Brightcove Player Cookies

This topic addresses Brightcove Player's use of cookies.

Overview

By itself, the Brightcove Player does not create or read any cookies.

However, Brightcove-supplied plugins and other third-party player plugins may use cookies. The cookies used by third-party plugins depend on third-party software, such as Google's IMA SDK, to power advertising.

Please check in with such third parties for a description of the cookies used in their plugins.

Examples of cookies that may be used by the Brightcove Player

The Brightcove Campaign plugin leaves a cookie named bc_uuid, but also, depending on your Campaign Data Connection, you may receive cookies from third-party providers' scripts such as Marketo and Eloqua.
Google Ad Manager's IMA SDK and Freewheel may use cookies, but those are managed by the respective Ad SDKs, and Brightcove does not control their cookie usage.
Third-party Analytics plugins like Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, and Adobe Analytics may also use cookies, but those are set by the respective SDK and not by any components that Brightcove owns or controls.

Storage of user preferences across sessions, e.g. So I don't need to set the page language to Spanish every time I visit.
For user identification, e.g., To tell the page that I'm me and I'm logged in.
For advertising targeting, e.g., I am an anonymous user who likes cars and is 35-45 so relevant ads are delivered to me.

This page says that the Brightcove Player doesn't use cookies, but I see a few brightcove.com or brightcove.net cookies. Why?

Cookies are referenced by domain, not by page, and many Brightcove Players may use cookies because the customer in control of that player has chosen to use them for their business purposes.

If you're not using a brand new and fresh browser install, you'll likely see cookies related to Brightcove. If you're a Brightcove customer, you'll probably have stored cookies related to the Brightcove Studio (user interface), or from the analytics or marketing tools we have deployed on our Brightcove Homepage or support pages if you've visited either recently. You may also have visited the website of one of the many other Brightcove customers and picked up a Google Analytics or Google IMA3 cookie, too. Various known and custom plugins or integrations can create and read many other cookies.

Can I check my own player?

Absolutely. Loading your player in a private (or “Incognito mode”) tab or window is the easiest way. Private tabs won't load any previously created cookies, so you will only see cookies this particular player creates. Depending on the player configuration, you may see some or none.

Then open up your browser's cookie store and take a look! This page has a good explanation of how to do this in most browsers.

Aren't cookies bad?

Not necessarily, and not usually. While the world is slowly moving away from cookies, they're still a common and straightforward way to store small quantities of useful data in a user's browser. This data is about you, and you have control over what you share with others.

Whether companies are transparent or not about them is up to the individual company and the countries within which they operate (cookie consent banners are one way of enforcing transparency), but you can always decide if you want to accept cookies or disable them altogether. It's a tradeoff because, without cookies, websites can't “remember you” and can't keep you logged in, and the ads you see may be about products and services completely irrelevant to you (or even in a language you don't understand), but it is — and should be — up to you.

Keeping updated

If you would like to be kept updated on changes made to this page by Brightcove, you may wish to utilize a third-party web page monitoring service such as Website change detection.

This document was last updated on 8 January 2025. Please contact Brightcove Support if you need additional information on cookies.