As we move forward into the second half of 2024, it’s an excellent time to reflect on the significant advancements made in our Video Player over the past year. From a sleek redesign to innovative features, our team has been working hard to enhance your video experience. Here’s a look at some of the standout updates:
One of the most noticeable changes is the complete re-design and facelift of the video player. It now looks better, more sleek and modern, and aligns more closely with Cloudinary’s brand. Additionally, the new design allows for easy adjustments to match your own brand, ensuring a consistent and customized look for your content.
Introducing the AI highlights graph, a game-changer for viewers and content creators alike. This feature uses artificial intelligence to automatically generate visual highlights reel of the most engaging moments in a video. This not only helps viewers quickly find key segments but also provides valuable insights for creators on which parts of their content are most captivating.
To further improve video navigation, and particularly long-form video content, we introduced the chapters feature. This allows creators to divide their content into distinct sections, making it easier for viewers to find specific segments of interest. Chapters are especially useful for longer videos, tutorials, and educational content.
But that’s not all! Chapters can now be auto-detected and generated using our new AI service. This innovative technology analyzes the video content and intelligently creates chapters, saving creators time and effort while enhancing the viewing experience. With AI-generated chapters, viewers can effortlessly jump to the parts that matter most to them, making video consumption more efficient and enjoyable than ever before. For perfect results, the generated chapters can then be easily edited using the chapters editor in our video-player studio.
Understanding how viewers interact with your content is crucial, and our video analytics suite is here to help. Not only does the player enable the collection of detailed viewing trends and behavior data, but we’ve also introduced a powerful analytics dashboard. This dashboard allows for easy visualization and in-depth analysis of the collected data, providing content creators with deeper insights into viewer behavior, engagement, and performance. Furthermore, we also provide you this data through our video analytics API, so you can consume and further analyze the data. With these tools, you can make data-driven decisions to optimize your video strategies effectively.
In response to the growing demand for live content, our video player now supports live streams. This allows users to broadcast live events directly through our video player, expanding the range of content you can offer. Whether it’s a live concert, webinar, or sports event, our player is equipped to handle it seamlessly.
Accessibility and customization are key to a great viewing experience. Our improved subtitles and captions features offer better style customization and configurability, including options for adjusting position, fonts, sizes, and colors. You can also set the pace of the captions, powered by our AI-generated transcripts, which also allowed us to introduce word-by-word highlight functionality with advanced styling options, making it easier for viewers to follow along.
We understand the importance of integration with modern JavaScript frameworks. That’s why we’ve introduced an ECMAScript Module (ESM) flavor of our player, making it easier to use with React, Svelte, Angular, and other popular JS frameworks, providing developers with a flexible and efficient way to integrate the player into their applications.
// Import specific modules
import { videoPlayer } from "cloudinary-video-player";
import "cloudinary-video-player/chapters";
import "cloudinary-video-player/playlist";
// Or import all at once
import { videoPlayer } from "cloudinary-video-player/all";
import "cloudinary-video-player/cld-video-player.min.css";Code language: JavaScript (javascript)Performance is key, and our move to a modular architecture with lazy-loaded plugins is a big step forward. By breaking down the video player into smaller, modular components, we’ve managed to reduce the main bundle size by more than 50%. This not only speeds up load times but also ensures that only the necessary features are loaded, improving overall performance and user experience.
Behind the scenes, we’ve made numerous under-the-hood infrastructure changes. These enhancements ensure more stable, reliable performance and easier deployments. Our improved change-logs provide better transparency and documentation, making it simpler for developers to keep track of updates and implement them smoothly.
The past year has been a period of remarkable growth and innovation for Cloudinary Video Player. With a sleek new design, AI-driven features, improved accessibility, and enhanced performance, we’re excited to provide you the tools to deliver the best video experience possible. We remain committed to innovation and look forward to bringing even more exciting developments in the coming year. Stay tuned, and thank you for being a part of this journey with us!
To learn more about Cloudinary’s image and video API platform, visit our site.
