaScript knowledge
• Access to our BEML templating system (Pro Edition and higher)
• Some spare time

Here is what you need to do.

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I'm heading down to give my 15mins of cents to the London Facebook Garage tonight.

For those not able to make it tonight we're going to do what we did with the Drupal for Marketing event and stream this live over the BC3 platform.

We'll also have the same tie into a Facebook Livestream box and you can embed the stream directly into your FB Profile by clicking the button in-player.

You can see more about the event here : http://www.facebookgarage.co.uk/

Enjoy!

Please note that the stream probably won't come up until 7pm so keep trying to connect.

This event has now closed and the player taken down. Was a great time! Head over to the Facebook Garage website to view post event videos

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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.

I have need of such an integration to help spread the word of a live event we're looking at doing with Drupal tomorrow.

After digging into the code - I found it had some limitations given the FB's architecture requires the metadata of the video and player to be hosted on a HTML page.   If you're doing contextual publishing then this can be relatively straightfoward.

But I'm more interested in build this out in a BEML component that can be transported to any of my player templates.

To do this I needed 3 things

1. A server side script to create the meta tags on the fly

2. A BEML component to call the FB Sharer URL

3. A BEML Image link added to the player to allow a user to action it

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There's so much buzz out there about the iPhone and what it means for the mobile online video market.  Sometimes the noise is so energetic that we tend to forget that the iPhone is only one player in the vast smartphone market.

Here, our Regional Director of Sales Engineering, Mark Harpur gives us a great anecdote that demonstrates that Brightcove is ready and available to handsets beyond the iPhone:

During Wimbledon I was watching Murray’s second round match streaming on my PC, it was getting late and I didn’t want to miss the end of it, but needed to get home.  What I needed was an application that would allow me to watch online, streaming video on my phone. Enter Skyfire (http://www.skyfire.com/) which is a mobile browser with full flash support. After a quick download and install, I was able to watch the rest of the match on the train home on BBC iPlayer and since it supports flash, this means that Brightcove players can be viewed as well. The video below shows a streaming video (note this is full streaming not PD) in Brightcove running on my HTC Touch Pro.

 http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid1873859723?bctid=30587652001

There are a few limitations such as no full screen and you will probably want to use your phone’s wifi connection where possible to avoid massive bills, but on the whole a great experience. Sorry iPhone users, it is only available for Windows Mobile phone or a Nokia phone users so I  guess you will have to wait awhile for someone to create a streaming video app.

--- Cameron Church

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As the Brightcove platform continues to be used as the foundation for new and unique applications, one of the most exciting emerging proposals is for internal communications over a corporate intranet.

The use cases we're starting to see is for large multinationals who have embraced video as a key tool for corporate and client communications, particularily in the finanicial and legal vertical - if a picture says a 1000 words, how many words does a video say?

I'm happy to say that running Brightcove over an intranet is just as straightforward as running it over the internet.   This is thanks to the Flash client side runtime that allows the BC platform to adopt the end user's security profile for accessing local resources.

There are some limitations and things to do to get this up and running but nothing that should scare you off to giving it serious consideration for your corporation.

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