To anybody reading this who wasn't at the conference- I talked a lot about each slide and don't have any of those notes in the presentation. I'd be happy to explain anything more in the comments.

I've been building advertising SDKs for more than a year at Brightcove, and I want to share the things that I've learned about how advertising works- we'll go over the basics of advertising (CPMs, Mad Men, ad networks), the life of an ad (ad policies, ad delivery, impressions), and the emerging standards (VAST, VPAID). It will be a very technical dive into an area that many of us make our living off but which not a lot of people understand. A coworker of mine, Melissa Gregory, will also be giving a ten-minute introduction to Brightcove at the beginning of the talk.

The presentation I'll be giving is a sponsored presentation for Brightcove. I don't want this to dissuade those who just want to hear about RIA advertising, as my goal is to make this a talk that's the same as the non-sponsored talks at the conference. Being a former speaker at 360Flex in Seattle, I know I can make this happen, no matter if you use a different video platform or none at all.

I'm happy that Brightcove is a Bronze sponsor at the event. We'll have a booth there, which I'll be manning at points and where you can learn more about what we do (and pick up some schwag).

Not signed up for 360Flex? If you can get to San Jose in two weeks, you should sign up now. This is the original Flex conference, and the people who attend make it a one-of-a-kind event. I went to the first 360Flex in San Jose as well as 360Flex in Seattle three years ago. I met so many incredible people at both events, and I'm sure it will be the same at this one.

This post is long overdue, but I've been a little sleep-deprived and focused elsewhere lately. So here's a supersized set of links.

Meetup with Us: The London Brightcove Developer Group has taken off, and the Boston Brightcove Developer Group is close behind. I put together the Boston group, so I hope you'll go to the meetup page to join!

David Mendels: I'm very excited that Brightcove has brought David Mendels on board as President/COO. I knew him from his time jumpstarting the Flex team, and I can see him having the same kind of influence at Brightcove.

Lots of stuff: I can't think of a concise way to describe the many features that have been released so here's a rundown of a lot of stuff: chromeless player templates, built-in player sharing to Twitter and Facebook, player performance enchancements, cue point editing with video preview, additional VAST support, and a lot more that you can find in the links above.

BEML editing: Todd Yard of the Brightcove player team has created an awesome application for the visual design of players. The code complete is also very helpful.

Creating Brightcove plugins: I enjoyed this article on creating Brightcove plugins. Don't get thrown off by the message at the top of the page- it reads just fine in English.

Blogs you can find: The many blogs on brightcove.com have been rearranged so that you can see them in one place. Lots of excellent reading there that you can now grab in one RSS feed or follow on twitter.

Media SDKs: Two new media SDKs have been created, one for for .NET and one for ColdFusion. I've lost track of the number, but I'd guess there's a media SDK for about 10 languages now.

More devices every day: Brightcove can now be found on Yahoo Connected TV Widgets.

As a hopefully-obvious cavaet, these are just my reasons and have nothing to do with Brightcove. We have plenty of excellent people focused on the JavaScript side as well here, and I'd read Jeremy Allaire's post on TechCrunch if you're looking for a more Brightcove-centric response.

Brightcove 4: The launch of Brightcove 4 should have its own blog post, but I'll write what I can here. Some of these features I've written about on this blog before, like live video, VAST support, and Facebook integration. Here's a list of features I haven't mentioned, some of which I'll talk about more below: a new Express edition, iPhone SDK, new analytics module, transcoding movies with more renditions and higher quality, ability to switch between progressive and streaming for any video in your account, live streaming with full ad support, and more ad integrations (including OpenX and Freewheel).

$99-A-Month Edition: The Brightcove Express version can now be bought online for $99 a month (with some other plans costing more). I remember talking to someone awhile ago (ahem, on a podcast) and being told Brightcove was much too expensive for them to use. This is a price that many more people can afford, and I'm very excited to see more people try out Brightcove. If you've read this blog for awhile and are just curious to try things out (and/or you want to see the nice-looking Flex apps that are used for video management) you can also use the link above to quickly create a trial account.

iPhone SDK: The iPhone SDK is a pretty big project at Brightcove, and it's grabbed a lot of attention in the launch. I've only seen the demos of it, and it does looks snazzy. The switching between progressive and streaming videos in an account makes the retrieval of videos from Brightcove a lot easier for this project and for all other mobile devices. Often companies want to have their videos streamed on the Web, for bandwidth savings and making it harder to steal, but mobile devices require progressive videos. We now have a simple switch in the media APIs (one parameter that needs to be added to calls) to force the retrieval of progressive videos.

The Mad Men Keep Going: The OpenX ad integration is interesting as a free solution for advertising. OpenX is an open source ad server you can install yourself. Also interesting on the ad front is the release of the ad rules SDK. This SDK, when used with the ad translation and ad display SWF SDKs, allows for complete control of the ad system in the player. Companies like Freewheel need this in order to allow their own complex ad rules to behave in the player, and the ad SDKs are allowing very involved integrations to be done without Brightcove's direct help.

