Webinar distributor BrightTalk launched as a platform through which organizations could upload and share webinars and other marketing materials with partners and potential customers. That’s a thoroughly lucrative business, it seems, as there are thousands of such videos on its site. Now it’s looking to make better use of all those assets that it has on its platform by making them easier to find, and watch, and share.
Unlike other webinar distributors, where the content is mainly controlled and marketed for short-term benefit by the client promoting it, BrightTalk sees value in the long tail of webinars that are hosted on its platform. So it archives and aggregates that content and has been working to make it more discoverable by viewers who might be watching related webinars. So each webinar has a distinct landing page, but it provides a feed of related content from the creator of the webinar and other BrightTalk clients. The result is that viewers have more clickable content to view.
BrightTalk has also added social-sharing features to make the content on its platform more easily shareable on the social networks. That includes all the places other interested viewers might be, such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, or Google+. There are also options for sharing via email and the ability to embed videos on other sites. Once users get to the site, there’s also a simplified sign-in process: Users who have visited previously will have one-click access to all BrightTalk content.
The company has also made its content more accessible by moving to an HTML5 player, which can be viewed on all sorts of mobile devices, like the iPad, iPhone, and whatever else. That will let mobile users watch videos that weren’t previously accessible on those devices.
BrightTalk raised a $20.5 million round of funding last year. The company has about a million registered users, and has been growing 100 percent year-over-year, according to co-founder Paul Heald. Its viewers already watch about 2 million minutes of video a month, with average session times of 34 minutes each, but the company expects that to increase thanks to the new design.