What’s New in Vbrick Rev – May 2021 Edition

This week, we started to roll out the latest version of the Vbrick Rev Enterprise Platform across our global datacenters.  This release was packed full of new capabilities and enhancements directly informed from feedback and requests of our customers.  In this release, I’m proud to say, Vbrick once again ups the game on webcast events, adding functionality to fully brand webcasts and use RTMPS sources for live streams among others.

(Do you have an upcoming webcast event? Here are ten great tips for your next live streaming event.)

I wanted to share with you “a few of my favorite things“ about this week’s release.  I apologize to those who now have the song from The Sound of Music playing in your head.  I know that Kevin in our product management team is likely now singing along. 

1) Enabling RTMPS Cloud-Based Video Production with Rev Webcasts

The Covid pandemic accelerated the adoption of video across all our customers.  It also accelerated the adoption of cloud-based, internet-accessible solutions like Vbrick Rev.  The pandemic also drove the need to achieve a higher production value for certain types of events without access to your trusted on-premises video production studios.   

I’m excited to announce that we’ve now made it much easier to work with your preferred cloud-based video production solution, software encoders, or your traditional hardware encoders with our new RTMPS Video source for webcasts.   It now takes just a couple of clicks to source a Rev webcast from any of these tools.   Whether you leverage OBS, Switcher Studio, Restream.io, Socialive, Brandlive, Streamyard, or any other RTMPS capable video production tool or encoder, you can now quickly source your Rev webcast from any of those tools.

2) Empowering Global Workforces with Live Transcription & Translation for all Video Sources

A key theme for us has been to ensure that, wherever possible, Vbrick Rev automatically enriches and adds value to our customers’ live and recorded video content.  We started our AI journey with the ability to tag users appearing in a video and automate the tagging process using facial recognition, later adding transcription and translation for recorded content.   

It is super-exciting to announce that as part of this release, we complete our support for live transcription and translation across all our supported video sources, including the newly introduced RTMPS video source.   Your video library content and your live video streams will now be accessible to any employees or attendees in their preferred language.

3) Making the 1:M Webcast Experience feel more 1:1

It was also essential to continue to move the needle on user engagement. This release revisits our tried-and-true Polling and Chat capabilities and enhances the user experience and capabilities in each.   Polls can now offer up to 15 choices, and our chat inherits rich text editing, including a collection of emojis.

4) Branding for Webcast Events

Our customers leverage the Rev platform for internal virtual events or external events that can benefit from unique branding for the event.  This release introduces the ability to brand individual events differently than the account-level branding, including the ability to pick a different logo and colors for the event.  OK, I may have gone a bit overboard in the example below.

5) VOD Enhancements

While our most recent release placed a heavy focus on Webcast Event enhancements, we also managed to squeeze in a couple of improvements for our VOD and EVCM capabilities (with a lot more on the way in the 2H of the year.)   This release includes the ability to snap a thumbnail from any portion of the video and provides additional account-level controls for the media browsing experience of the VOD library.

I can’t wait to start getting feedback from our customers about our new Vbrick Rev Platform release and, inevitably, the start of a new set of ideas, suggestions, and enhancement requests from our customers.   Onward to our June release and the second half of the year roadmap items.

You can also learn more about Vbrick Rev and the full details of our latest release here.

Sincerely,

Olivier