January 12th, 2009

Brightcove adds some new leadership talent

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 11:22 am

Categories: Brightcove, Rich Internet Applications, Rich Media

Tags: Talent, Leadership, Brightcove, Blogging, Media Players, Corporate Communications, Internet, Consumer Electronics, Personal Technology, Marketing

This morning Brightcove made an announcement that they’re adding a few new faces. A couple of those faces will be familiar to anyone who has been involved in the RIA world for the past couple of years. Jeff Whatcott, who was vice president of marketing at Adobe, is joining as senior vice president of marketing for Brightcove. The biggest news in my mind was that David Mendels, who was senior vice president at Adobe, is joining the board of directors. I was devastated when David left Adobe because he was a great outward presence on blogs, email, and every other form of communication. As an SVP it was always impressive to see him leave a comment on someone’s blog and I can remember thinking how cool it was when he would leave a comment on my blog when I was still a community member.

Brightcove has a ton of old Allaire/Macromedia/Adobe people, so it isn’t surprising that they would draw from that pool again, and both David and Jeff were based in the Newton office. There may be some more old Adobe faces popping up at Brightcove down the road. In part because they seem to be doing so well. As Jeremy’s letter said, they released Brightcove 3 which included a chance in direction away from individuals uploading content to more polished and branded work. It seems to have been received very well.

They’ve also don a ton of work on the developer side to make it easy to use and integrate the Brightcove platform. They’ve got an XML-based BEML langauge which lets you create and customize Flash-based video players. They’ve got a Media API which lets you use REST-based web services to get actual content and metadata out of your Brightcove account. They’ve also got a number of custom components and hooks for you to build your own, so that you can add basically anything you want to your video player like stock quotes, news tickers, or anything that might enhance the experience around your content.

Brightcove continues to do a good job. As I think we’ve seen with Hulu, content is king. Brightcove has a ton of content and they’re making that accessible in a number of different ways and letting people get in and customize it to make the experience their own. The addition of Jeff and David is yet another step in the right direction.

October 24th, 2008

New York Times rolling out HD video content with Brightcove

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 10:21 am

Categories: Advertising, Brightcove, Rich Media

Tags: New York Times Co., Brightcove, Video, Andy Plesser, Andy, Corporate Communications, Portals, Branding, Marketing, Internet

Andy Plesser has the scoop that the New York Times has launched a new HD video portal using Brightcove’s service, something I’ve covered recently. With news that the New York Times is in trouble, this couldn’t come at a better time. Online video continues to explode in popularity and it’s becoming arguably the best way to reach new audiences and keep those audiences engaged. The New York Times doesn’t have a brand problem or even a content problem, but newspapers just haven’t been adapting well to the web. Video is one way to counter that.

The New York Times is using the new platform which allows for dynamic streaming so that users get the best quality video stream that their bandwidth allows. The portal looks like it has a lot of great content across all of the New York Times’ categories. They look like they’re using preroll ads. With the impressive brand of the New York Times, advertisers could be more than happy to jump in and advertise on the site, especially with the economic downturn looming. This is a good move for the Times and another indication of rich media becoming more important in every facet of content creation.

October 14th, 2008

Brightcove overhauls UI with Brightcove 3

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 6:34 am

Categories: Brightcove, Online Video, Rich Media

Tags: Brightcove, Video, Corporate Communications, Marketing, Ryan Stewart

Today Brightcove is rolling out a new application as part of their web platform for content creators (Update: here’s a post by one of the Flex developers who worked on it). The new user interface and features are some of the coolest things that I’ve seen in the ever popular rich media space. There are a few highlights of the new platform but the biggest takeaway for me was that Brightcove really wants to put people in control of how their content is displayed. To that end one of the things they’ve done is overhauled how people can create new video players. Using a XUL-like language anyone can create a template for video players that includes things like a horizontal list of related videos, meta data, and various other aspects of the video player experience. That can be saved as a template and then used across an entire network of sites. What’s nice is that you can then build on top of that template to customize the experience even more. In the demo I saw they used a nature show to demonstrate how you could add a playlist of rainforest videos and skin the original template with rainforest assets. You could then take that same template and customize it for an ocean themed show. They really nailed the branding aspect of video while allowing reuse of assets and a ton of control with the XUL-based interface language.

A couple of the other highlights include new APIs and dynamic streaming. The new APIs are expose in both Flash and JavaScript so that regardless of the technology you’re using, you can still get in and manipulate or access various parts of the video. Using the APIs you can pull out metadata, make changes to the playlist, or even alter how the video plays. It’s going to mean that developers and site creators can easily customize what and how they want things to appear on their sites. Dynamic streaming lets content creators encode multiple versions of a video at different bitrates so that the user gets the highest quality version available. Brightcove detects the bandwidth and then based on settings that the content creator establishes, the user gets the best possible quality video stream.

