Video portal integration

Diāna Helmane
Product Owner
March 29, 2024

Backscreen WebPlay video platform enables you to automate the processes of uploading, transcoding, producing, scheduling and publishing content. Integration with a public website or portal is an important prerequisite for ease of use. The Videosher video platform thus becomes the main tool for the administration and management of video content and related information, or CMS.  

Using the Backscreen WebPlay video platform, it is even possible to host content on the site automatically, but more often than not, the editors of the portal make sure that the video is in the right section and has all the relevant descriptive data (metadata) before publishing it.  

The functionality of the video platform provides a complete process for dealing with content metadata - receiving it from other client or external systems, linking it to video files, storing, editing and publishing it, allowing content portals (news sites, VOD platforms) to present this metadata content directly to end-users, as well as delivering this information to external systems such as partner sites if necessary. Metadata in this case is considered as descriptive information, such as a description of the topic, content, actors or participants and additional accompanying material such as pdfs, images, etc. (Editorial metadata). 

To make one of the most important processes in content management for media clients - scheduling - as flexible as possible, a new media item with a descriptive part or metadata can now be created in the video platform before the video arrives, so that editors can prepare the necessary information in advance and publish it immediately when the video is ready.  

Using the Backscreen WebPlay video platform application programming interface, or API, portal developers can create applications that interact with the video platform server. This integration, which only needs to be done once, provides extensive and automated content administration capabilities and allows automation of processes where users work across multiple systems, both within the Videosher video platform, the client's internal and third-party platforms. 

This process is very well complemented by the automatic publishing function. When the configured start or end time for content availability is reached, a status message is sent to the client portal server using one of the direct notification technologies (webhook, message queue, etc.), which allows automatic publishing/unpublishing on the portal without the need to manually copy the embed code into a dedicated location on the portal. For automatic structuring of content in the portal's menu system, you can use one of the mechanisms we offer, such as content categories, tags, topics or metadata. 

The theme functionality is designed to allow easier categorisation of content on portals. Unlike categories, which work like folders and videos can only be in one of them, themes allow you to add videos to any of them, thus creating a much more comprehensive categorisation, and it is possible to use different types of themes in parallel, e.g. you can assign themes by video genres, you can use themes to create so-called portal carousels, etc. 

For the monetisation of customer video content, the video platform functionality includes various tools. 

AVOD scenarios benefit from integration with ad serving tools using the VAST, VPAID or VMAP standards, which allow the integration of third-party ad services into the Backscreen WebPlay video platform in the video player. It is possible to automate the placement of ads in videos by applying logic depending on the length of the video, so that videos that are too short do not have very long ads, while full-length films have multiple ad breaks. 

For SVOD/TVOD scenarios, the Backscreen WebPlay r video platform offers different content protection methods which, when integrated with the paywall, allow to protect content from unpaid viewing. Content protection is ensured by encryption (DRM or clear-key), geo-restrictions, tokens against streaming, embedding restrictions on specific pages, etc.  

We have recently developed new functionality to customise the video player to the customer's needs. The video platform's default iframe player embed code is more universal, but it is possible that some browser features are not interoperable with it.  That's why we now propose to use JavaScript-based embedded code for the player, which can be customised to the client's solutions, as well as allowing more interaction between the code on the portal page and the player. 

It is worth remembering that when creating a new portal, it is necessary to integrate analytics tools (e.g. Google Analytics, Gemius, NPAW Youbora), defining dimensions by which usability statistics can be sorted or searched, assessing the profitability, popularity and relevance of the service for end users. The overall statistics of the client portal consist of video views statistics and website traffic statistics. Video statistics are included in all Backscreen WebPlay video platform standard solutions. In addition, a list of video items by popularity - getpopular - can be retrieved using the platform's API statistics function. The solution is designed to display the most viewed videos on the client portal.