Advertising Module

Why does a video still flash before the preroll ad or between videos?
EDITION: Enterprise, Express 499, Pro / CATEGORY: Advertising Module / PRODUCT: Video Cloud
The reason why you are seeing a video still flash before the preroll ad or between videos is because it is giving the Player something to display while it is fetching the next Video clip. This is a design functionality.

While faster connections may see the Video Still quicker than others, slower connections will remain on the Video Still with a Loading Video animation while waiting for the Player to retrieve the next Video.

If this is a serious problem for you, replacing all video stills with a blank image is one way to work around this.
Is there any way to set the player so an ad starts to play at a pre-designated time in the video?
EDITION: All / CATEGORY: Advertising Module / PRODUCT: Video Cloud
In order to set an ad to start playing at a designated time, you would need to set a cue point. A cue point is a marker at a precise time point in the duration of a video. You can use cue points to trigger mid-roll ads (that is, ads that occur during playback of the video content, like a commercial break) or to separate chapters or scenes in a long-form video.

There are two types of cue points:

Ad Cue Points: Trigger ad requests.
Code Cue Points: Cause an event that you can listen for and respond to. Often used to indicate a chapter or scene break in a video.

There are five ways to set cue points in videos. You can set cue points using:

The Brightcove Media module
The Brightcove Advertising module
The Media Write API
FTP Batch Provisioning
The Player API (When using the player API to set cue points, the cue points are temporary and only exist for that player load (session). The cue points are not stored on the video in the Brightcove system.)