Embedded Webcasts Are Here! What’s New in Vbrick Rev – August 2021 Edition
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August Vbrick Rev Release Powers Embedded Webcasts and Advanced VoD Sharing
We just deployed our August Rev Cloud release this weekend for our US Customers, which marks the beginning of the second half of our 2021 roadmap. This release includes a number of great new capabilities, but I’ll focus on embedded webcasts and improved access controls in this blog post. Both are great examples of the work our engineering and product teams are doing to ensure our customers can leverage the power of video to empower, engage and reach their employees and their own customers anywhere and anytime.
And for those of you who would rather read…here are a few of my favorite things about the August release.
Embedded Webcasts
In order to reach every employee or customer, it is super-important to surface video, whether live webcasts video or recorded content, in the context of the applications and websites that employees and customers use in their day-to-day activities. For marketers, it is also important to create truly bespoke experiences to differentiate their webcasts and messages from other vendors’ content.
Enter embedded webcasts.
We’ve always had a rich capability to embed recorded video content on your preferred content management system, public website or custom-built or purpose-built bespoke web application, but until this release we did not have the same rich capabilities for embedding webcasts into those same destinations.
Let’s go through three potential scenarios for leveraging embedded webcasts:
Internal Corporate Communication
As many companies do, Vbrick has a corporate intranet portal that our entire company leverages to gain access to shared documents across departments. In our case we use Microsoft SharePoint for our corporate intranet. Like many of our own customers we also hold recurring company townhalls where our executives share updates and developments that are of interest to our employees. The August release,with support for embedded webcasts, will now enable those enterprise townhalls to be surfaced directly on the front page or home page of our corporate intranet, without requiring employees to visit a separate application to attend the webcast.
External Communication for Marketing and Lead Generation
My wife is a realtor and as I am learning, real estate is a pretty competitive business. If you’re like me, you probably get one or more realtor postcard each day in your mailbox. Increasingly, as in other industries, realtors are differentiating themselves by using content marketing and producing useful standalone content for their potential customers and clients. To date, that content tends to be delivered in the form of written guides or web pages, but the next evolution of that content is video.
Increasingly, forward-leaning realtors are holding webcast sessions or “zoom calls” as another way to provide valuable content to their potential clients. Now, with Rev Embedded Webcasts, realtors like my wife can now bring live and recorded video content directly to these prospects, without having these potential clients leave the realtor’s web page or the broker’s website and losing the valuable lead generation, marketing and tracking capabilities of keeping them in “one place”.
Bespoke Video Experiences for High Touch Customers or User Communities
We have a number of customers who leverage our embedding capabilities and our rich portfolio of APIs to build bespoke or tailored experiences for their customers. One of our customers in the financial space has built a custom video experience for their high-wealth customers. With the August release, webcasts can now also participate in those tailored experiences. In addition, the embedding capabilities allow customers to mix Rev’s video capabilities with other engagement tools to create truly unique employee or customer experiences.
One example that we often hear about is the desire to combine some 3rd party user engagement tools like Slido alongside a live Rev Webcast. With the new embedded webcasts, these scenarios are now easily achievable.
Flexible Access Control and Sharing for Recorded Video Content
With all the webcast talk above, you’d think I’ve forgotten about recorded content. Nothing could be further from the truth, in fact, recorded content and VOD should be a critical part of a company’s video strategy. In addition to VOD enabling companies to reach employees and customers on their own schedule, adding Rev’s full featured enterprise video content management capability can help build a corporate video knowledge base that turns your meeting recordings, your user generated videos and other marketing videos into true corporate strategic assets.
As with all corporate strategic assets, videos need to be properly secured and have proper governance over sharing within the enterprise and potentially externally. Rev already offered a rich access control mechanism and our Rev August release introduced more flexibility around securing and sharing of video assets.
In the past, our access control mechanism allowed for sharing videos to a specific set of users, to all users in an account, to a channel or publicly. Some of those choices, specifically channels were previously mutually exclusive. With the august release, you can now combine these options and have videos managed and collaborated around within a channel and then later share the video with all users or externally without losing the association with one or more channels.
A more concrete example might help: A marketing team is collaborating on a set of new video ads within their marketing channel. Within the channel, the team continues to iterate on the videos, commenting, editing until they reach a point where they feel ready to share more broadly. The team now includes a group of folks from the sales team to review the content and after a few more iterations, opens the content up to the entire company for a pre-launch announcement. As a final step, the marketing team makes the videos public so that they can viewed directly from the company’s website.
A complete video lifecycle without losing the linkage and permissions related to the marketing team and their channel.
You can learn more about the importance of security and governance for your video assets in this blog article.
What’s Next?
I hate to even distract you away from the great new capabilities in the August release and as I’ve said in some of my previous blogs, as a product manager, “I can neither confirm nor deny” that we are working on some of the items below for our October and December releases:
- Ability to create user-generated video content from your browser with webcam and desktop capture.
- Support for Webcast event pre-registration and registration management for public events.
- Enhanced Vbrick Multicast content distribution and Rev Connect Peer-to-Peer Distribution to better support Hybrid Work environments.
- Additional integrations with Microsoft Teams and the Microsoft ecosystem.
- and a few other potential surprises
I continue to be super excited about the work that our awesome engineering team and our mostly friendly neighborhood product team are taking on the rest of this year for our customers.
Sincerely,
Olivier
