If you're new to Brightcove 3, you may be wondering about how to best take advantage of the Single Video Player template on your site and how to keep control over the look and feel of your players.
If you are currently using Brightcove 2 single title players, you may have wondered if there was a faster way to get your content online. In Brightcove 2, there are quite a few steps involved in publishing a new video in a simple single title player on your site. This is one of the workflows we greatly simplified in Brightcove 3.
With Brightcove 3 you can get single videos onto your site faster. In addition, the Brightcove 3 player offers a host of other advantages: faster load time, smaller player download size, more configurable player options in the UI, easier analytics integration, dynamic delivery to ensure your end users are getting the best video quality experience, and real full screen mode.
Let me elaborate.
The player framework was completely rebuilt from the ground up in Brightcove 3 to take full advantage of ActionScript 3.0 and the new and improved Flash runtime, which is inherently faster than its predecessor. Also, the Brightcove 3 players load the various modules dynamically to provide the features you've enabled, rather than loading all available modules.
You can reduce the size of your Brightcove 3 player by disabling player features you are not using. For example, if you are not using the Brightcove Player APIs, disabling this option in the Publishing module for the player will save you 45 kB (this is the default setting).
Player features you can disable to reduce the player size, and therefore the loading time, are:
Adding functionality necessarily adds to the size of the player that needs to be loaded. With Brightcove 3, the power to determine the size of your player is in your hands. Check out the player load performance demo.
When building Brightcove 3, we conducted many usability studies with our publishers. We wanted to speed up the time it took to upload a single video and post it on your web site, so we invented Quick Publish. Click here to read more about how to use Quick Publish.
You can publish a new video on your web site in two steps:
Quick Publish is great because it allows you to re-use your single video players as 'skins' for your videos. Instead of having to create a new player each time you want to publish a new video, you can create single video players with the branding, features, and controls you need in the Publishing module, and then re-use these experiences for all new videos on your site.
Not only does this allow you to have a controlled, consistent, branded experience for your videos, but it is way easier to maintain. If you want to change the look or any of the player controls for the videos on your site, you don't need to administer the changes to each player instance, with this method you'd have a handful of player skins to update and you're done!
Brightcove 3 players are so flexible. Not only can you build your own player template (Pro & Enterprise customers only), but there are a lot of player controls available in the Publishing module. All of the features below are settings exposed per player in the Publishing module:
Read more about all the available player settings.
If you're going to provide full screen mode in your players, want to deliver high quality content, or you are delivering content to low-bandwidth geographies, you should consider leveraging Brightcove 3's dynamic delivery feature. We do all the work for you. Simply upload an H.264 or other high-quality video format, and we will transcode the file into multiple renditions – from low to high quality. Then, without any additional configuration, the player will choose the best rendition to play back to the user, based on their playback window size and available bandwidth.
It's so great because you don't have to do anything to take advantage of it!
Now that you have all the information you need, get started by creating a new Brightcove 3 player.