Video cloud service provider Brightcove has announced a number of new enhancements to its offering, along with a couple of new collaborations, at its PLAY event in Boston.

Among them is the beta availability of Context Aware Encoding, a new video compression technology that lowers the total cost of ownership and improves video quality.

Context Aware Encoding uses machine learning and deep video analysis to achieve optimum quality for each video with the fewest bits necessary.

This patent-pending approach to transcoding enables Brightcove customers to maximise visual quality while reducing storage and delivery bandwidth requirements by up to 50 per cent.

Brightcove has also announced an exclusive integration of review-and-approval platform Wipster, which designed to give users of both platforms the freedom of one-click publishing direct from Wipster to Brightcove, allowing for seamless cloud delivery of video content.

Furthermore, Brightcove has introduced its Enterprise Video Initiative, a combination of innovative functionality and key partnerships that extends Brightcove’s existing platform to help corporate communications, human resources, training and partner enablement groups deliver the benefits of online video to internal audiences.

The company has extended its cloud video platform with new functionality that includes:

• In-Page Experiences, a template-driven capability that makes it easy for any business user to create engaging video experiences in a variety of formats, with links to other content, a wide range of calls to action and interactive elements that can automatically change both the flow and the content before, during, or after the initial video playback.
• Brightcove Live, which simplifies the use of live streaming for internal events such as town halls and customer forums, and to create VOD assets that extend the value after the event.
• Audience Profiles, which captures and analyses individual video viewing data to guide business decisions.
• Single Sign-On (SSO), which enables IT organisations to integrate Video Cloud into their federated identity management systems, enabling centralised control of access.
• New partnerships and integrations with enterprise CDN offerings from Hive Streaming, Ramp and Streamroot, which enable more efficient, higher quality, secure streaming of video content behind the firewall.