Before diving into the new decade, our product managers rounded up their favorite features of the year 2019 for our Encoding, Player, and Analytics products. Looking back, it made us realize how many cool and useful features were released. Let us know if you agree with our selection and which features you’d like to see added in 2020.
The Bitmovin Product Team wishes all a Happy New Year!
ENCODING
Dolby Vision
Dolby Vision is quickly becoming the de facto HDR standard for 4K TVs. Streaming services have been at the forefront of Dolby Vision 4K content.
We’ve updated our Bitmovin encoder to support Dolby Vision HDR to deliver cutting-edge pictures for an astounding visual experience featuring a depth of color that’s been unknown to consumer-grade devices.
GCE Connect
Bitmovin customers can now run encodings using their own Google Compute Engine (GCE) account. Running our encoding product in your preferred environment can help you to control costs.
SPEKE
Content piracy is a growing ROI problem for content owners and distributors across the globe. Bitmovin encoding is supporting the Secure Packager and Encoder Key Exchange (SPEKE) which defines the standard for communication between encryptors and digital rights management (DRM) platforms. SPEKE simplifies content encryption by replacing hundreds of combinations of proprietary API integrations between multi-DRM vendor key servers and encryptors with a single open, standards-based API.
Get here to all API reference endpoints
These are just the top three features, you can see all of our encoding release notes here.
PLAYER
Low Latency
We support Low Latency mode for Live content through chunked CMAF DASH streams. This enables our customers to reduce latency down to 3-5 seconds glass-to-glass latency and configure low latency settings for select Live events as needed.
Offline Playback for Mobile SDK
Do you want to build a Netflix-like experience easily and quickly? We provide APIs and sample apps to help developers to do so. And we support offline content management for both non-DRM and DRM-based content.
iOS Samples
Android Samples
Device Coverage
To further strengthen our comprehensive coverage of devices and platforms we added support for Samsung Tizen 2016 SmartTVs at the beginning of the year.
Bitmovin Ads Module
Lots of upgrades were made to the Bitmovin Ad Module such as:
- Support for adaptive streaming (HLS/DASH) ads to provide a great user experience also during ad breaks.
- Reduced time to transition from an ad back to the main content which tremendously increases the quality of experience for users, and thus reduces drop-offs.
Also, we integrated Yospace, a new Server-Side Ad Insertion (SSAI) partner across all of our player SDKs to provide a seamless ad serving experience for customers that prefer an HLS only workflow.
To see all player features that launched in 2019, click here.
ANALYTICS
Advertising Analytics
In time for NAB 2019, we released ad analytics. Here are just the top insights the ads dashboards can give you:
- Get detailed performance insights. They are intended for ad-ops, support groups or business stakeholders
- Track monetization by looking at ad fill rates, business KPIs, skips, and aborts
- Reach the right audience by optimizing your ad strategy with data-driven decisions
3rd party dashboard integrations (Grafana, Google Data Studio, Tableau)
Bitmovin Analytics lets you control and present your video data exactly the way you need it.
A script for a developer-specific workflow using a custom visualization engine or a data integration with a data store and query platform such as Google Data Studio, Grafana or Tableau makes it possible.
Industry Insights
If you need to benchmark your business processes and performance, look no further. Our analytics product now features ‘Industry Insights’ for selected metrics, showing the median data point for that metric across the entire Bitmovin Analytics customer base.
Plus, we made a small but efficient change in the analytics dashboard. Breakdowns are now on the left-hand side next to the tables. This was a highly requested feature that improves usability.
Dashboard/Usability
Support integration
To always serve you, our customer, better, we overhauled our support process and integrated product-specific templates that make the submission and resolution of issues faster and easier. Of course, we hope you won’t encounter any issues, but in the instance that you do, click “Contact Support” in the left-hand nav.
Encoding UI (VoD + live)
We’ve added a fully configurable Encoding UI to our dashboard. Use your own assets and storage to get going right away, or use available test assets for VOD or Live Encoding streams.
Sub-Organizations
Ever wanted to set-up a separate production or development environment? Now you can go to the left-hand navigation in the main dashboard and click on Organization Settings. You can create up to ten sub-organizations all billed to the same (root-) organization. This way you can limit and control access to members of your organization for better service and administration control.
As we wrap up 2019, we want to wish everyone a Happy New Year. We are excited to continue building more features and functionalities that help you, our customers, reach new heights. If there is anything you need from us, don’t hesitate to reach out to our product team – [email protected].
