Adding Cue Points

Introduction

Cue points are specified places on the video timeline. When the video is played back, an event is automatically broadcast every time a cue point is reached - using the Player API, you can listen for these events and take whatever action you wish. In addition, you can read all the cue point information from the video metadata stored in the player mediainfo object, which allows you to mark the cue points on the video timeline in some way if you want to.

There are two kinds of cue points:

• Ad cue points: these are used to mark places where an ad request should be made (if the video and player are enabled for advertising).
• Code cue points: these are used to take some action using the Player API - some typical uses are displaying some kind of call-to-action (CTA) or displaying some image or text relating to video content, perhaps as a video overlay or in the page around the player.

Sample app

See the Pen CMS API Sample: Add Cue Points by Brightcove Learning Services ( @rcrooks1969) on CodePen.

Implementation overview

You can add cue points in the Studio Media module. You can also add them using the CMS API, which is the method we will use in this sample.

HTTP method

Cue points can be added either when you create the video or later with an update request. In this sample, we will add them to an existing video by making a video update request, which means you will use the PATCH method.

Endpoint

The endpoint for the update video request is:

          https://cms.api.brightcove.com/v1/accounts/account_id/videos/video_id

Request body

The request body is a JSON object that can contain many items of video metadata. Here we will just look at the cue_points field, which is set to an array of cue point objects, as in the following sample:

          {
          "cue_points": [
              {
                "name": "Ad Cue Point",
                "type": "AD",
                "time": 2.0,
                "metadata": null,
                "force_stop": false
              },
              {
                "name": "Code Cue Point",
                "type": "CODE",
                "time": 4.0,
                "metadata": "The metadata might be text or the url for an image to display",
                "force_stop": true
              }
            ]
          }

Cue point object fields

Below is a description of the fields for cue point objects.

Notes

• ^[1] Technically, the cue point is active until the next cue point is reached - therefore, in the cue points array that you can retrieve from the Brightcove Player, you will see a startTime and endTime as well at a time for the cue point.