Brightcove CDN - Supercharge Video Delivery
What is Brightcove?
Brightcove is a publicly traded online video platform company. They offer a variety of video products and solutions for live streaming, ads, enterprise, and more. Brightcove also allows you to use a CDN in conjunction with their Video Cloud hosting and publishing platform, enabling you to deliver your video files faster.
This article will further discuss Brightcove's video delivery platform as well as how to use it in conjunction with KeyCDN to supercharge your video files.
Video delivery via HLS
There are two main methods to deliver video content which are: progressive download and streaming. We'll focus on streaming in this article as progressive downloading, although has its benefits, isn't meant to deliver large amounts of video bandwidth to a sizable audience.
KeyCDN offers HLS streaming which stands for HTTP Live Stream. This streaming protocol was developed by Apple and is advantageous for a few reasons:
- Any firewall or proxy that allows HTTP traffic, can also handle HLS.
- iOS devices handle HLS streaming very well.
- Web players such as JW Player or Flowplayer require the Flash-based version to play RTMP streams, which is not so common anymore.
Using a KeyCDN Brightcove CDN setup
There are a few choices when it comes to using a CDN for video delivery with Brightcove. These are:
- Brightcove's CDN
- Bring your own (BYO) CDN
- Remote assets
- Multiple choice
In the case of this article, we'll focus the BYO CDN, remote assets, and multiple choice options.
Option 1 - BYO CDN
The BYO CDN option allows you to pull content from your Brightcove's Video Cloud account. Therefore, once your video assets are uploaded to Brightcove's Video Cloud you would setup a KeyCDN Pull Zone to pull the assets from your Brightcove account to then be cached on KeyCDN's edge servers.
Use the Brightcove video URL as the Origin URL in your KeyCDN Pull Zone setup.
Option 2 - Remote assets
The other option, remote assets, pertains to those who are already hosting their assets on a CDN and don't want to go through the hassle of moving them to their Video Cloud account. In KeyCDN's case, this would be equivalent to hosting your assets on a Push Zone. If you choose to go that route you can then use either the Video Cloud Media module, the Dynamic Ingest API, or the CMS API to create videos in your Video Cloud account which point to the videos in your Push Zone.
There is one limitation to working with remote assets which is that you cannot use the image capture feature in Brightcove to create video still and thumbnail images. However, these can be uploaded manually.
Option 3 - Multiple choice
Let's say you want to use both the BYO CDN and remote assets options - no problem. In this case, you would simply create a Pull Zone in KeyCDN to pull all of the assets stored in Video Cloud for new uploads while you can keep your Push Zone's remote assets for existing uploads or special cases.
Summary
Brightcove is a reliable and well-known video platform. If you're looking for a way to deliver your video assets seamlessly and efficiently than they are a great choice. Although if speed is a priority it's important to make use of a CDN to ensure that your assets are cached and delivered quickly to your visitors. Setting up a Brightcove CDN integration with KeyCDN is easy and whether you want to host your assets remotely or directly on Brightcove's Video Cloud, KeyCDN can help you supercharge them