BrightCove - Overall a Great VCMS!
April 16, 2014
BrightCove - Overall a Great VCMS!
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Modules Used
- Video Cloud API
Overall Satisfaction
The read APIs are being used to grab video assets for media processing and meta-data tagging. It's used by our Data Engineering department to easily access video assets and meta data. We are fan of the read APIs, though while good, some of the documentation could be better. We also use the write APIs to write back to Brightcove, which we are slightly less impressed with.
- Ability to easily output a JSON response for requested video data. This makes it easy to work with Brightcove as partner.
- The read APIs are very flexible and can the output can be easily customized using cgi args. This provides great customization of the output and sorting and filtering mechanisms to find the videos you're looking for.
- The ability to add captions to videos is good, especially with the regulations requiring video captioning. DFXP support works great as long as the player is given the exact XML format it is looking for.
- The write API documentation could be better. Specifically, the portion where they talk about adding captions. There are simpler ways that they have documented.
- The write API could be better. It's up to the developer to retry on write failures as it's limited to 1 QPS, which I can understand. However, I feel they should have a better way to intelligently manage write requests so the end-user does not have to do this. Either this, or provide some examples where more than 1 write request can be combined into 1 http call. For example, if they provided an example where you wanted to add captions and also add meta data in one call, that would be helpful.
- I don't have any hard numbers, but providing an efficient read API has been very helpful to us in custom development.
I've used Ooyala and I do like Brightcove over Ooyala as I feel their read APIs are easier to work with. However, to be fair, I've never used Ooyala's write APIs, which may or may not be better.
Support
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Quick Resolution Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed No escalation required Support understands my problem Support cares about my success Quick Initial Response | None |
Once, they provided me with the exact format for their DFXP closed captioning format, which I had a very hard time finding on their website. The example they provided worked perfectly!
Usability
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Like to use Well integrated | Requires technical support Lots to learn |
- The read API is fairly easy to use and well documented.
- I did not enjoy trying to figure out how to add captions or use the write API to add meta-data and caption URLs, but it may have just been my inexperience. I just wasn't able to search for and find easily readable documentation and code examples.