Before You Begin

Applies to Roles
Ad Operations
Version
Brightcove 4
Modules
Edition
Express, Pro, Enterprise

Before you begin integrating your ad server with Brightcove, you, as a member of the Ad Operations team, should complete the following tasks:

Learn about the video publishing strategy

Learn as much as you possible about your video publishing strategy from your product and programming team before planning your integration and beginning the ad operations tasks. As a member of the Ad Operations team, you should actively seek out what your company's video strategy is or might be in the near future and get involved BEFORE the business decisions are made. Go out and proactively ask the following questions so that you can prepare appropriately:

  • How does the video platform we will use support advertising? 
  • What advertising technologies and video ad formats are supported?
  • What will our video publishing model look like?  Will the player design impact the ability to sell advertising campaigns?
  • What is your expected video stream volume and how will that initially impact our available inventory?

The size and features of the players your organization has chosen influences the ad formats that can be sold and served. Before you begin enabling video and player policies, you must know this information. The Brightcove Publisher Center provides more information on how to perform the following tasks: Creating a player, Uploading assets, Creating playlists, and Programming Playlists.

Obtain and read all documentation

Carefully read all Brightcove and ad server documentation, including integration and video ad trafficking documentation. Contact your ad server support team for documentation on the ad server you are using.

In addition, the Developer Center contains several articles related to advertising operations written by developers or customer support or sales engineers that may be of interest. Click here to access these articles.

Determine how video ads will be hosted

Brightcove does not support the hosting of video ads. Publishers are responsible for hosting all video ad assets and banner creatives.

Determine how video ads will be encoded

You will need to encode your video ads using a video encoding program or obtain a publisher's FLV video file from your advertisers. Brightcove provides ad specifications that you can modify and distribute to you advertisers and agencies.

If you prefer, you can have your internal resources publish the files.

For more information, see Video Source Files Specifications and Recommendations.

Determine what tools are needed

You will need to obtain and use a number of tools for video ad trafficking and troubleshooting. Tools that you should consider obtaining are:

For more information about how to use each of these tools, see Troubleshooting Ad Campaigns.

Installing an FLV player and viewing ad creatives

This section describes how to install an FLV Player and view video ads. By viewing the video ads, you can ensure that you know where they are located, that they are displaying properly, and you can determine their duration. You will need to know the location and duration of video ads during ad trafficking.

  1. There are a number of FLV Players available from the Internet. Locate and download an FLV Player.
  2. After the FLV Player has been downloaded, locate the http:// or https:// video path of the video ad you want to view and paste the video path into a browser window.
  3. Press the Enter key.

The FLV Player will open and the video ad will play.

Ad Server-specific tasks

For additional tasks specific to your ad server, click on the appropriate ad server below:

What's Next...
Integrating your ad server

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