Syndication Strategies

Open and viral syndication

If you are happy for your videos to achieve the broadest possible distribution, you can adopt an open syndication approach. You can publish players or create web pages from which any visitors can grab the player publishing code and embed the player on their web site.

A subset of open syndication is viral syndication. The Brightcove Player offers features that give viewers an easy way to click in the player and share the video on Facebook, Twitter, or other social sharing sites, or get player embed code or a URL link to the player, which lets them present your player and video content on any web site or in email. Read more about Configuring the Social Properties for a Player.

Viral syndication can be a very effective tool for expanding your audience, but in using it, you give up some control. Open syndication has the disadvantage of taking your video out of the content you've created for it on your web site, or your affiliates' web sites. There is a step you can take to insure that your branding travels with the video - see Watermark Fields in ingest profiles.

Trusted party syndication

In trusted party syndication (also called managed syndication), you develop a contractual relationship with your affiliates. This relationship often involves agreements about what content will be available and may include payment for content or an agreement to split advertising revenue. If advertising is part of your video business strategy, make sure you have a clear agreement with your syndication partners about reserving rights to advertise in connection with the syndicated videos. Using trusted party syndication, you retain control over who shows your content and where it is published.

Players for trusted party syndication

If you're taking a trusted party syndication approach, we recommend that you create a dedicated Brightcove Player for each of your syndication partners. With this strategy, you can record performance on a per-player basis, and target content and ad campaigns by player. You also maintain control over the content published to the player and can update or remove content at any time from within the Studio. Here are the main steps in implementing this strategy:

1. In your Brightcove account, create a separate player for each syndication partner. You can customize it all you want, with input from the partner.
2. Use domain restriction to limit the player to that affiliate's web site. This makes sure that people can't snag the embed code from an affiliate's site and publish it on a different site. Examine the other player settings. You may want to configure the hosting options for the player so that links drive traffic back to your site or turn off advertising for the player. Think about the player settings that Video Cloud offer and configure the player to reflect the agreement you have with your syndication partner.
3. Choose the content for the player. If it's a playlist player, you control what videos, from time to time, are visible in each affiliate's player. Or, if it's a single-video player, you can program it using quick video publishing or by modifying the player publishing code.
4. Distribute the player publishing code. You can send the player code to your syndication partners, who can then embed their specific player in their own web page. You can use either the Standard (iframe) or Advanced (video tag) embed code. but distributing the Standard embed code allows you to maintain stricter control of the player, as the affiliate will not be able to modify the player aside from its size.
5. Monitor performance data. You want to know how your videos are performing on each affiliate's site. This is especially important if you're running ads or sharing revenues for your syndicated content. Since you have created a player specifically for each affiliate, it is easy to look at performance by affiliate in Video Cloud Analytics.