Palm OS Example: The non-iPhone world, we haven't completely forgotten about you. There's a new article on developing for Palm.

Brightcove 3.4: This release didn't have as much in it previous dot releases, as we were gearing up for Brightcove 4, but it did include media sharing in the media module and ad support in the media controls.

New Media SDKs: Two new media SDKs are being worked on: one from Al Manning for ActionScript and one for Java.

Remembering ColdFusion: I worked on the ColdFusion team for six months, so I won't forget about it (and the CFers can thank me for the super keyword for CFCs in 6.1 as well as many of the performance improvements). But to bring it back for those who haven't thought about it for awhile, here's an example of posting videos to Brightcove in CF and a creator's interview with Jeremy Allaire

November 4th at 7pm
One Cambridge Center, 12th Floor
Cambridge, MA

EventDispatcher should expose list of attached listeners went from 4 votes to 16 votes.
Include FlexPMD went from 3 votes to 9 votes.
Expose more of "additional compiler options" in the UI went from 3 votes to 12 votes.

If you haven't seen them yet, there's plenty more voting suggestions in another post on mine (although two of them have already been fixed in 10.1).

Encoding for the iPhone: Learn about the settings that we've found work well when targeting your video for the iPhone. You can use this with the existing support that Brightcove has for the iPhone.

Developer TV: You can hear me talk on the new Developer TV about Using Ad XML, Using VAST Ad XML, and Troubleshooting with Player Logging. Next time I'll try to encode things better so that you can actually read the text. And let you see more of Charlie and Callie.

The Future of Online Video: An interesting Q&A about online video with Jeremy Allaire.

Adaptive Streaming: Brightcove now uses adaptive streaming to pick the right video for your current bandwidth. One interesting thing to note about Brightcove's player implementation for this is that we don't require Flash Player 10. Or rather we require FP10 if the user really wants to use adaptive streaming, as that's the only way this feature will work, but the player itself will work fine in FP9. It required an interesting trick to get this to work, and I don't know of any other player that does this.

Boxee Support: Brightcove publishers can now distribute on boxee. This may mean I need to finally stop just using a web browser after hooking my Macbook to the TV.

Brightcove's Facebook Status: New articles have been posted to show how to embed video in a Facebook news feed and add a player to a fan page.

My logs show that the blog post was viewed 840 times. I'll take off more than half of that number to account for crawler visits, people who didn't read the article, etc. So that leaves us with 400 people who could have voted on a bug.

Keeping 400 people in mind, here's what I see for the bugs that I entered in the list:

EventDispatcher should expose list of attached listeners. 4 votes
Include FlexPMD. 3 votes
Expose more of "additional compiler options" in the UI. 3 votes

That's a depressing voting percentage. There are a lot more bugs in the original post, and they don't look to have changed much in numbers either.

So why didn't people vote for these bugs? Here are my guesses:

1. You find it too much effort to vote for bugs

This is probably because you don't want to spend the time to register for an account. To show how easy this is, I just signed up for another account (which I will use to double vote for everything*). It took me less than 3 minutes, and most of that time was waiting for the email registration. The total time in which I was really doing something was less than a minute.

After you have an account, you can vote by clicking on a link in the left-hand column of the bug report.

It does take a bit more effort to create new bugs for things that are bothering you, and I know I haven't been very good at this. But I've been getting better as I've been thinking more about point #2.

2. You don't think voting for bugs matters

You voted for a bug that got deferred without explanation, or an enhancement that feels like it's being ignored. Or you've read stories about this, or you just don't believe anybody pays attention to a few votes on here.

I can understand why a lot of people would think this, but I think they're wrong. Unless things have changed dramatically since I was on the Flex team, opinions like this matter a lot to the team and future planning. The thing that's hard to see from our outside-the-team perspective, however, is all the other inputs going into the decision of what gets done or not. There's corporate goals, other internal team requests, what will make money, what people on the team want to work on, etc. So it isn't the only "vote" on the matter, but I think it's a very important vote.

3. You didn't like the bugs I entered

Now this is a reason that I can completely understand. Maybe you're focused on the Gumbo components, or better data services, or you just want more cowbell. In any case, if you didn't like the bugs I pointed to, I hope you're finding or entering the issues that concern you.

4. You don't have to vote to get something fixed... you have other ways

I think this only works if you're Doug McCune or work at Adobe.

* Of course I'm kidding about double-voting. Unless FP-444 doesn't really get fixed.

I'm missing MAX to keep my wife company as we expect our first child when it gets a bit more cold out. So if you don't hear me blogging for a few months, this is the reason. :)

Brightcove San Francisco Alliance Meetup, September 10th at 6pm
Brightcove Toronto Meetup, September 10th at 7pm
Brightcove Cambridge Developer Meetup, September 17th at 7pm

I'm putting together the Cambridge meetup, and I hope a lot of people in the Boston area will head to our office to meet the development team and see some of the things we've been working on.

I'll also be teaching half of a developer training session for customers and partners on September 17th in Cambridge. If you are interested in attending the training, please email training@brightcove.com for more details.