Not a week after we derided Brightcove for its difficult user interface in a story about newly emerged competitor Delve Networks, the Cambridge-based video hosting company is releasing a completely rebuilt version of its service into private beta.
Existing SaaS customers now have the opportunity to try out Brightcove 3 Beta, which will be made available to new customers sometime in the Fall. Development on Brightcove 3 began about nine months ago and has focused on three primary areas: a new publishing model, support for long-form video and, last but not least, an improved user interface.
The new publishing model centers around Brightcove’s first server-side API, which allows publishers to deeply integrate video meta data into their display pages. Publishers can choose to highlight related videos in ways that make the most sense for their content (perhaps by organizing them into lists that can be browsed by topics or names). They can also display descriptions, and choose URLs, that optimize SEO. As far as monetization is concerned, in-page advertisements can be synchronized with in-video ads to make for more effective impressions.
Brightcove has never put any limits on the lengths of the video uploaded to its platform, but until now it never tailored the delivery of longer video to users’ technical capabilities. The new version places Move Networks (a platform that specializes in the delivery of long form video) in its sights by adjusting delivery quality based on bandwidth and computational power. Brightcove wishes to become the single platform that publishers use to deliver both short and long form content, without requiring users to install a proprietary plugin, as Move Networks does (Brightcove delivers its video through Flash).
Finally, Brightcove 3 has been blessed with a new user interface that doesn’t require publishers to skip around between tabs to address different parts of the setup process. An iTunes-looking control panel takes advantage of drag-n-drop and batch editing capabilities, which should streamline the addition and editing of videos.
Brightcove is certainly one of the biggest, if not the biggest, video platforms for web publishers. According to internal statistics, the videos on its platform are viewed by 135 million uniques per month, and revenues experienced 500% growth in 2007. Publishers include Discovery, National Geographic, Showtime, and several other big media companies.
The company hopes that this release will help it expand internationally (it already has a strong presence in the UK and has taken direct steps to establish one in Japan). Brightcove is also soliciting non-media companies like non-profits and governmental organizations in addition to integrating more deeply into existing publishers’ websites.
we want a video solutions partner for Fropper.com. Someone who can manage video upload, hosting and content delivery. Let me know what synergies are possible.
- Rahul Vaz
Product Manager
Fropper.com
Rahul,
Ooyala is the best in breed from my POV.
My Web 0.2 contribution for Mark’s post…
http://www.jogt...php?trackId=106
No offense, Mark, but your opening sentence needs help:
“Not a week after deriding Brightcove for its difficult user interface in a story about newly emerged competitor Delve Networks, the Cambridge-based video hosting company is releasing a completely rebuilt version of its service into private beta.”
It sounds like Brightcove derided itself?
The writing on techcrunch always gets made fun of in the washington post comments
@Ryan – Thanks for point that out; Brightcove certainly wasn’t deriding itself. Fixed.
I am amazed by the amount of funding they have gotten so far. I wonder what type of revenue they have to justify 90Million. I am pretty sure that some of the new coming more open inexpensive, and even open source platforms will capture a big poriton of this growing market.
@Michelle – How right you are. Investment is high in this one. But Brightcove is Jeremy Allaire’s deal, their original intention was to capture ad revenue (a big opportunity), and IP Video was the hottest thing going when they attracted most of that money ( at a great valuation ). Smart of them for capturing all that cash when it was available. Time will tell if a video management infrastructure company can carve out enough value to repay those later round investors.
Scott. Indeed lucky them. not sure any of the VCs will be making such investments this year…..BTW – I recently read Matt Asay’s post about Kaltura (http://news.cne...9918865-16.html) the new open source video platform. I am sure that they did not receive even a tenth of such funding….but still are capable of offering a competing solution. I wonder what will the emerging of companies such as them and other open source players I see attending the OSCON conference, do to brightcove’s model.
Michelle, It appears they are trying to be the Akamai of their market segment. That could work, actually. Will Disney be serving video off of Kaltura? Hard to see that happening. Twistage is an interesting company. Stripped down video player with all the features but none of the sizzle and very cost-effective.
Rahul, my name is Josh with Fliqz Inc. We provide very affrodable, plug and play video solutions for uploading, managing and delivering your video assets in a video player that reflects your sites look and feel.
I’d be happy to explore with you to see if there might be a potential fit.
Josh
“affrodable”? Meaning it comes with a small crying hobbit?
The problem with a complete rewrite is that they’re spending 18 months rebuilding their entire system instead of using that time to innovate and bring more value to their customers.
If you look at their press releases, they went into commercial preview (whatever that means) in April of 2006. I can’t find any evidence of a Brightcove v3 (as VentureBeat points out), so in the end they’re going to spend almost 2.5 years without adding significant new functionality.
Alex Castro
Delve Networks
http://blog.del...llo-brightcove/
Rahul, my name is Antoine with VideoBloom. We provide easy-to-use, affordable (and even free), self-service and full-service solutions for uploading, managing and distributing your videos. We also offer a wide range of standard and custom video players and monetization tools. Our clients include social networks like Fropper. Bottom line: we help you make money with your videos.
Contact me at antoine@videobloom.com.
Antoine>
What happened to DelveNetworks? The site is now parked and no blog. http://www.delvenetworks.com/