All in all Brightcove 3 is a big leap forward in giving the people who create video a ton of control over how that video behaves. It’s a good step for the rich media world and a great example of where the industry needs to go.

June 17th, 2008

Brightcove refreshes with brand new service and new focus

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 6:27 am

Categories: Brightcove, Flash, Online Video, Rich Internet Applications, Rich Media

Tags: Brightcove, Video, Corporate Communications, Marketing, Ryan Stewart

Today Brightcove, one of the first RIA companies and one of the first to use Flex, announced that they’ve overhauled their service and dubbed it Brightcove 3. The primary goal of the new Brightcove is to provide better support for “long-form video”, or full length shows instead of smaller clips that we’re used to seeing. Brightcove has done a really good job of incorporating brand, usability, and distribution with their current Flash video player, so it makes sense for them to continue that momentum and focus on the more interesting and more lucrative long content. As NewTeeVee noted, this move (bad pun intended) is aimed directly at Move networks. Move has gained a ton of traction with companies like ABC and Fox and Brightcove wants a piece of that market. Brightcove said there will be some cost savings over Move and that they’ll be using the mostly-already-installed Flash plugin versus Move, which has it’s own plugin.

Another big piece is a new publishing model which finally includes a Brightcove API that helps content creators insert video meta data into their pages making it easier to search and more meaningful for the semantic web side of video. The new publishing model also gives the content creators a lot of control over how to access video. They can now choose URLs, display descriptions, and decide when and how to highlight related videos. It should make it easy for users to jump from video to video all in the Brightcove player.

The final piece of the new rollout is a brand new user interface which is built all in Flex and according to TechCrunch has an iTunes-looking control panel and the ability to do drag and drop editing capabilities.

According to CrunchBase, Brightcove has $91.1 million dollars in funding putting it pretty close to the top of the video startup space and just a tad shy of Move networks $91.3 million.

November 27th, 2007

Brightcove closes consumer doors. What happens to Aftermix?

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 4:35 pm

Categories: Brightcove, Flex

Tags: Video, Aftermix, Corporate Communications, Marketing, Ryan Stewart

Brightcove announced that they’re dropping the consumer side of their video platform to focus on the larger parters and their content. They’ve been extremely successful getting new partners and as Josh Catone notes, they weren’t fully into the consumer side of things to begin with. But it’s a shame to see. Steve Borsch makes a great point about the difficulty that smaller fish have when looking at a video platform. My question was what will happen to Aftermix, a psuedo-consumer play that allowed people to mix up videos, photos and music then distribute them. It was associated with the .tv property.

So what does the future hold for Aftermix especially as the video-editing/mashup space heats up with things like Adobe Premiere Express? It sounds like it will be back in some form. The welcome screen for Aftermix says that “you’ll soon be able to use Aftermix on many sites throughout the web” so they may roll this into some of their bigger customer’s properties and use content from those sites in the mixes. There’s a lot of potential there so I hope we see some solid news about Aftermix sooner rather than later.

October 17th, 2007

Newsweek launches new site with Brightcove tools

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 1:39 pm

Categories: Brightcove

Tags: Newsweek, Site, Tool, Brightcove, Productivity, Ryan Stewart

On Monday, Newsweek rolled out a brand new site. For years Newsweek had been a part of the MSNBC site but now has its own spot on the web with a very rich media centric site. The new site was built almost entirely using new tools from Brightcove. Brightcove has gained a lot of traction as a tool for companies and individuals to publish (and distribute) video content but as part of the new platform they have moved into more feature-filled creation tools as well. Newsweek is a prime example of that.

The Newsweek site leveraged Brigthcoves’s StoryMaker and Console tools which allow you to build out your channels, add functionality and then set up programming lineups and campaigns. Based on the site it has gotten quite a bit of traction but I think the Newsweek site is the biggest so far and makes the most use of all the features.

Keep an eye on Brigthcove. They’ve been branching out into the content business in a big way and have both talent and assets to keep the momentum going.

September 13th, 2007

Brightcove launches Brightcove.tv

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 12:44 pm

Categories: Brightcove, Rich Internet Applications, Rich Media

Tags: Video Editing, Video, Brightcove, Ryan Stewart

Brightcove has rebranded part of their site from Brightcove.com to Brightcove.tv today. The email I got said the change was so that there could be a distinction between Brightcove partner content and Brightcove technology:

With the switch to Brightcove.TV, we can provide a dedicated site where Brightcove partners can showcase their videos that isn’t confused with Brightcove technology offerings. Now you can learn about media publishing and distribution for your business on Brightcove.com, and then promote your video on Brightcove.TV.

Perhaps as part of this, they’ve opened up Aftermix,(ZDNet coverage) their video editing tool, to everyone who wants to use it. Brightcove has some great rich internet applcation technology that helps both manage and create content. It sounds like they’re going to highlight that more and separate it from the viewable content. Hopefully it means they’re going to build out even more in the way of services for manipulating or handling video. They have a very, very talented team and they’ve built some world class RIAs.

