Brightcove is a video platform that offers streaming solutions and other video hosting features, perfect for organizations. But what else do you know about the platform?
The Brightcove platform offers vital solutions to any organization looking to leverage the power of video. These solutions include live streaming to engage with customers and audiences, internal team communication, employee training, and more.
However, before you sign up for Brightcove, there are a few things to know about the platform. Here are the top ones you should keep in mind.
1. A whole range of video solutions, including streaming
Brightcove offers a variety of video products and solutions that are suited to the different needs of organizations. These include:
Video hosting
Video hosting is one of Brightcove’s top solutions. The company offers a Video Cloud Studio platform for uploading, managing, and publishing videos.
The Video Cloud has several cool features that can be useful to an organization. These include creating galleries for easier management of your videos, creating and managing user accounts, language settings, and more.
Live streaming
Brightcove offers a Live module which allows you to easily broadcast live events to various desktop and mobile devices or publish them to platforms like Facebook and YouTube.
You can use the Brightcove Live module in several ways, such as:
- Hosting and broadcasting live events
- Hosting virtual events, for example, town hall meetings and employee training events.
- Broadcasting 24/7 linear channels.
- Integrating the Brightcove Live module with web conferencing applications like Zoom, Avaya Conference, Cisco Webex Conference, and INXPO Event.
OTT (over-the-top) solutions
Brightcove offers several OTT solutions which allow you to deliver video content to a wide range of audiences through live streaming or video on demand.
The platform’s OTT solutions include:
- Brightcove Beacon: An OTT platform that allows you to create a single streaming experience that can be broadcast to various devices. It has some cool features, like an admin portal and a content management system.
- OTT Flow: An OTT platform (powered by the Brightcove Cloud) that you can use to seamlessly offer live and on-demand video services.
Brightcove also offers an OTT application management system, which you can use to build custom OTT apps for your organization.
2. Brightcove tools and features
Besides the video solutions and products, Brightcove offers a range of tools and features designed to improve your experience on the platform. These include:
A Customizable video gallery
Brightcove offers a gallery platform that allows you to create custom video experiences.
You can use the gallery to create:
- A customized, branded video portal that you can host on Brightcove.
- Custom, in-page video experiences that allow you to display branded video layouts on your web pages.
- Custom landing pages that you can use for marketing campaigns.
- Custom event experiences for your live or virtual event, thus improving your audience engagement.
A Customizable video player
The Brightcove player is another top tool offered by the video hosting platform. The player is designed using HTML5, which allows for a consistent look and experience across all devices.
The video player is also fast-loading and highly responsive, which improves your audience’s user experience.
Another cool feature of the video player is its customizability. For example, you can customize the appearance of the video player’s skin to match your brand image.
You can also create custom captions, playlists, and interactions in your video player using plugins, which can significantly improve audience engagement.
Social media integration tools
Brightcove offers a social media module that allows you to easily publish videos in your Video Cloud to various social media platforms, such as Facebook, YouTube, and X (formerly Twitter).
You can publish the videos manually or automatically synchronize the videos in your Video Cloud account with your social media channels.
The Brightcove social modules also offer several other features like:
- Allowing you to publish live events on Facebook and YouTube
- Adding social media like buttons to your video player.
- Creating privacy settings for your video.
Video interactivity features
Brightcove offers an interactivity module that allows you to add interactivity features to your videos, thus increasing user engagement.
Some of the cool things you can do with the interactivity module include:
- Adding text and image overlays to your videos
- Adding drawings to videos
- Adding chapters to videos
- Adding quiz annotations to videos
- Adding time-triggered events to your videos (for example, pausing, playing, or jumping to a specific time)
- Adding polls and user sentiment features to videos
- Adding chat features to your videos
- Embedding a form in your videos
- Creating branching and slide-sync experience for your videos.
3. Video monetization options
Brightcove is not just a platform for hosting and publishing your videos; it also allows you to monetize your content, thus increasing your organization’s revenue.
