Started working to integrate Brightcove video players with a third party ad agency today. Should be done pretty quickly so there will probably be few points of interest for me to bang on about here. Still, this kind of thing is relatively new so any problems I encounter are probably worth documenting.

The Brightcove tool is pretty impressive and has a slick flash interface, but is let down a little because it is not that flexible. Not to matter though… A few clicks here and there and I should have some ads popping up where people least expect them to.

The original system was set up by me before christmas by writing a 3rd party ad translator to integrate ads. This tool is still relatively new so not all ad providers have integrated their systems with Brightcove and so you need to work with the Brightcove API to get things working. The process was a little complicated and my hopes that things would just work were not realised. The silver bullet in this case was to use Adobe Flex builder instead of Flash to compile the actionscript SWF file. Once I did this, all worked perfectly. Another issue was getting crossdomain.xml files in place on both the client and 3rd party sytems. Flash is none too forgiving when running scripts between different places but it does not always visibly complain either. Needless to say, 3 months on and ads are still not getting served. Not great but a perfect opportunity to change provider and monetise some of these videos.

UPDATE
Got ads working pretty easily thanks to Acudeo’s tight integration with Brightcove. For some reason though, the ads fail in IE6… But who uses that browser now anyway, well, only all the people who are most likely to be idiotic enough to click on the ads in the first place probably. Fix due soon I hope.