CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Brightcove, the cloud content services company, today unveiled Brightcove App Cloud™, a content app platform for building and operating powerful native apps and touch websites for Apple iOS and Google Android smartphones and tablets. App Cloud combines an open HTML5-based development model with intelligent cloud services for cross-platform compilation, automated app distribution, analytics, advertising, and connectors for content management systems and other cloud services, making app development and management more efficient and cost effective than ever before.
Brightcove today also introduced a new name for the company’s market-leading online video platform, Brightcove Video Cloud™. Together, App Cloud and Video Cloud comprise the suite of Brightcove cloud content services that media companies and marketers use to publish and distribute professional digital content.
“Delivering content apps across fragmented devices forces online publishers to choose between redundant one-off app development and cookie-cutter templates,” said Jeremy Allaire, Brightcove chairman and chief executive officer. “App Cloud offers a new alternative with a platform that significantly streamlines the development and management of custom content apps across devices. With App Cloud, Brightcove cloud content services offer unprecedented choice, control and efficiency for initiatives spanning online video, native apps and touch websites.”
The Rise of the Content App Platform
Audiences are increasingly discovering, consuming, sharing, and creating content through installable apps and touch Web experiences on smartphones, tablet devices and emerging new platforms such as Internet-connected televisions. Media companies and marketers are struggling with the cost and complexity of delivering and managing great content experiences across all these new platforms. App Cloud represents the emergence of a new kind of integrated solution designed to address these challenges: the content app platform.
“The App Cloud offers us the opportunity extend our content reach in an affordable and efficient manner, building new experiences with our existing content across a variety of delivery platforms,” said Nathan Potter, vice president of digital media technology at A&E Networks Digital Media.
Both Apps and Touch Web Experiences
Native apps and touch websites each provide unique benefits that make a combined approach preferable. Native apps enjoy access to APIs and special device capabilities, but are not discoverable or accessible through mobile Web browsers. Touch Web experiences offer essential search engine discoverability, but cannot access the native APIs for accessing camera, microphone, push notification, address book, or other native capabilities for security reasons. Today, App Cloud automatically generates compiled Apple iOS and Google Android native apps and HTML5 touch Web experiences enabling customers to enjoy the benefits of both the app approach and the touch Web approach without incurring additional costs.
An Open Standards and Open Source Development Model
To build App Cloud experiences, developers use HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, and the App Cloud SDK to create templates that reflect their brand and desired functionality. The App Cloud SDK includes powerful JavaScript component libraries for accessing native device capabilities, retrieving and submitting content, and composing cinematic, high performance user experiences optimized for touch screens on Apple iOS and Google Android smartphones and tablets.
Powerful Cloud Content Services
App Cloud is unique in combining an open development model with powerful cloud content services that improve the user experience and day-to-day operation of content apps and touch Web experiences. These services include:
- Content Connectors that provide universal connectivity to content stored in existing Web content management systems, online video platforms, blogs, photo-sharing services, and custom systems that support open APIs.
- Content Optimization Services that offer a high performance user experience over limited bandwidth connections by synchronizing, transcoding, caching, and delivering content.
- Actionable Analytics that facilitate ongoing business optimization by closely tracking installations, usage time, and other analytics.
- Intelligent Push Services that facilitate cross platform delivery of native push notifications to users based on geographic locale to engage users with timely, relevant information.
- Account Administration Services for centrally managing system users, templates, content connections, and apps.
Availability
App Cloud is expected to become commercially available in the second half of 2011. The product is currently in private beta for approved customers and partners.
About Brightcove
Brightcove Inc, the cloud content services company, provides a family of products used to publish and distribute the world’s professional digital media. The company’s products include Brightcove Video Cloud, the market-leading online video platform, and Brightcove App Cloud, the pioneering content app platform. Together, more than 3,000 customers in 50 countries rely on Brightcove’s cloud content services to build and operate exceptional media experiences across PCs, smartphones, tablets and connected TVs. For more information, visit http://www.brightcove.com.