Justin Woods, Manager of Web Services & Tech Trailblazer

Justin Woods, Manager of Web Services for Hope Channel International will be one of the keynote speakers at PLAY 2019, an annual three-day conference for the online video industry hosted by Brightcove. Every year, PLAY invites a small group of industry leaders to share solution-based best practices to an audience of more than one-thousand video and technology innovators.

This isn’t the first time Justin caught the attention of Brightcove for the PLAY conference, he’s been on their radar before.

“They (Brightcove) have invited me to be a speaker before, but I declined because I didn’t think I had anything really “big” to talk about. Once our latest suite of Hope Channel apps launched, I felt that there was something significant for me to talk about,” shared Justin.

For the past few years, Justin has pioneered his way through a lengthy journey of developing a multi-platform suite of apps for Hope Channel. The latest app allows users to watch Hope Channel’s video content both live and on demand from several of the television network’s participating global affiliates. Justin will be the first to share that Brightcove went on that journey with him.

“Brightcove is our video on demand platform, if you’ve watched us online in any way in the past several years, it’s been through Brightcove,” explained Justin. “Brightcove approached Hope Channel a few years ago because they had started working on a new system that would be able to help solve some challenges we faced with our original Hope Channel app.”

One of those challenges was the issue of fragmentation across the network’s affiliate channels.

“We didn’t have a nice consistent app product, so in that vacuum our affiliates started creating their own Hope Channel apps. To solve that problem, we pursued a strategy to bring unification, making the product so good that affiliates would want to adopt it,” Justin shared.

Another significant feature of the latest app is the option of offline playback, offering users the ability to download episodes of programs directly to their device. This feature gives those around the world with limited or intermittent access to Internet the opportunity to download Hope Channel content when they have Internet, and then have the option to view it at a later time when they may not have Internet access. When it comes to app use, Hope Channel’s mobile activity of weekly users has more than doubled since the apps came out.

Not only is Justin looking forward to sharing how Hope Channel and Brightcove collaborated together to meet strategic goals, he’s also looking forward for the opportunity to share more about Hope Channel.

“I’m excited for the opportunity to talk about the great things Hope Channel is doing to an audience of people who would probably never encounter Hope Channel otherwise, and to do it in a way that shows Christians as proficient and cutting edge,” shared Justin. “I even found out that one Brightcove customer is flying all the way from Europe to hear my talk – this is a great opportunity for Hope Channel.”

Justin’s keynote presentation at PLAY 2019 will happen on Wednesday, May 15, 2019 in Boston Massachusetts, here in the United States.