Latest Vbrick Rev Release Wraps Up An Amazing 2021

Hello everyone, Olivier here. Our final release of the year puts a nice bow on our 2021 roadmap. We targeted three to four prominent themes for the roadmap when we started the year. As I sometimes phrase it in roadmap presentations, these were the initiatives we were going to put “more calories” towards in 2021:

• Extending the reach of the platform to external and marketing scenarios
• Governed self-service for Enterprise Video Content Management (EVCM)
• Integrations with Microsoft 365, Webex, and other enterprise applications
• Friction-free video distribution for the hybrid workplace

The remainder of this blog post will look at each area and highlight a few of my favorite capabilities the team created towards each of these initiatives over the past year.

You can watch a round up of our latest release below:

Extending the Reach of the Platform

Many of our customers are extending the reach of their Vbrick Rev EVP beyond the realm of internal communication and leveraging Rev’s rich webcast and VOD capabilities for external scenarios. This year, we made many enhancements to make that easier for our customers.  

Public Webcast Event Registration & Registration Management 

Now you can add registration to your public webcast events. Attendees will get a simplified login experience with a tailored join URL. Administrators gain the ability to manage registrations within Rev and export registrations for use with their preferred marketing or email automation tool using CSV export or to bulk import registrations from an external registration system.

Enhanced Embedding Capabilities 

To reach every employee or customer, it is super-important to surface video, whether live webcasts or recorded video 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 essential to create truly bespoke experiences to differentiate their webcasts and messages from other vendors‘ content.    The December Rev release builds on our earlier releases this year to introduce more control over embedded video content and additional branding options for the embedded video player.  The release also includes a complete refresh of the player controls and UI.

Enhanced Public CDN Distribution

The pandemic shifted attendance to internal corporate webcasts for many employees to the internet.  While we expect that 2022 will see a return to in-office attendance and viewing of corporate events, it likely will be in a hybrid form, with a mix of employees working from home and others from the office.  This year we strengthened video distribution options and capabilities for both, including enhancing our public CDN distribution capabilities.  Our mission is to ensure that employees, whether at home or in the office, can get the best video viewing experience possible.

Governed Self-Service for Enterprise Video Content Management (EVCM):

Our goal this year was to radically simplify and enable the creation and sharing of video content by any employee while offering the governance and compliance capabilities an IT team needs to enable these capabilities for employees.

Browser-Based Screen & Webcam Recording

Companies can now empower all their employees to easily create and share new video content directly from their browser without the need to install any additional tools. Creating knowledge-sharing videos that can combine video and screen share directly from Rev is now just two clicks away.   Playback of these recordings also benefits from our unique ability to separate the speaker video from the content share and allow viewers to choose their preferred playback layout.

Flexible Access Controls, VOD Ownership Management, and Finer-Grained Account Roles

I’m cheating a bit here, combining three excellent capabilities into one bucket, all supporting the ability for enterprise IT and security teams to finely control and govern the capabilities available to users of the Rev platform.  In turn, these governance capabilities make it easier to “turn on” self-service video content creation and sharing to all enterprise users.

Enhanced Integrations with Microsoft 365, Webex, and Other Platforms

To reach every employee in the enterprise, it is crucial to surface the ability to create, share and view video content in the applications employees use day in and day out.  This year we built on our existing rich integrations and added a few more.

Microsoft Teams Meetings & Live Events Integration

Microsoft Teams shops can now quickly source Rev Webcasts using a Microsoft Team Video Meeting or a Microsoft Teams Live Event, inheriting Rev’s ability to distribute those webcasts at scale using the Rev eCDN and engage employees at scale with Rev Webcast’s polling, Q&A, and Chat capabilities.

Webex Webinars (formerly Events) Integration

Vbrick Rev customers who also adopt Webex Webinar can now easily upgrade those Webex Webinars with eCDN distribution and automated recording of Webex Webinar events with Rev’s full enterprise video content management capabilities.

Friction-Free Distribution for the Hybrid Workplace

Many of our customers are planning their return to the office or hybrid office plans for 2022 and looking to leverage our eCDN offering to optimize video distribution on the corporate network.

Multicast Distribution with Error Correction

Ensuring that all attendees have the best video experience across a wide variety of networks is a technical challenge for sure.  Packet loss is one challenge that can seriously affect the viewing experience of some attendees on less-than-perfect networks. Vbrick Multicast now includes the ability to recover from certain levels of network packet loss with its built-in error correction. This new functionality may especially be of interest for customers looking to adopt wireless multicast, which is more prone to these types of network packet loss issues.

Rev Connect Peer to Peer Distribution for Larger Locations

Our December release brings a significant enhancement to our Rev Peer to Peer distribution capabilities.   Many of our customers have adopted Rev Connect to enable efficient live streaming to their smaller branch office locations with 25 to 50 employees.  Rev Connect can now more efficiently be leveraged for larger branch locations and medium-sized offices with 100 to 200 employees with our latest release.

It has been an excellent year for the Rev Platform and the Vbrick product and engineering team.  The team is now working hard on the 2022 roadmap with some exciting capabilities to make it even easier to adopt the Rev platform and Vbrick Distribution, and ensure that every employee can truly benefit from video in the enterprise.

I’m hoping that Santa is good to you and your families this year; Wishing you a great holiday season and a happy new year!

Sincerely,

Olivier