Back in Q2 of 2010, Digital Surface provided production and consultancy services to Lavish Productions, the London-based leading Creative and Production agency responsible for conceiving and executing an online talent contest ‘Break Into Music’ on behalf of the careers and recruitment resource monster.co.uk.

The Break Into Music competition (now closed, but can be seen here) made use of the Brightcove online video platform to manage the upload, approval, review and rating of musical performance videos submitted by registered users via web or iPhone app upload.

Digital Surface was able to assist Lavish Productions in turning around the project in a lightening fast time frame and to budget by providing

• effective technical consultancy underpinning system design
• custom video player production at minimum cost

The technical consultancy aspect enabled Lavish Productions to ramp up straight into build by providing documented pointers to key resources, examples and suggestions how best to achieve the required functionality. An ad hoc support service was also provided for the duration of the build phase so that Lavish Productions could request additional input and advice as required.

The production aspect saw the delivery of a custom video player template using Brightcove’s XML-based user interface layout capability, BEML (Brightcove Experience Markup Language) supplemented by a BEML-compliant custom component written in Flash. The final player fulfilled a number of key requirements including

• customised sharing call to action
• voting functionality
• extended analytics capability
• configurable promotional image with click through

Illustrated documentation of the video player was provided, enabling Lavish Productions to easily make tweaks and updates to the BEML underpinning the player without prior experience of Brightcove.

The project was a resounding success with over 1000 talented submissions uploaded, stacks of views via both the Break Into Music website and shared links pushed to social network sites. Engagement was massive – over 28,000 votes were generated for the top 3 finalists alone. Above all, monster.co.uk boosted registration numbers with a huge group of talented individuals keen to make their mark!

Read more about services offered by Digital Surface.

Tags: case study, custom video player, Lavish, technical consultancy, white label service