Brightcove Native Player SDK for Android

Overview

The Native Player SDK for Android is Brightcove’s low-level integration for delivering live and on-demand video inside native Android applications. It gives engineering teams a production-grade ExoPlayer-based playback engine, a turnkey ads stack, DRM, analytics, and broad device coverage — without having to hand-roll the hard parts of streaming.

It powers some of the world’s largest broadcasters, sports federations, and publishers, with first-class support for Android phones and tablets, Android TV, and Amazon Fire TV.

What sets it apart

My role

As a Senior Software Engineer at Brightcove, I worked on the Native Player SDK for Android — a high-scale video platform that streams 50,000 minutes of video every minute for enterprise customers. The remit was modernization at the architecture level: rebasing a decade-old Java codebase onto ExoPlayer, hardening monetization, and bringing ad measurement up to current IAB standards while keeping the SDK’s production customers running without a hiccup.

• Rearchitected and modernized the legacy Java SDK toward Kotlin and ExoPlayer
• Implemented OMID (IAB Open Measurement) for ad viewability and verification
• Enhanced server-side ad insertion (SSAI) and the analytics pipeline for monetization
• Updated the SDK to support the latest Android TV and Fire TV platform standards
• Led a remote offshore engineering team delivering SDK enhancements

Capabilities

• Video playback
• Live streaming
• Advertising integration
• Analytics
• DRM content protection
• 360° video
• Offline playback
• Picture-in-picture
• Multi-audio tracks
• Cross-device resume
• Captions
• Connected TV

Distributed across

Built on

Languages

JavaKotlin

Frameworks

Android SDKExoPlayer

Platforms

AndroidAndroid TVAmazon Fire TV

Standards

OMID (IAB Open Measurement)

Capabilities

Live & VOD streamingServer-side ad insertionAd verificationAnalytics pipelineDRMOffline playback

API at a glance

val videoView = BrightcoveExoPlayerVideoView(context)
val emitter = videoView.eventEmitter

Catalog.Builder(emitter, accountId)
    .setPolicy(policyKey)
    .build()
    .findVideoByID("6325382462112") { video ->
        videoView.add(video)
        videoView.start()
    }

“Powerful video experiences, built for Android — production-grade playback, ads, and measurement in one SDK.”