Brightcove Express Review

If you use video as part of your online marketing, then you are probably struggling to find the best way to manage and distribute your videos. Up until a few months ago, I was experiencing the same problem until I discovered, or shall I say rediscovered, a company called Brightcove. As an internet marketer, I have known about them for a while.

Brightcove is the Rolls Royce of online video publishing and until recently their prices were out of the range of most small businesses or advertising agencies. When I heard they introduced new pricing structures for small businesses and were offering a free trial, I took them up on it and never looked back.

In my opinion, Brightcove is THE killer app for anyone wanting to market with video online. It has helped me increase sales in my business and made it easier to do so.

Instead of taking you through the ins and outs of the program, I thought I would give you the perspective of a small business owner and how it has helped me in my business. If you want to know how the program actually works, you can always download a thirty day trial and see for yourself.

This review is based on five months of using their service.

Brightcove Advantage #1: Smooth Playback with no Buffering

There is nothing more embarrassing for me than to show a client a video about my company or one I have produced for them only to have it stutter and buffer every five seconds. If you use Youtube or any of the other sites like it, you know what I am talking about. Especially with HD video. Sometimes you have to wait several seconds for the video to start only to have it buffer and stutter a few seconds later.

Brightcove has solved this major problem with something called multibitrate streaming. Basically what this means is, when you upload one of your videos to your Brightcove express account, they make up to six versions of the video optimized for different internet speed. Then when someone watches your video, Brightcove Express delivers the version that matches their internet speed so there is no more buffering. Sounds awesome, right? To see if this really worked I watched a video with my high-speed office connection and Brightcove delivered a beautiful high quality HD version.

I also wanted to see if the video played buffer-free at lower connection speeds so I hooked my laptop up to my 3g modem that I use for travel. Of course this connection is much slower than your typical cable connection so this would be a really good test. To my surprise, Brightcove delivered a version optimized for my slower connection and there was no buffering at all. Of course the quality was a little lower but I will take a little lower quality over buffer frustration any day. Now I can rest easy knowing that no matter what part of the world someone is in while watching my videos, they are having a great buffer-free experience.

Brightcove Advantage #2 Embed Once and Future Updates are Reflected

If you are always updating and changing video on your site, this feature will be a dream come true. With Brightcove, you only have to embed your video player once on your site, then any changes you make to that player in your Brightcove media manger will automatically change on your website. There is no more embedding the code after every little change you want to make.

For example: look at the video player for my magic show below. If I want to rearrange or add new videos, I just upload or rearrange in Brightove and the changes reflect on this player.

This might not be a big deal if you only have this player on one page but I have this particular player embedded on fifty pages. I have a magic show page for every major city in America so I can rank well in multiple cities. It is important for me to have video at the top of all these pages so potential clients can see what I do right away.  A few times a month, I view my Brightcove analytics (more on that later) and see which videos are performing the best and swap them around to maximize the amount of time visitors sepnd on my site. Like magic, the change is reflected on all fifty pages. Imagine if had to change all fifty pages every time. Chances are I would not do it.

Another great way to use this feature is if you have a featured video player on your home page. Instead of changing the code each time, you can created a featured video playlist and any content you put into the playlist will be reflected on your home page.

Brightcove Advantage #3: Awesome Analytics

The analytics in Brightcove is second to none. At first I didn’t think it was a big deal, but now I am addicted. Not only can you see how many plays your video has, but you can see how long people actually watched your video. I was floored when I saw this data and it taught me how to create better videos to sell my services and products.

Let me explain. Last year we started a twitter management service for clients. I made a video describing all the benefits of twitter and why it is important to maintain a presence. This video lasted about four minutes and I thought it was a masterpiece of mixing relevant information with a sales message. Boy was I wrong. Through the Brightcove analytics, I saw that fifty percent of the people stopped watching the video twenty seconds into it and the other fifty percent barely made it halfway through. According to the analytics, only three people watched it all the way through, and I think that might have been me admiring my work.

With this new information, I reshot the video and made it forty seconds long giving only the highlights of price, how we get followers by geography and how many posts we do for you. To my amazement, site visitors started watching it all the way through and we started closing more sales.

I would recommend you use this data in your business and keep tweaking your videos until you see people are watching to at least seventy five percent. It has made a difference in my business, and I think it will make a difference in your as well.

Brightcove Advantage #4 Brightcove’s Players Are Professional Grade

Before I started using Brightcove, one of the gripes I had with most other video hosting companies was their lack of player customization. Again, Brightcove has answered. Not only can you change every single aspect of the player such as player colors, size, rollover links and backgrounds, but you have several tools at your deposal for sharing your video. If you look at the player below,

• you can share it via twitter or facebook
• you can email it to someone
• you can get the embed code
• You can get the page link

Also you will notice a “more info” watermark on the video. If you click that, it will take you to the video landing page–a feature I absolutely love. I know Brightcove intended it to be a logo overlay to brand your business but I am a small business. I don’t want to brand as much as I want to drive traffic, so I turned it into a blatant lead generator. The best part about this is no matter where this video ends up through social sharing or through people placing it on their blog, that video will always have that watermark to drive traffic back to the host website. (This particular video leads to the website of one of my clients).

Brightcove Advantage #5 The Best Customer Support in the Industry

Their customer support is the best I have had in recent memory. When I first joined, I signed up under their $99 dollar plan and was perfectly happy to figure things out for myself. But fortunately, this was not going to be the case. A few days after I signed up, I got a call from my “account manager”. I mean come on, I was only spending $99 bucks a month and they still found me important enough to give me one of those. How cool! During this call he ask me if I was finding everything ok and answered all my questions, and when there were a few he could not answer, he said he would have tech support contact me. Not five minutes later, tech support called. Wait, it gets better. I think it was about two weeks into my service with Brightcove and I got an email from them asking me if I had a few minutes to talk. They wanted to brainstorm with me on what new features or improvements to current ones I would like to see. Now, I could see them wanting to brainstorm with Fox or Staples, but me? Wow. The only way to put this into words really is to say that I feel they don’t discriminate against your price plan. I mean they make me feel like I am just as important to them as the CEO of General Motors. I feel like they are my video content partner instead of my video content provider. I feel that if I have an idea that I would like to see, I could call them up and the entire company would stop what they’re doing to listen to what I have to say. I am not saying they would, I am just saying that is how they make me feel. In fact they have inspired me to give that kind of customer service to my clients.

As you can tell I have become a Brightcove Fanboy over the last few months and I think you will to. They have a thirty day trial so you can see for yourself how wonderful this company really is. Check them out at www.brightcove.comI wrote this review because I know when I was searching for video hosts, I could have used this information, and it is my hope that I can save you a lot of aggravation. Good luck to you; and if you try their service, let me know what you think.