BIMvid will be at NAB 2013 in Las Vegas. Stop by our booth (N2533) April 8-11 and learn more about our end-to-end video platform. To schedule time to talk with a member of our team, please email us at: BIMatNAB@bimlocal.com.

Follow @BIMvid on Twitter to get updates and information during our stay at NAB.

Happy 2013! We have rolled right into the new year with many exciting new things to talk about. This first update is about some improvements to the broadcast editing portion of BIMvid.

First, a bit of history. The "BIMvid" brand today encompasses a suite of video tools, including 24/7 capture for on demand clips, live streaming, and asset management. However, we began BIMvid in 2008 as just the 24/7 component for TV broadcasters in the United States. We provide BIMvid Video Capture Boxes that ingest a broadcast feed and sends it to an online video editor from U.K.-based Forbidden Technologies called FORscene, which provides users robust editing tools, including frame-accurate editing, on par with any production editing system in the world, but in a system based entirely in the cloud.

In fact, BIMvid's cloud-based video editing workflow predates the recent popularity of "the cloud" as a buzzword to describe cloud computing. We've been very happy with the results of our integration with FORscene (and, were thrilled to cheer on Forbidden's success last year in bringing their expertise to NBC's Olympics coverage).

Two recent additions to this partnership are closed captions, and tighter integration with the BIMvid asset manager. First, we're pleased to offer closed caption support in the BIMvid FORscene Editor, which allows broadcasters to seamlessly publish on-demand videos with captions.

Second, we've integrated the editor with our asset manager. Previously we had separate logins for the BIMvid Manager and the BIMvid FORscene editor, but recently we completed a single sign on integration that allows the editor to be launched from within the manager. Now broadcasters can create and manage all of their on-demand video from a single cohesive environment. Clips created in FORscene are quickly transferred to the Manager, where users are already logged in and can syndicate videos as needed.

With these improvements broadcasters can rest assured that BIMvid meets their online video editing and management needs even better than before!

While it's not *quite* as exciting as being shipwrecked with a tiger, we are pumped up about our new BIMvid API.

The API is a REST(ful) API and allows clients to send us videos without needing to log into the user interface.

Since it's brand new, we will be continuing to develop it to meet our clients' needs. Feedback and suggestions welcome, just use the "Contact Us" button to send us a note, or you can reach out to us on Twitter.

OK, so it's not ice cream, but it's still pretty sweet. We're pleased to offer television broadcasters two flavors of video capture box: standard output and "higher quality" which we've termed HQ for short.

Read more about HQ, and our closed caption solutions, on Broadcast Interactive Media's website (that's us, the creators of BIMvid!)

We are pleased to announce that with our latest new developments, BIMvid now supports closed captions!

The FCC has new regulations for closed captioning for some online video (here’s a good summary if you want to learn more), but in a nutshell, some videos from broadcasters are going to need captions on them just like when they appear on your television. BIM has developed its video products to allow broadcasters, or any online video publisher to include captions with their video content.

We encourage you to learn more about BIM’s closed caption solutions and use the orange "Contact Us" button if you are an online publisher that wants to learn more about how you can use our services.

We're also going to continue to develop BIMvid to provide even more caption encoding and display options over time, and we'll be sure to keep you updated when those are available!

We recently finished some major changes to the BIMvid Manager and thought it would be a good idea to share what we did and why we did it.  

When Broadcast Interactive Media started BIMvid, there was no Manager. Our clients, mostly broadcasters, had a simple need -- to take a video in any format and upload, transcode, and store it, so that it would always be available for playback on their websites, which we hosted. We built a straightforward upload form tool that accomplished this purpose.

We then realized that many businesses had similar video needs for their websites, too, and we decided to make BIMvid available for anyone that wanted to publish video, no matter who was hosting their site. Our mad scientist developers combined our existing video technology with user-authentication technology from another of our products, YouNews, and an existing database we had, Amazon's SimpleDB, and the first BIMvid Manager application was born.  

