Setting Up Custom Metadata

Custom metadata is available only for Brightcove Pro and Enterprise customers. If you are interested in upgrading your Brightcove account, please contact Brightcove for more information.

Every video has properties, or metadata, such as the video's name, short description, and tags. The standard metadata fields available for videos is listed in the Player API Reference. However, you may have special business needs for additional metadata fields for your videos. In that case, you can create and use custom metadata. This can be very helpful if you have additional video metadata stored in your CMS that you would like to associate with your Videos in Brightcove, that can then be accessed in the player for display or integration purposes. For example, if you wanted to track the Episode Number for a show, you could create a custom field to store this information and update your CMS integration to grab the info from your CMS, store it in your Brightcove Video metadata, and then display it to users when they view that video in a player. You can also use custom metadata to store information about the video that is required when tracking Video events in your Analytic solution, for example a category identifier.

Main steps for setting up custom metadata fields

To set up custom metadata fields:

1. Carefully plan the metadata fields you require for your videos. While it is possible to add metadata properties on the fly and, with some difficulty, to remove them, it is best to establish a definitive list of custom metadata fields before you start applying the custom fields to your videos to avoid unnecessary data migrations down the line.
2. Determine what data type each property should be. In this release, custom fields can be either text or lists (see Defining custom metadata fields).

Defining custom metadata fields

In this release of Brightcove, the data type of a custom metadata field can be either text string or a list. In future releases, we expect to support numbers, URLs, and dates as data types. You can have no more than 50 custom fields, in any combination of the available data types. You can define up to 10 custom flelds yourself using the Video Fields page in the Brightcove Studio Account Settings page. If you need more than 10 custom fields, please contact your Account Manager or Brightcove customer support.

• A text field is a series of alphanumeric characters of 1024 characters or less.
• A list allows you to select a single value from a list of pre-determined string values.
  • Any list can have no more than 150 possible string values.
  • Each string value in the list can be no more than 100 characters long.

For each custom metadata field, you need to specify:

• display name – this will appear as the label for the field in the Media module.
• internal name – this is the name that will be used in the Media API and in FTP batch provisioning.
• field type – either text or list.

Setting and updating custom metadata values

Brightcove offers three different approaches to creating and updating videos, and you can use any of them to set and update custom metadata values:

• Media module in Brightcove Studio
• FTP batch provisioning
• Media API

Custom metadata is also available through the Player API:

• Accessing a Video's Custom Metadata