What’s New in Vbrick Rev – June/July 2021 Edition

It’s a Wrap (of the 1h 2021 Vbrick Rev Roadmap

We just deployed our June Rev Cloud release this weekend for our US Customers, wrapping up the first half of our 2021 roadmap. This release includes some excellent new Analytics and AI capabilities. It is always hard to pick my favorite, so I’ll highlight a few of them and recap all the hard work our fantastic engineering team and our mostly friendly neighborhood product team delivered for our customers this first half of the year.

And for those of you who would rather read…here are a few of my favorite things about the June release.

Account Level Webcast Analytics Dashboard

Over the past year, we have been adding rich analytics for individual webcasts offering historical and real-time analytics. In addition, the June release now adds an account–level dashboard for account administrators that provides for account-wide reporting across all webcast events that have occurred on the account and offers a heads–up on all currently ongoing live events. 

Transcription Custom Dictionaries and Transcript Inline Editing for Vbrick Rev IQ

As with analytics, Vbrick has been continuously adding enrichment capabilities to Vbrick Rev.  Vbrick Rev IQ leverages Video AI technology to automatically transcribe, translate, optionally recognize, and tag people appearing in videos.   The use of transcription and automated translation broadens the reach of video content to all employees in an organization.   

While automated transcription is very impressive as a technology, it is not “perfect” and typically achieves about 80% accuracy.  In this release, we introduce two capabilities to improve on that remaining 20%: 

• Custom dictionaries 
• Transcription editing 

We have introduced the ability to create a custom dictionary of proprietary names and terms that apply to a customer’s business, for example, their company name.  This custom dictionary helps train our AI model to improve its recognition of those terms.   

We have also introduced inline editing of transcripts via the Pulse tab of a Video for any final fixes and tweaks to transcriptions and translations.

A Few More Favorites

In addition to these analytics and AI enhancements, we also enhanced other areas of the Rev platform in the June Release, including: 

• Ability to preview branded webcasts directly from within webcast settings 
• Ability to have rich text comments, including emoji on VOD comments. 
• And many updates to our Public REST APIs.

Finally, we also introduced a completely revamped documentation portal with a modern UI, enhanced search, and updated navigation.  For developers or developers at heart, the new portal includes a much-enhanced API documentation experience.

A Great H1

As the first half of the year ends, I am excited about our plans for the 2H of 2021.  We entered the year having identified key initiatives for this year’s roadmap.  The keynote initiatives for this year included:  

• Governed Self-Service 
• Extending the reach of the Vbrick Rev Platform to marketing and external scenarios
• Microsoft Integrations 
• Content Distribution for a Hybrid Workforce 

Every Vbrick Rev and Rev eCDN release contributes towards those initiatives while also enhancing the platform across the board.  The first half of the year introduced some key new capabilities: 

• Microsoft Teams Video Conference Integration with support for MS Teams Live Events
  Our customers and their employees can now quickly source their next webcast from a Microsoft Teams Video Call, meeting, or Microsoft Teams Live event. 
• Enhanced Webcast and User Engagement Capabilities
  A host of enhancements to our webcast capabilities, including the ability to brand webcasts individually and enhanced the user engagement capabilities, including a new rich text chat with support for emojis and support for larger polls. 
• RTMP/RTMPS Webcast Source
  Offers a much-simplified experience with the flexibility to use your preferred cloud-based video production solution (Grabyo, Brandlive, Socialive, Restream.io, and many others), Video Switching solution, or software encoders as a video source for a Rev Webcast Event. 
• Live Transcription & Translation for Webcast Events
  Customers who adopt the Rev IQ module can now easily add live transcription and translation to their webcast events, ensuring that all employees can remain engaged and informed for corporate events regardless of their preferred language. 

What’s Next?

While I don’t want to steal the thunder from what has been a great 1H, we have some great work underway for the 2H of the year.  As a product manager and as the saying goes, “I can neither confirm nor deny” that we are working on some of the items below: 

• Enhanced and more Flexible VOD Access Controls to power more sharing scenarios.
• 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. 
• 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. 
• and a few other potential surprises 

I am super excited about the work that the engineering team and our mostly friendly neighborhood product team are taking on the rest of this year for our customers.

Sincerely,

Olivier