Everyman IT

I have been conducting a beta test of the Brightcove Video Delivery Service for use delivering our content.  After a few days playing with it I have to say that it has a lot going for it, but there are a few specific quirks that will keep EverymanIT from migrating as of yet.

Brightcove seems to be a fantastic platform for the non-geek.  It’s easy to use, robust, powerful and relatively inexpensive for what you get. It took me all of 5 minutes to figure out how get a video into production on our site.

Basically there is a simple web interface that you use to upload your video files.  When you upload the files Brightcove automatically creates 6 versions of the video files of different quality depending on the connection speed of the viewer.  When a visitor is viewing your videos Brightcove automatically detects their connection speed and provides the video file that will play best.  Brightcove keeps rechecking the speed and will switch between video versions seamlessly as the visitors connection speed goes up or down.

Once your video file has been uploaded and processed you can choose the video player template that you like the best, and then you simply copy and paste the code for your video to your website.  For the more ambitious video producers there are a number of options you can modify for each video file.  Including; Watermarks, Meta Tags, and Social Networking Links.

The starting package is only $99 per month with no contract.  This allows you to post 50 videos of any size and gives you 40GB of streaming bandwidth.  This is definitely a great service if you are beta testing or playing around with video distribution, and if you decide you like the platform you can easily expand your plan to the $199 version, $499 version and the professional series starting at around $1000.

On top of all of this Brightcove also encodes your videos not just for Flash Players, but also for the iPhone/iPad/iPod.  So unlike most streaming video service you can reach out to the iCrowd.

They also have a detailed Analytics package so that you can see how your videos are being used by your visitors.

Saying all of that there are some drawbacks that make me shy away from using Brightcove yet.  The first issue for me is the inability to set buffer length.  Brightcove automatically buffers between 2-20 seconds. This means that if people try to skip around within my classes they will have to wait for the video to play until the buffer fills.  If someone is trying to find something specific this can be beyond annoying.

Beyond this Brightcove is a relatively closed system for plugins and modules.  Unlike our JW Player you cannot simply buy and add plugins as you wish.  Closed systems always make me a bit nervous.

And finally although the bandwidth allocation should be fine for most video distributors since our classes range 20-120 minutes long I am concerned that the allocation will end up not being enough for us.  Even at the $499 plan they give 250GB, compared to the 4.5TB we get from our servers at our colocation facility for $310 per month.  Being that we already own our servers on software there is no mitigating cost savings.

The iPod/iPad/iPhone compatibility is something that I wish to have, but I honestly don’t believe that for our demographics demand being able to watch classes on their smart phones.

If I had known of Brightcove before we invested in our servers we may have used them for video distribution instead.  All in all if you are thinking of running a real video site you should take at Brightcove.  It’s relatively cheap, easy to use and unless you’re picky like me it should do what you need.  AND since there is no contract it’s a good place to start and if you out grow their service you can migrate to you own servers later.

Check out Brightcove at:  http://www.brightcove.com/en

Update September 3, 2010

Bob Mason the CTO of Brightcove informed me that you can modify the buffer settings manually.  He pointed me to this support page, and it works well during my tests: http://developer.brightcove.com/en/articles/player-load-and-stream-connection-apis