Brightcove Launches Much Improved User Interface
Brightcove is a web video publishing platform aimed at professional publishers that, according to Techcrunch, streams several hundred million videos a month. Its clients include large media brands like Showtime, Lifetime, HBO, the New York Times and AMC (you can watch Mad Men through their player on the AMC website). Brightcove is a paid service with prices starting at a few thousand dollars a year.
I have used Brightcove on random projects over the years and developed a love/hate relationship with the product.
On the positive side, it is definitely the most feature rich video publishing tool I’ve ever used. Among other features, Brightcove offer six different video players you can customize and allows you to quickly and easily set up custom video playlists and automatically serve lower quality versions of videos to people with slower Internet connections. It is the engine behind Barack Obama’s creative Barack TV section and AMC’s Mad Men user generated video contest. The feature set is truly impressive.
On the negative side, up until a few days ago Brightcove had one of the most maddening user interfaces I’ve ever used. Truly awful. Simply uploading and posting a video involved downloading a desktop client and then separately logging in to their web interface and going through more hoops. Simply uploading a video and getting the appropriate embed code took four steps when it really should be done in one motion. Assets, Titles, Lineups, Players. After spending probably thirty minutes a day in their interface for a month, I had basically gotten to the point where I could do what I needed to do but had in no way mastered the platform.
So when I logged into Brightcove on Tuesday and saw that they had completely overhauled their user interface I was not happy. It had taken a long time to get my bearings in the old interface and I had no interest in learning a new one, which I assumed would simply be confusing in different ways.
I was wrong. (View an overview of new interface on Techcrunch here.)
While not as easy-to-use as YouTube or Blip.tv, the Brightcove user interface has been streamlined dramatically while retaining the robust feature set that made the tool unique in the first place. Uploading a video no longer involves installing a desktop client and has been reduced to one step. All the value-added features are still there, but are quarantined from the upload process so that they don’t create static in the video upload process.
Basically you can now safely use Brightcove without having a Masters degree in Computer Science.
Would I now recommend Brightcove? It depends. For probably 95% of the clients I work for, I’d push them towards Blip.tv if YouTube isn’t cutting it. Blip allows for really high quality video, is relatively feature rich and costs less than Brightcove. Brightcove is overkill for most people. However, now that the user interface problem has been fixed, I would whole heartedly recommend Brightcove for the 5% of people that need a really high end web publishing solution.
Product Website Highlight: Acne.org
Many product-selling websites include a lot of Web 2.0 tricks to convince the Internet surfer that the product is worth checking out. Heck, even Cheerios has a website which includes a flashy splash intro. Most product sites seem to be nothing more than an excuse to have a site, like a self-fulfilling prophecy of owning a company:
"Well, if we have a product, we must have a website!"
Certain consumer products have useful and inventive websites, such as this one I recently found: Acne.org. I found this site through a linked video in YouTube. The site contains many of these videos, which is a brilliant idea for free advertisement (click on the thumbnails for full-size pics).
The site is massive in content. From just the home page, a viewer can tell the large amount of information conveyed throughout all of the separate pages. The top menu bar alone contains more than twenty different sections from which to choose, all separated under broader categories. Many of these sections include video demonstrations of the tips and tricks that the web master (and product creator) hopes to teach. These video clips are high quality, short, well-scripted, and have reasonable volume.
Tina Fey, twitter, and the Elections
Ok. I admit it. I never really "dugg" twitter. While I did tweet for awhile, it was simply a different way for me to update my Facebook status. I killed two birds (not the cute twitter bird) with one stone. I guess that composing snappy 140-character or less haikus isn't my cup of tea, and I only drink herbal tea…
Beyond that, anyone who simply replied to me likely got ignored due to my ignorance of the rejoinder. No, I don't like desktop applications for twitter. Half the time this ignorance was caused by twitter birds focusing on hefty the infamous whale instead of processing tweets. Then there is the seemingly vast cottage industry of companies and products who owe their existence to twitter. You can upload photos, shorten URLs, track your analytics, and probably submit your taxes via twitter, but nothing piqued my interest that much until now.
While checking someone's twitter feed today, I noticed links to twitter's election page at http://twurl.nl/npo6wl (shortened for mere kicks and giggles). Through this page twitter displays tweets with specific words. For instance, you can click on a link to see what people are tweeting about Tina Fey-impersonator Sarah Palin. Now, I find that interesting and useful. This service, however simple in theory, aggregates the tweets — from the serious to the snarky — in a way that enables me to quickly check the pulse of how the twitterverse feels about specific topics.
Granted, I've seen other services that aggregate tweets around specific events and topics, but this is the first time I've seen it on twitter itself. Hopefully, we'll see more of these useful pages instead of the birdies and the whale.
Information Overload during the VP Debate?
I was astounded at the amount of different technical venues for the watchers of the debate. In four years, the Internet has started playing a more vital role in influencing voters' decisions.
Some of the most impressive tools came from an unsurprising source, the website of ‘political giant' CNN. Not only could you watch the debate live from your laptop but you could also watch the debate live with blogger comments displayed on your screen. In addition to that, you could watch live analysis from expert political teams. This means that debate watchers not only had the ability to hear from their peers, but also experienced analysts.
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