June 18th, 2007

Big Rich Media news for both Silverlight and Flash

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 9:47 am

Categories: Brightcove, Flash, Rich Media, Silverlight

Tags: Microsoft Silverlight, Video, It, Ryan Stewart

It’s been a big week for news in the Rich Media space and both Flash and Silverlight have been able to make a splash. Rich Media is arguably one of the most important use cases for the major Rich Internet Application platforms. It drives penetration and the rise of YouTube helped Flash become the defacto standard for web video. The very first version of Silverlight focused very heavily on video knowing that without video, you can’t build the kind of fun, interactive applications that are garnering so much attention. So the announcements last week by Maven Networks and today’s by Britghtcove are significant for the space.

Last week Maven Networks announced a partnership with Microsoft that would bring Silverlight to Maven’s Internet TV Platform. Maven has some big customers including 20th Centry Fox, Sony Pictures Television, CBS, CSTV, Hearst and Univision Online. The company currently supports Flash, but with this announcement, will let its users choose either Silverlight or Flash video. It’s a solid strategy for both companies. Silverlight has done a great job of focusing on video quality and is ahead of Flash in terms of technical quality (though the recent Flash Player update may change that). This deal with Maven gives users a chance to try Silverlight while not giving up Flash Video for those who haven’t installed the Silverlight plugin yet.

The second deal, announced this morning, is with Brigthcove and FOX Networks. FOX is going to syndicate content via Brightcove and allow it to be embedded on blogs and other places so that users can share and promote FOX content wherever they want. Brightcove has been doing a really great job of helping to revolutionize the internet TV space and they’ve done it mostly on the back of Flash. They continue to expand their library of content and have recently been working on Brightcove Aftermix which is a Flash application that helps content creators mix in music, pictures and video clips to create a rich media mashup.

February 27th, 2007

Jeremy Allaire - Brightcove's Aftermix

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 10:56 am

Categories: Brightcove, Rich Internet Applications

Tags:

Jeremy Allaire demoed their new video editing application, Aftermix at Engage. It' a Flex 2/Flash Player 9 application that looks like it's going to make a pretty big splash in the budding video editing suite. One place Aftermix seems to have a big boost is that it ties closely with the Brightcove ecosystem and allows copyright holders to provide bits of their content that users can use and manipulate. They're called "asset bins" and are a mix of user-created and professional content.

Users pull assets from the bin onto the timeline which is divided into 3 seconds, video, audio, and photos. The timeline is very graphical and you can map video and audio assets very easily. You can also record your own content right from the application using the webcam feature in the Flash Player and preview the video as you go.

February 3rd, 2007

Adobe's "Philo" - branded Internet TV and some possible competition for Joost

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 1:21 pm

Categories: Adobe, Brightcove, Flash, Rich Internet Applications, Rich Media

Tags:

Adobe's "Philo" project has been around for a while but it seems to be gaining some momentum lately. Back in October, at Adobe's MAX conference, we saw a short demo of Philo by Kevin Lynch at the keynote. Jeremy Geelan had this to say about the Philo demo at the keynote:

Lynch closed with an Internet TV application being developed in-house at Adobe, called "Philo." If anyone had any doubt that Flash video is at the center of the Adobe vision for 2007-8 and beyond, Lynch's slick demo will have without a doubt showed them that it will be.

However, after the keynote Philo kind of went dark and I hadn't heard much about it. But today I got a link to Ryan Taylor's blog from Owen van Dijk. It sounds like Ryan is going to get a demo of Philo sometime this month and the project sounds like it has gelled a little bit more:

Now enter Adobe’s ‘Philo’ project. Philo is an internet TV application of sorts. It consumes RSS feeds from video sites such as Google Video, YouTube, MTV, etc. You are able to watch the videos and interact with content as you would on the actual websites themselves, however the application is also reskinned, or “branded” if you will, to the site/brand that the content is being delivered from. Suddenly, you have a miny TV application in which you can switch between internet video sites quickly and easily just like flipping the channel on the TV. It’s a brilliant idea and it has a lot of potential.

From that description, it sounds like Adobe is making a big move into the increasingly crowded internet TV space. If they use Apollo, which is what I would expect, then "Philo" might be a direct competitor to Joost. Joost got a lot of attention from people like Om Malik and Mike Arrington. If Philo can generate that kind of buzz, it will be good for Adobe but maybe not so good for some of Adobe's partners. I'm unclear on how this might affect prominent Adobe customers like Brightcove.

Adobe is clearly looking to move up the value chain by not only empowering developers to create applications on their technologies but actually create content themselves. We saw this a bit with Digital Editions and "Philo" seems to up the ante. Internet TV is obviously a huge deal, so if Adobe is going to play, they've got to come in ready to compete.