Let me give you 4 reasons why you should consider Brightcove.tv as your prime video channel to start with as an entrepreneur. In the beginning I was not really charmed by the way Brightcove was set up to upload videos but when you understand how it works, it has some very convincing advantages over the more popular video portals.
1) It is faster then you think
Uploading uncompressed videos to Brightcove is much faster then uploading to YouTube, GoogleVideo, VideoJug etc..
To give an example: I uploaded a video to Youtube of 345Mb, which took about 3,5 hours. With Brightcove’s PublishPod, it took only 20 minutes for the same movie.
How is that possible? If you download Brightcove’s PublishPod application and use it to upload your movie instead of uploading it via the browser, your movie is compressed by the application BEFORE it is uploaded. So, your uncompressed movie of any size below 1Gb is processed to a reasonable quality compression that will be the end result on Brightcove.tv, no more further conversions. Most other video channels compress the video after you uploaded it, resulting in long waiting periods
2) Higher quality display
Compression it slightly better than YouTube resulting in higher quality output. This is new, actually. YouTube tended to be a bit better, but Brightcove now uses the latest compression method available on the Windows platform. On Mac, the result is the same as YouTube, but that will change as soon as a new plugin for Mac will be made available by Adobe.
3) Higher ranking of your videos
For instance, my art video “One Man Show” appears on page 1 in Brightcove while on YouTube, I’m on page 8. Why? Less competition for the same subject.
Brightcove is slightly more complicated to publish your movie because you have to follow a certain order of working. That puts off a lot of people and as a result, only serious content providers remain. However, the extra work you have to do to fill in data, select a player etc.. is compensated easily by the fast upload. It does not take me 3 hours to fill in all the details.
4) Last but not least: Your video plays on your site
Brightcove does not redirect viewers away from your site like YouTube does for some time now. So, you better use the embedded code from Brightcove to put a video on your site then from YouTube because if a viewer clicks on the image of a YouTube video, he/she is taken to the YouTube site. Only when you click on the little menu bar at the bottom it plays in your site. Most viewers do not know that and are whisked away. If you have a video channel on YouTube that is ok, but in most situations you want to keep viewers on your site, don’t you?
That said, do not neglect the other channels
However, you still need to upload videos to Youtube and the others because they have large communities and that means big exposure. But I would recommend to upload to Brightcove first, then get your embed code, put it on your site or blog and then at leisure do the other video channels.
There is a nice free service that uploads to several video channels at once if time is not on your side: www.tubemogul.com. I wrote a review about the service. Read it before you start using it.
