Why Video Technology is Taking Over the World — and How to Prepare for Its Innovation
Tags: Innovation, Videos, Video Technology, Diversity In Tech, Technology

Getting to Know Namita

Introducing the Fellows and Alumni to Brightcove started with an introduction to Namita Dhallan, Brightcove CPO since July 2020. Chatting with Hack.Diversity, Namita shared her story of how she landed where she is today — and what advice she would give to others who are feeling imposter syndrome.

Namita described her career trajectory as one that she didn’t necessarily aim for — that is, she had set herself up for an engineering path. Namita majored in computer science before many schools were really focused on it, and decided to extend her college experience to pursue two co-ops — which was something she encouraged our Fellows and Alumni to remember: that real-world experience helps to differentiate you from peers who may just have in-classroom experience.

Following college, Namita worked at IBM after having interned there in college, and then a supply chain company — and throughout her time, focused on structured programming, object-oriented programming (OOP), and web movement. However, despite working as an engineer, she continued to be curious about why she was building what she was building and how others’ roles related to her work, and continued to ask questions to product officers about overall product cycles. Eventually, at a previous company, when the CEO asked for suggestions of what to do, Namita put all of her suggestions into writing — and was promoted from Vice President of Engineering to Vice President of Product Management. In her words, product management owns the road map of the entire development cycle.

However, her impressive career trajectory has not prevented her from facing imposter syndrome, too. Her advice for others? Figure out how to get past it. In order to take the next step, be bold and push yourself on what you can do — and don’t let the feelings of doubt ruin you. Learn what you need to learn to be successful in your role, develop skills where you’re always learning, and ditch people who poke at you and your skills.

Namita reassured our audience that in general, it’s okay to feel nervous, but to always remember that you get hired because someone believed that you CAN successfully do the job.

What is Brightcove?

Namita talked about the overall vision and culture of Brightcove, and described it as first and foremost that “our people are our greatest asset, and that’s really true at Brightcove.” The company started in 2004, in the age of DVDs and even one year earlier than YouTube. Whereas many people used to think of video technology as a nice-to-have, Brightcove saw the huge potential that video technology had to impact the world, and has now seen others also recognize it as being just “as essential as air,” said Namita.

She continued to explain that what distinguishes Brightcove is their innovative spirit and unwavering commitment to providing the best product. Now, they continue to differentiate their company from competitors through being known for their reliability, scalability, and security. Approximately 2% of all total public downstream Internet traffic annually originates from Brightcove, and as a publicly traded company with over $185 million in revenue during 2019, the 2020 projections are looking even better. Brightcove is headquartered in Boston, with offices worldwide, but they remain committed to finding talent wherever people are. Thus one of the largest majorities of their workforce is made up of remote workers.

What Happens Behind the Videos We See?

After Namita’s fireside chat segment, Brock Wagenaar, Senior Director of Engineering for Data, and Swetha Jayaraman, Senior Data Engineer, shared more about the technology behind Brightcove.

The goal for Brightcove’s customer: learn about who’s watching their videos to understand which are popular, and when, and where.

Brightcove has an interface on the admin side that offers up relevant key analytics, such as daily unique viewers, seasonal patterns, etc. Using these analytics, customers can see what percentage of the video was watched by everybody who viewed it — which is an important consideration for customers, as we all know how classic it is to start a video for the first few seconds, but the drop-off rate that follows can tell customers about how their videos are landing.

Brock walked Fellows through a day in the life of the data that originates from Brightcove videos being played, to how that data is then actually used. Fellows saw the flow from source to end, where the data is actually recorded, and learned more about the business side of Brightcove’s model: the product sold to clients is a video portal, whichBrightcove’s clients then use to showcase videos to their own customers. Thanks to Brightcove’s innovative data analytics, their clients are able to achieve the largest reach possible by referring to what the numbers tell them about their customers’ viewing patterns.

Brightcove uses basic web technologies (HTML and HTTP) — as shown here, when Brock cracked the code open and showed Fellows the inside.

Swetha explained how customers use Brightcove analytics to increase their ad reach. They don’t need to go to a third-party service to get separate video analytics, which is a critical part of Brightcove’s product and business strategy. The Brightcove system is constantly collecting events (videos being played) for analysis, and processing them 24/7 — which results in approximately 100,000 events per second as usable data! From this, Brightcove customers can see how interactions with their videos should inform how they might want to modify videos to increase engagement. With the data available to them, Brightcove customers can more strategically plan around what an audience would be receptive to — in terms of content, length, format, and more.

Big Thanks

To the presenters and team: Namita Dhallan (CPO), Brock Wagenaar (Sr. Director of Engineering for Data) and Swetha Jayaraman (Sr. Data Engineer) for an engaging, informative and incredibly interesting session with Hack.Diversity Fellows!