Today marks the announcement and release of Brightcove’s Platform 3, the latest release of their online video distribution service. They’ve rebuilt the service completely and comes with the promise to “empower website producers to be successful in the era of pervasive video.”

They do look like they’ve got a bunch of interesting and usful new features. We’ll focus on that to start.

One of the most problematic parts of the Brightcove player in the past has been the slowness to load, something I’ve been particularly sensitive to personally since I don’t have the absolute fastest broadband connection in the world.  Those like me will notice their new “dynamic delivery” updates, that automatically adjust the bit rate of the video streams so that the viewer will get the highest quality video stream their connection will allow.

For producers who use the system, they’ll notice a number of new updates that will hopefully work towards streamlining the production and distribution phases. As I’ve talked about before, the Brightcove system has always been one of the more advanced online publishing systems, with some of the most detailed media management tools.

The only problem that is systemic to any online publishing system like this is that the media management can sometimes get labor intensive and tedious when it comes to classifying and tagging every icon and clip in the system. Platform 3 includes new media management and publishing tools that hope to aide in this.

Additionally, they’ve made more extensible their media API, so that the player and content can be more seamlessly integrated with the producers text content and rest of the website.

These tools have appealed to a wide variety of producers, mostly those in the mainstream sector who don’t have the in-house technical teams to put together a custom solution or utilize some of the more common pro-sumer platforms out there, many of which have just as much customization options that Brightcove currently has even in this new release, and are quickly catching up on the production side as well.

When Brightcove first announced that they were coming out with their new platform, I wondered whether or not it would live up to the hype. Brightcove has lost a little bit of the magic for me over the years.  They’ve been de-emphasizing a lot of their tertiary initial promises and slowly focusing more on tailoring the player for long form content. They’ve cut back on sales efforts almost entirely at this point, and have long since closed down their user generated content portal.

In their interest to tailor their service for mainstream outfits that seek to find a distribution method outside the established portals like Hulu, YouTube, iTunes and Joost, Brightcove has completely ignored a large component to online video distribution - media RSS. Granted, due to licensing and DRM concerns of current clients like Showtime, Time, Lifetime, and video on demand service FearNet, this isn’t probably a feature in high demand.

For veteran Internet content producers, though, podcast feeds are key to monetization and brand management. Distribution is key, and without the ability to lead folks into a central place to lock in viewers, all the viewers their branding and online marketing accrues will be transient at best. 

In the end, Brightcove ends up being a great solution for mainstream outfits looking to have the look and feel of systems like Hulu while maintaining their own branding on the player. Those looking for a more robust solution that provides similar player customization might be interested in offerings from CastFire and Episodic.

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As you’ve probably noticed, we’ve been using a pretty rare platform for our video podcast series Mashable Conversation.  The platform is called Episodic, and it’s amongst the best I’ve tried (and I’ve tried quite a few).  I don’t often fawn over a company, so I hope you’ll indulge me for a moment. They’ve got one of the most responsive customer service teams I’ve ever worked with, with the aim to really make the usage of the system as transparent as possible for the producers.

Given that I preach very often about the features and services that video platforms should be providing for their customers, when I’m auditioning services for my own use (or in this case, the company’s usage), I send the unfortunate company representative through a long list of hoops they must jump through.  Noam Lovinsky was the unfortunate soul assigned to explaining the platform’s capabilities to me.

They Have What I Need

My requirements were that the platform must: generate an iTunes compatible podcast RSS feed, must have an embedded player that has viral elements (remote embedding, and such), have detailed analytics, have dynamic advertisement insertion capabilities, and must be able to generate an iPod compatible MP4 file.

There are a few platforms out there that we’ve tried that get about 90% of this done, but Episodic’s was the first that got 100%, and then some.  Their transcoding options support a variety of standardized formats, and allow you to upload your program in multiple segments so you can change out elements of the show without going back and re-rendering the entire back-catalog (for instance, you’ve probably noticed that we’ve changed out the intro to something a bit more aesthetically pleasing this week).

The ability to dynamically assemble an episode also allows for a whole new level of analytics to get accustomed to. I can run side by side comparisons, for instance, on the two versions of the introduction to the show (interestingly, the one with the higher quality seems to perform about 1% poorer in terms of drop-offs).

The advertising options in the system are particularly advanced, as well. It supports pre-rolls, mid-rolls, post-rolls, and overlays across all of your content.

As an added bonus, the system also integrates with another favorite video service of mine: TubeMogul.  After your files have been transcoded on the service, you’re able to with a click upload them directly to your TubeMogul account (which then of course blasts them out to YouTube, Metacafe, Yahoo Video, and the wide assortment of other embedded video hosting websites out there).

Act Now, and You Also Get…

With all that, what else could they pile onto the deal to sweeten the pot?  Well, pulling the service out of invitation only mode would be great (I can’t tell you how many requests I’ve had recently from fellow producers interested in giving Episodic a spin, lately).  They’re doing a little bit of that today - it’s not exactly open registration, but they’re launching a new service that uses some of the transcoding technology they’ve developed.

Do you have an existing video feed?  Would you like it to have an iPhone compatible website generated around that content so that iPhone users can check it out?

Simply fill out the form and set up your transcoding account.  And while you’re there, you can also apply to be a part of the limited beta on the platform we use here at Mashable.

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