Brightcove is pulling the plug on Brightcove.TV, its consumer-oriented video showcase. In an e-mail to the site’s members, Brightcove says that it will no longer be accepting video uploads after December 17. The YouTube-wannabe site was never one of Brightcove’s strengths, which is serving video for professional and semi-professional content creators. That is something that the company will continue to do, primarily through its customers’ own Websites and in embeddable players throughout the Web (like the one below). This is not the end of the world for Brightcove, which should still have some of that $60 million it raised last January to plow into its main business.
I asked Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire why he decided to throw in the towel on Brightcove.TV. His response:
We are not throwing in the towel on Brightcove.TV, we are eliminating its use as an end-user sharing service. Note that the vast majority of programming on Brightcove.TV are professional channels published by media businesses that use our overall platform for their websites and syndication. It will continue to operate as a content showcase of pro publishers using the Brightcove Platform.
He further states in this blog post that the eight million monthly unique visitors to Brightcove.TV (as reported by comScore) is “dwarfed by the adoption of our Internet TV platform by media businesses around the world.” He counts 4,000 such media publishers, who collectively attract “over 120 million uniques visitors per month across thousands of websites.” Brightcove.TV was always a sideshow.
Even though Brightcove.TV will continue to operate and showcase videos from Brightcove’s partners, it will no longer accept videos from consumers. I am tempted to put it in the deadpool, but will refrain for now. If it disappears completely, or arises Zombie-like in the future, we will let you know.
Maybe the problem was that not enough regular people uploaded their clips to Brightcove.TV in the first place. Instead it is filled with cheesy trailers like this one for, ahem, Dead or Alive:
$60mil? Hell, I’ll take $600k…
A lot of major industry players still use Brightcove as their default ASP, so I doubt their core business proposition is about to disappear.
Haha, I’d take $100k.
Can we get a lower bid?
Many new websites, that are popping up via, killerstartups.com lists 20 per day sometimes more. They are all based on the same 10 or so theme’s. There are not enough users to find them all, to much of the money startups raise goes for advertising, which should be either word of mouth, viral, direct navigation or SEO. Not pay some website $10k per month to get people to look and go away. Users put in fake emails, hoping to see what is up.
kijiji.ca, aboutme.com, many many startups, not enough users.
If they are not selling advertising well, then what longterm value are they providing their clients? It seems they are a glorified LL VAR with a flash player.
It’s “Dead or Alive,” noob. I guess you didn’t watch the whole trailer OR ever hear of the game.
Wow, this is kid of unexpected. I would have thought that they were doing well with accepting the consumer videos. I can understand their dilemma, though. Whenever you accept user-generated content on your site you’re liable for much more than you could ever imagine.
I like the clickable ad next to the story that reads “Brightcove: 5 keys to success with Internet TV”.
I wonder if shuddering this service is one of those keys….
Come on guys, they are not going anywhere.
That was one of my last films…then I did Prison Break. Dead on Arrival? cmon.
Kiss Kiss.
Soon YouBoob will be shut down too!
That will be one great day!
http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
Dead on arrival? They seem to be hanging in there pretty strong across major media sites. Their ASP version (.com) at least.
I think the post is a little misleading. They want to focus on their core business which is professional, quality media content. There are already too many YouTube competitors. They want to provide a channel for their media partners (paying customers) to easily distribute video on their sites.
(we are one such customer)
This is a rather poor post. It is misleading and reflects poor analysis on the part of Techcrunch.
1) The site isn’t being shut down. A single “feature” of the site, allowing consumers to upload video, has been turned off. Most of the content on that site came from high quality produces who use BrightCove’s content management service. The email was pretty clear and I’m surprised that TechCrunch, NewTeeVee, etc., couldn’t do any homework and just twisted things.
2) BrightCove has always invested most of their resources into their video content management system, which they call an Internet TV platform, so this doesn’t reflect much of a change to the company.
There was a time where they planned to turn brightcove.tv into a major destination, that hasn’t worked out, but many companies try things here and there that don’t work out.
Geez…a little more thoughtful analysis please.
It is wise for Brightcove to focus on content management system, without attractive content internet TV could not attarct enough users to visit the web. But do you realise what comes after good content? The great increase of users will follow it, so if the technology is not good enough to sustain the increased users the total system will done. And they will lose lots of users forever. Because users can not accept one interent tv without fluent and stable playing.
Here you can check CCTV as an example, CCTV is the offical TV to broadcasting NBA is china, and when the hot match come like Houston Rocket. It will be enormous users assemble in short time and it is really great challenge for the technology support, and you guys can check the web of CCTV sports and find out the tech solution in enormous users for internet tv.
Link:http://nba.sports.cctv.com/14/index.shtml
I agreed the Dasgupta’s ideas.
I talked to the CEO of of BrightCove who is Jeremy Allaire to try other technolgy in order to enhance their streams.
I watched the CCTV NBA game a few days ago, which was really surprised me for it’s stable and fluent streams.
I post some comments on other topics yesterday, said I would dig who is the technology provider for CCTV.
Unfortunately, I only can see it’s called “Koos Information.” something.
However, anyway, that’s a very good experience when i can watch the NBA game online.