Overview of Brightcove:
Brightcove is a free video sharing website that comes in three flavors: a regular Brightcove account lets you upload and share videos normally; the Brightcove Network account, also free, lets you publish videos for free, earn ad money from Brightcove-placed ads, and even gives you the option to sell you downloads; and the Brightcove Platform, though it charges you a fee for publishing, allows you to control your own ads, keep all the revenue, and also lets you sell your downloads.
Cost of Brightcove:
Free, except for the Brightcove Platform account, which charges for upload.
Terms of Service for Brightcove:
You must be 13 or older to use Brightcove. You retain all rights to your content, but Brightcove can do what they like with your submissions. No content that is obscene, hateful, copyrighted, illegal, etc., is allowed.
Though Brightcove does not allow pornography, adult or mature content may be published under certain circumstances.
Sign-up Procedure for Brightcove:
Brightcove asks for an email address, password and screen name.
Once you sign up, you’re taken to a page with a straightforward “Upload video” button to take you to the upload form.
Uploading to Brightcove:
Brightcove’s maximum file size is 100MB, and they support .3GP, .avi, .dv, .flv, MPEG2 and MPEG4, Quicktime and .wmv formats.
On the upload form, you must enter a title, and can add a description and tags. You get a progress bar with the percent complete; upload is pretty slow. Brightcove also warns that some videos may take a few hours to display after upload.
Tagging in Brightcove:
Brightcove enables tagging, though you can only add a few before you run out of space.
Compression in Brightcove:
Brightcove converts all videos to Flash before adding them to the site, so make sure you have a high-quality file to begin with.
Viewability in Brightcove:
Brightcove videos don’t look fantastic, but they’re not terrible either. The viewer isn’t huge, but does have a full-screen option. However, be warned that full screen videos appear blurry and a little washed out.
Sharing from Brightcove:
To share a Brightcove video, choose one of the three icons on the bottom of the viewer. Clicking the little envelope will open up a form to email the video to a friend; the icon in the middle opens up the Permalink, or URL where the video can be found; the last icon opens up HTML code you can copy and paste to embed the player in another website.
If you want to add the video to a blog, click the Menu button in the lower right of the player and select the middle icon, “Blog This.” Choose a blog service (Blogger, LiveJournal or TypePad), enter you username and password, and Brightcove will post the video for you.
