All posts by Anthony Romero

People are watching more and more streaming content, with year-over-year time spent watching streams growing almost 22% on desktops and 48% on mobiles as outlined in our Video Trends to Look for in 2017 webinar. Viewers like to watch more of a good thing too. This can be for education purposes, entertainment or discovering more about a product or topic. Organizing your video assets into easy-to-find video playlists can aid in more content being consumed, and take advantage of this growth in time devoted to streaming content.

To help in navigating video assets, IBM Cloud Video and Ustream have added a playlist feature. This enables content owners to create numerous playlists associated with on-demand videos. These videos can range from professionally edited assets to auto archives of earlier live streams.

• What is a Video Playlist
• Create Video Playlist
• Watching and Interacting with Video Playlists
• Editing a Video Playlist
• Video Playlist Use Cases

Data from a Wainhouse Research report shows that 27% of enterprises that are over 500 employees are adding at least 25 hours of on-demand video content to their archives each month. This explosion of content is proving key for applications like training and educating a workforce, or used as collateral to engage prospects. However, with these growing archives also comes with it a challenge of discovery, of being able to quickly locate relevant content when needed.

One way to address this challenge, though, is by improving overall content discoverability. This can be achieved through implementing a sophisticated enterprise video search and improving metadata for your video assets, ideally though methods that don’t also increase the time commitment to managing the video archive. This article talks about ways to improve asset discovery, why it should be something to strive for, and discusses recent updates using IBM Watson that are aimed at addressing these needs.

• Enterprise video search
• Video search filters
• Video asset transcription for discoverability
• How to transcribe videos with IBM Watson
• API search calls

Looking to deliver live streaming content with closed captions? Curious on CEA-608 captions and how they differ from CEA-708?

This article describes some of the benefits of closed captioning live content while discuss the CEA-608 and CEA-708 methods. It also briefly touches on execution, with emphasis on IBM Cloud Video which has recently enhanced its delivery to support reaching mobile devices with these captions.

• What are the benefits of closed captions?
• What are CEA-608 captions?
• What are CEA-708 captions and how do they differ from CEA-608?
• Are CEA-708 captions better?
• Encoders: adding CEA-608 captions to a live stream
• Adding CEA-608 captions from other encoders

Looking to add closed captions or subtitles to your video content? Need WebVTT captioning support?

While closed captions can be associated with aiding the deaf and those hard of hearing, their benefit goes beyond this for video creators. In this article, learn about captions, why you should be investing in them and how viewing habits are changing in a way that increases their use. Also learn about the WebVTT format for subtitles and caption, how to create them and convert other subtitle formats to them as well. This is topped off with discussing how to add captions to your videos on Ustream or IBM Cloud Video, using Streaming Manager or Streaming Manager for Enterprise.

• What are closed captions?
• Closed captioning VODs
• What is WebVTT?
• Creating WebVTT files: DIY
• Convert SRT to WebVTT online
• Using services to create caption files
• Adding closed captions to videos on IBM Cloud Video
• Closed caption user experience

Want to speed up notifications around a live broadcast? Do you need to reduce manual efforts involved to maintaining additions to your video library? Looking to do some tricked out things with your smart device around an executive town hall?

Live channel and video webhooks let you know when events happen, so you can build automated processes around them to reduce workloads and improve end user experiences. In this article, discover what is a webhook, why you should be using them, use cases and how they work at IBM Cloud Video.

• What is a webhook?
• Why are webhooks important for video applications?
• Channel webhook use cases
• What events can webhooks at IBM Cloud Video notify on?
• Setting up channel webhooks

Looking to broadcast 4k streaming video? 4K presents an opportunity for better, more vivid detail. This can enhance viewing content on larger screen sizes, such as on a big screen in a meeting room. Even downscaling the assets, though, can present an image that is high quality with a higher level details. It also offers an opportunity to focus in on smaller details. Ever do a presentation with a graph that was indecipherable due to size and compression? 4K streaming at an appropriate bitrate can be a solution.

IBM Cloud Video has added capabilities to create 4k live streaming video and upload 4k VOD (video on-demand) files. This article outlines these capabilities and also discusses what is 4K and how to go about broadcasting at that resolution. It also outlines some of the challenges inherent with live streaming 4K content, due to the large demand from both the broadcaster and viewer in terms of a required connection speed. Consequently, before they can begin streaming at this resolution, broadcasters need to reach out to IBM Cloud Video’s customer success to discuss their setup.

• What is 4K Video?
• Recommend Settings for 4K Streaming
• Required Connection Speed to Broadcast 4K
• Download Speed to Watch 4K and Adaptive Bitrate Streaming
• Encoders for 4K Live Streaming Video
• History of 4K Video and Industry Specifications