I’ve been down on YouTube lately. As the popularity of the site grows and as more video is added to the site, the harder it is to find the video that I’m looking for. Try typing in lonelygirl15 into YouTube’s search. Thousands of videos will appear, but the actual video of the actress playing lonelygirl15’s lead character, Bree, is buried deep down. As a matter of fact, the official lonelygirl15 website posts video the YouTube competitor revver.
YouTube is NOT a commercial application. But a fine example of a commercial application is BrightCove. This application gives site owners the ability to embed video on to their site using the BrightCove player. For commercial users, it gives advertisers the option of buying embedding pre-roll and post-roll spots and it gives users the chance to change the advertising once a program has run. Imagine a broadcast TV show without the ability to sell a different set of ads when a program was being rerun. BrightCove gives web broadcasters the opportunity to do continually sell ads on video that has previously been posted.
Democratic candidate for Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick is using BrightCove to power his DevalPatrick.tv website. Like YouTube, BrightCove allows users watch again and send to a friend. But unlike the popular social networking site, BrightCove gives its users the option of having more than one channel. DevalPatrick.tv has 7 channels ranging from “Issues” to “Fun.”
The biggest functionality missing from BrightCove that politicians might want is the ability for users to upload their own videos to the site. DevalPatrick.tv lacks user generated content and BrightCove lacks the ability to upload user generate content. But other than that, DevalPatrick.tv is the most ambitious campaign web video that I have ever seen. And BrightCove is the right player to keep all of the Patrick campaign’s video in one easy to navigate page.
