Brightcove has added three new products to its cloud content services platform to take direct aim on the changing demands for handling and displaying online video. Two new products—Zencoder Instant Play and Zencoder Live Cloud Transcoding—leverage the Zencoder cloud-based video encoding business Brightcove acquired in August. The third enhances a DRM relationship the company established with Widevine earlier this year.
"All three capabilities are paid add-on products," explained Brightcove Chief Marketing Officer Jeff Whatcott in an interview with Fierce OnlineVideo. "Instant Play is a feature that you can flip on as part of a transcoding job on a job-by-job basis and it commands a premium price. Live Cloud Transcoding is something we'll charge for very similarly to how we charge for on-demand video which is the amount of video that's being transcoded. In the Widevine case, there's a charge that varies based on the amount of video you need to have packaged with DRM and how frequently that content is accessed."
The Zencoder products are also still in beta stage and not commercially available although Brightcove is recruiting customers for beta testing. All three products take aim at customers with growing online video needs, Whatcott said.
"In the case of live video transcoding it's organizations that are broadcasting live events online or are broadcasting 7x24 over the Web as part of an online TV offering," he said.
Zencoder previously provided that capability only to on-demand video. The new product offers live stream encoding in the cloud, he said.
Instant play technology would be used by organizations with time-sensitive content or organizations that have "huge archives of content that is infrequently accessed," he said. "Today they would have to pay in advance to encode that video in all the right formats and store it at great expense so that it could be played back should anybody want to watch it."
The new Zencoder Instant Play product encodes the video so it is available for playback even while it is still being uploaded and transcoded.
DRM, already part of Brightcove's arrangement with Widevine, has now been integrated into the Brightcove video cloud platform.
This is, of course, for "people who have content that needs to be protected—movies or television or training or other content in the enterprise," he explained. "We're the first video platform to both become certified and commercially available as an integrated part of our video cloud on our video platform."
For more:
- see this news release
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