Once a year around this time, Brightcove rolls out a bunch of new features to its online video platform and calls it a new release. With Brightcove 5, this year the service is becoming even more Apple-friendly than ever before. Not only is there more HTML5 goodness baked in, but it now supports Apple’s HTTP streaming for video apps and also offers a template for creating video apps on the iPad.
Brightcove started paying closer attention to how videos play on Apple products last year with Brightcove 4, which added support for an iPhone video player. Then as it became clear that Apple would not support Flash players in its mobile devices, Brightcove started transcoding to HTML5 and laying out a roadmap to add support for analytics, advertising, and custom players.
Now, with Brightcove 5 it adding in more HTML5 features. When media sites and other customers create branded video players, they now look the same in Flash and HTML5. And Brightcove’s analytics now keeps track of views in HTML5 players alongside Flash players. It also supports APPle’s new HTTP streaming for videos in iPhone and iPad apps, as well as HTML5 browsers (but only on Apple devices). Finally, it is going to start pushing its iPhone app for video producers and reporters to be able to shoot, edit, and upload video straight from their iPhones to their Brightcove accounts.
In addition to the HTML5 and Apple-specific features, Brightcove is also adding YouTube sync, which lets video producers push their Brightcove videos automatically to their YouTube channel or manage which videos they would like to promote there. Overall, video uploads and processing should also get faster for pro and enterprise accounts with some new file transfer acceleration technology Brightcove is licensing from Aspera.