The platform has several content monetization solutions you can use, including:
Ad-based monetization
With Brightcove, you can place adverts on your videos, earning revenue when your audience watches them. The platform offers several ad-based monetization options, including:
- Adverts from third-party platforms such as Google Ad Manager and Magnite.
- Server-Side Ad Insertion (SSAI): You can insert ads directly into your videos on the Brightcove video hosting platform, which your audience will view as they watch your videos.
- Client-Side Ad Insertion (CSAI): You can insert ads directly into the video players, which will be accessible to users on their devices when they play your content.
- Free ad-supported streaming television (FAST) channels: You can earn ad revenue on Brightcove by providing your audience free ad-supported content via the 24/7 linear channels.
Subscription-based monetization
You can create a subscription-based monetization system where your target audience subscribes to your platform. This can be perfect if you have many fans amongst your target audience willing to pay to access your content.
With the subscription-based model, you could even create different tiers for your fans. For example, you can have a plan where subscribers pay a higher price to access your content without ads and another subsidized plan where users access your content but with some ads.
Transaction-based monetization
You can monetize your content on Brightcove with one-off transactions. This can include charging a one-time access fee for your videos or selling access to live streams and virtual events.
The best part about Brightcove is that you can combine all (or mix and match) the above monetization solutions to create a robust platform that earns you the maximum revenue for your content.
4. Analytics and reporting tools
Brightcove offers several analytics and reporting tools that help you measure user engagement and monetization for your video content. These tools are vital for organizations, as they can help you achieve your goals and scale up your enterprise.
Some of the top analytics and reporting tools you can find on Brightcove include:
- Video metrics: The platform offers several video metrics, such as play requests, play rates, player load time, video views, daily unique views, and live seconds streamed.
- Performance reports: You can access several performance reports with metrics such as the number of video views, traffic sources, types of devices, and the device OS system.
- Engagement reports: You can find out how your engagement is performing with metrics such as which videos (or portion of your videos) viewers are watching.
- Interactivity data: Brightcove provides you with a lot of data on your interactivity features, which offers insight into aspects such as how viewers are engaging with the features, their preferences, and what is motivating them.
- Social analytics: Brightcove provides several analytic tools to measure the performance of videos posted on your social media platforms. These include the number of social views and social engagements (likes, retweets, and shares).
- Ads and marketing insights: Brightcove offers several analytics and reporting tools that provide comprehensive insights into the performance of your ad monetization and marketing campaigns.
In addition to the tools offered by Brightcove, the platform also allows integration with other third-party tools, such as Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, Domo, Surfmeter Client Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Streamhub, Tealium, The Filter, Wooshi Insight, and more.
5. The pricing structure
When it comes to price, Brightcove does not offer standard pricing packages. Instead, the platform’s cost depends on an organization’s specific needs.
One thing you will notice about Brightcove is that the platform does not openly advertise its prices; prospective customers must contact the sales team for pricing details. However, this is unsurprising because it is mostly designed for organizations.
However, a few details about Brightcove pricing have leaked on the internet. According to Enveu (a Brightcove competitor), starter plans on the platform start at $199 per month.
According to Vendr, the average cost of the Brightcove platform is around $63,000 annually, while high-end plans can reach as much as $296,000 annually.
Brightcove pros and cons
Every video hosting platform comes with some pros and cons. Below is a detailed look at some of the benefits and drawbacks of Brightcove that you should take note of:
Pros
- It offers several powerful features for your video hosting needs.
- It offers cloud transcoding, which helps improve video streaming performance without needing a hardware-based transcoder.
- It is easily scalable, so you won’t have issues using the platform as your organization grows.
- It seamlessly integrates several third-party applications, tools, and services.
- You can request a free demo to get a feel for the platform before committing to a plan.
- The platform offers dedicated customer support to help you troubleshoot any issues you might encounter.
Cons
- It is expensive and can be unsuitable for individual users or small businesses and organizations with limited budgets.
- Using the platform requires a learning curve because of the many features and tools that can be quite technical.
- Some users have complained about limited analytics on the platform. However, this could be solved by using available third-party analytics tools.