However, since these two systems were originally designed and built for specific and distinct purposes, we soon found ourselves between a rock and hard place. We had a lot of new and exciting features to add to BIMvid, but we were held back by the tension between the disparate systems. It wasn't as bad as say, the United-Continental airline merger, but we were bumping against the limits of what could be done with our code base (not unlike a passenger bumping his head against the ceiling of one of those tiny regional jets. OK, we're done with the airplane analogies!) We also were running into search and data retrieval limitations with SimpleDB, again because we tried to develop well beyond the our original requirements for it.

So we took a hard look at where we were and where we wanted to go. While it's always difficult to abandon the culmination of years of work, we realized the best way to go was to design a new BIMvid Manager from the ground up.

First, we selected a new database, MongoDB. MongoDB (from "humongous") is a scalable, high-performance, open source NoSQL database. It offers superior scalability and searching functionality. In addition, as we add more complex search functionality, we can easily add in tools like Apache's Lucene search engine.
 
Our next decision was to develop our application on top of the Symfony PHP framework. This community-supported, open-source framework offers a base of standard functionality to speed development. Many features that we needed -- including login, security, database, and template functions -- come pre-built, which allowed us to focus primarily on improving application-specific functionality. This sped our development substantially and allowed us to rebuild in just a few months what originally took years. The BIMvid Manager is now one unified code base, which allows us to support our clients' video needs much more easily. Symfony is also actively being developed and improved, so we can leverage the work that the community is doing, removing some of the development burden of keeping our application secure and updated.

This week Sensio Labs, the founders of Symfony, is hosting the Symfony Live San Francisco 2012 conference. We are excited to be able to send one of our developers, Heather Matanock, to participate, and we are looking forward with great verve to all the new ideas and techniques that she will be bringing back!

Exciting news! Over the past few months, the BIMvid team has been hard at work planning and executing a complete overhaul of the BIMvid Manager. We are pleased to see the fruits of this effort in the newly released Manager version 2.0.

There is a new URL for our clients to login that also reinforces the brand: http://manager.bimvid.com. Once logged in, most other things are the same for our clients, but now it's much faster and smoother than ever before!

For the curious, the BIMvid Manager is built on an open-source PHP framework called symfony and a NoSQL database system using MongoDB (We'll talk more in-depth about our new technology stack in a future blog).

We look forward to continuing to provide easy-to-use video publishing tools and leading monetization strategies to help you, the publisher, get the most value out of your video.

With the literal explosion in all facets of mobile video — the number of device types to take into account, the number of video delivery platforms for publishers to choose from, and the emergence of new monetization models — it's never been easier for a publisher to become unintentionally locked into a system that leads to a missed revenue opportunity.  

Today's video publishers need an open system capable of delivering video and integrating with virtually any 3rd party platform, as well as a video CMS that comes immediately integrated with a monetization platform. Unfortunately, the complexity involved in integrating video ad networks has left many publishers stuck on video platforms that lag behind the technology curve.

Tablets, smartphones, Flash vs HTML5, iOS, Android, MRAID vs VPAID, OTT devices like Roku and Boxee  -- after the incredible pace of change over the past 12 months, who knows which factor or platform will be most important 12 months from now?  Having the ability to publish HQ video to any existing device and the flexibility to integrate with emerging platforms is a critical factor for success and survival in today's market.

These are exactly the types of publisher needs we focus on addressing with our BIMvid solution.  Any client launching on BIMvid is guaranteed to generate revenue from their very first video stream delivered, no matter the platform or format. The BIMLocal network (ranked in the top 2 in ComScore News & Information) serves just that function for the BIMvid platform and keeps our developers on the ball when it comes to new monetization requirements.  This includes requirements for mobile, online, in-exchange, in-app, and live streaming applications.  

I was recently impressed as I read about current BIMvid client, Fisher Communications, and how they are utilizing their existing system videos in a new platform for connected TV apps. (You can read the full release here: http://tinyurl.com/bl5um2v.) This perfectly illustrates the extreme levels of agility and adaptability publishers require if they expect to continually be able to adjust with the shifting technology terrain.

Though unlocking the full value to video content may seem like a guessing game to some, with an ad sales team to act as an internal customer driving our product innovation, BIMvid remains in a position to help our clients evolve with this industry, which is something not all video cms providers can say.

-From Broadcast Interactive Media CEO Timur Yarnall's "Captain's Blog"