Cat TV

This weeks assignment in Internet Television was to create an online television channel using the brightcove.com architecture. Brightcove allows you to create your own customizable video players, where you can upload high quality video content, titles, graphic images, video thumbnails etc. and create playlists, tag content for searchability, syndicate content and get reports on how frequently your content is being viewed. More interesting then that however, is the built in ability to charge users to view or download content, allowing creators to use the brightcove pay system to make money off original work. In addition, you can link to brightcove to view your player or embed it (either through html ,actionscript or javascript) in any website. From the player, viewers can subscribe to the player's rss feed, email the video to a friend or link to the video from their own website/blog.

There were some downsides to brightcove, the largest one being that you can only use it through Internet Explorer on Windows, no good for MAC users or those of us who use a real browser like firefox. Unfortunately, the video uploader only works in this environment. Other then that annoyance, the video console was very easy to use, although there were a couple of times when it completely froze up while uploading (not sure if this was my internet connection of the console itself). It was also really easy to customize the look of the player with the automatic CSS editor. However, I found that I really wanted to extend the functionality of the player so that viewers could leave comments on media. I could not figure out how to do it in any kind of real way through the brightcove console so I used the section reserved for an external link to a website to send media id values to a perl script that would then display comments and allow viewers to leave comments for that particular video.

It would be nice if brightcove made the player more interactive. I would also love to see brightcove make a similar player for mobile phone video. The current equivalent in the mobile world, abazab, does not allow the creator of the player to customize it at all and the individual videos are not searchable though tags, titles and descriptions as they are on Brightcove. Not sure that they would ever do mobile video since the site seems to be directed towards displaying high-quality content.