Bending Spoons Updates Brightcove’s Product Road Map; Focusing on Reliability, Performance, and User Experience

Over the past few weeks, I’ve had the opportunity to review Bending Spoons’ product roadmap for its Brightcove platform, providing the company with feedback at the executive level. While I can’t share the company’s detailed document, Bending Spoons is allowing me to highlight some of their plans for Brightcove’s product line and where they are investing.

Overall, I appreciated the clarity of their product strategy and their plans to build on Brightcove’s existing strengths by enhancing the reliability, performance, and user experience of the core products, while continuing to cater to the unique needs of their media and enterprise customers. Bending Spoons identified and reviewed over 100 feature requests and improvements, using data tied to revenue potential, operational costs and customer feedback to identify and prioritize a shortlist of the initiatives with the highest potential to impact their business and customers positively.

The key takeaway from my calls with Bending Spoons’ management team was that they will move quickly, investing in initiatives where they see success and reevaluating those where they don’t. While this sounds like a common-sense approach, it wasn’t always the way Brightcove previously operated, as the company would routinely roll out new products and features without much customer feedback or demand.

Here are some key takeaways on what is being worked on across the Brightcove platform:

• Adding support for Ultra-HD live streaming (Shockingly, Brightcove has never supported live 4K video)
• Improved UX to optimize for vertical video experiences by adding new vertical video components in the Gallery for an out-of-the-box solution
• A set of AI features, including improvements to Auto-Captions, Universal Translator, Metadata Enhancer, Content Multiplier, and new AI Advertising features
• Improving live streaming with SSAI, with the addition of content protection through DRM
• A visual redesign of the web player and significant Android SDK improvements
• Improvements to programmatic user provisioning and deprovisioning, streamlining onboarding/offboarding and reducing admin overhead
• Improving the Brightcove Player’s caching system to optimize page load times (not video start times)
• Improvements to viewership analytics, closed caption metrics, improved automated insights and search
• Roll out automated usage alerts to notify customers when they reach key thresholds, providing more transparency

With Brightcove’s new product roadmap now defined and shared with all Brightcove employees, the team is working to determine packaging and pricing strategies for select high-impact features, including the AI Suite, Live 4K, and the Recommendation Engine. Further details on packing and pricing are expected to be released shortly. Bending Spoons has also identified several potential opportunities for future iterations of its roadmap and is monitoring usage data, customer interviews, and market trends, reassessing these opportunities regularly.

In my conversations with the new owners of Brightcove, I was impressed by the time they spent talking to customers, gathering real-world feedback, and making product decisions based on data, rather than guesswork. Bending Spoons communicated a clear and detailed strategy to enhance the platform and expand the business, which will organically lead to sales. Bending Spoons told me they know execution is everything, and their success will lie in how quickly they learn and adapt as they begin to execute individual initiatives and communicate their strengths to customers. I think their product road map is on point, and if they execute on it, customers should be happy.