Brightcove is getting brighter...
April 25, 2014

Brightcove is getting brighter...

Colby Iannazzo | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Modules Used

  • Chromeless Player
  • HTML5 Fallback Player
  • Flash Tabbed Players

Overall Satisfaction with Brightcove Video Cloud

My organization began using Brightcove as our company-wide video cloud solution because our servers were struggling with the bandwidth usage and taking the videos to a third party hosting solution seemed like a great way to off-load the videos. Brightcove was a good solution, as it came with a base set of players as well as provided multiple renditions based on available connection speeds of the clients.
  • They have a really strong back-end framework for video delivery - They use multiple CDN's around the world to deliver the best quality video quickly.
  • The user interface is simple to understand - While they provide many video tutorials on how to work with the user interface, it is intuitive enough to just jump in and get started on your own.
  • The YouTube sync option has been a great way for us to manage the videos, based on keywords, to help coordinate and organize our channel.
  • The customization portions of the video players require learning a completely unique language and do not provide a GUI for player design.
  • The players are primarily flash based and require extra HTML code for an HTML5/Mobile ready experience.
  • It takes quite a few CSS workarounds to make the players responsive.
  • Players could benefit from more style options, such as themes, Play Button Overlays, icon customization, option availabilty
  • I have had many issues with the customer support department. They are really good at sending you video links to their knowledge base, but require a bit of escalation to get support beyond that. However, when I found a bug in their JavaScript file, they did get it resolved, it just took about 2 weeks...
  • The metrics/analytics could use a bit more finesse. They used to have a much better system, but about a year ago they updated and the new interface is less informative.
  • Faster website load times thanks to the CDN they have in place.
  • Connection Speed detection has been a nice feature.
  • An external JavaScript file that can cause troubleshooting issues
  • They do still rely heavily on flash and we are trying to move away from it.
It took quite some time to upload and organize our video library. The amount of time it would require to relocate all this information outweighs any negative aspect I personally have with the experience. They have been pretty good to work with and from speaking with my Brightcove rep, I know some of the issues I have listed are currently being addressed and tested for future releases.
How stylized do you want you player to be? How much customization do you need to implement? I think Brightcove is a great solution if you are looking for simplicity in your video delivery. For more complicated media solutions, they are working on getting there, they have so much potential. If they could remove the BEML coding reliance and bring the Player GUI into more of a WYSIWYG format, they would sky rocket.

It's definitely a company I will keep my eye on. They have a great start, they just need a bit of polishing.