Brightcove is recruiting to fill 30 new job openings in Q3 across nearly every department in the company including Engineering, Customer Support, Systems/Operations, Sales and Business Development. We've just posted the first wave of 12 new openings to our job board. We will be adding more jobs over the coming weeks.

Brightcove is scaling globally to meet the incredible demand for the world's leading online video platform. Over the past year, Brightcove's customer base has nearly doubled and now includes media companies and marketers in 27 countries. Brightcove is a profitable business that is laser focused on investing in our platform, scaling operations globally, advancing quality and performance for online video, and providing world-class customer service.

If you're passionate about online video, you're a leader, innovator, and want to work in an energetic fast-paced work environment, check out our postings and apply now!

Click here to visit our job board.

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Popular industry blogs GigaOM and NewTeeVee are featuring an interview with Brightcove Chairman and CEO, Jeremy Allaire. Subbing in for Om Malik, Liz Gannes and GigaOM Show co-host Joyce Kim talk to Jeremy about the rapid growth and adoption of the Brightcove Internet TV platform, content areas that are driving the most traffic, and the future of the company.

-- Josh Hawkins

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Today's feature article in paidContent.org is an extensive interview between Rafat Ali and Jeremy Allaire. The interview covers a lot of ground including Brightcove's investment strategy, changing dynamics in the Internet video market, and perspectives on a wide variety of businesses in the space, as well as Brightcove product initiatives.

Here are some excerpts from the interview transcript. You can access the full audio interview below.

"As we looked at the marketplace in 2005 and into early 2006, we decided to take what I would call a portfolio approach to experimenting in the market and I think that’s what entrepreneurs do. They take risks. They make multiple bets and they figure out what works. The great entrepreneurs ultimately find the things that work really well and double down on those and grow those...

"When we looked at the marketplace in the middle of the year we looked at the next 18 to 24 months where could be confident that we were going to be in a dominant position.  From our board’s perspective, from my perspective, we didn’t want to be invested in businesses where we would be number 5 or number 10 or even number 3 or number 4. So, we looked very closely at those and while the consumer facing product grew a lot—I think comScore (NSDQ: SCOR) has 8 million unique in August—just on a relative basis, it was not at a scale where we felt confident that that was going to be a product line that we’d be dominant in. 

"I think the other issue was that it created conflict to situation with the media companies that we work with. “Why are you building a consumer facing product? That’s our business.” So, we eliminated the conflict and ensuring that 100 percent of our investments are on a platform just made a lot of sense. That business has done incredibly well starting 2007.  We’re growing an enormous amount on the revenue side.  On the user side, we’re now hundreds and millions of streams a month. We have 4000 commercial publishers that operate with us, hundreds of major brands going worldwide and our platform reaches about 120 million unique users a month. That’s 120 million users that access these Brightcove-based media experiences through over 10,000 sites.  As an entrepreneur you double down on the things that are doing incredibly well and you diminish the things that you’re not confident are going to be huge...

"Interestingly, what we have seen happen over the last year is the requirements for running an actual online video business or using online video as a core part of their business have just gotten more complex, not less complex.  For example, there are all of the things that go around managing editorial and managing programming and managing rights and all the things that are associated with that become key pieces. On the user experience side, I think people are investing in not just having a player with content, but they’re looking at how do they deeply integrate that programming throughout their sites, how do they do that in automated ways, how do they leverage recommendations and social recommendations to drive that.  I think we’re also right on the cusp of pretty big breakthrough in terms of quality of experience and so this is an area we’re putting a lot of attention right now." 

Click here to read the full article at paidContent.org and you can access the full audio interview below.

-- Josh Hawkins

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A little bit meta here, blogging in TypePad about a Brightcove shout out on the TypePad website, but so be it. With all of the recent activity in the online video space, the Six Apart folks found it timely to highlight this little blog on the front of their site today. So thanks.

We've been a litle quiet here lately on the blog, and that usually means we're busy with other stuff. Which we are. We've recently released a variety of great new features to the core Brightcove service and there's a lot more on the way. So stay tuned.

- Eric E.

Link: TypePad Featured Blogs: Brightcove.

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This blog post from filmmaker Thomas Rigler really helped brighten a rainy Cambridge morning here at Brightcove HQ.

Couldn’t be easier. So, to all non-profits, manufacturers, retail chains, web businesses, networks and anyone with a property that bears any resemblance to a brand: Now is the time to follow Brightcove’s motto and ‘liberate your video.’ Launch that spankin’ new channel while it’s still for free – according to the Brightcove sales team, the free preview will be available at least until the end of the year and will afterwards definitely remain affordable for niche programmers."

It's been great to see so many new, compelling Internet TV channels unleashed over the past few months. Politicians, pets and pop stars. The diversity of programming is amazing.  Thomas - hopefully we'll see a channel from you soon?

http://www.broadbandjungleblog.com/2006/08/brightcove_broa.html

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This one goes in the horn tooting category.

"Overall, Brightcove appears to me as the premier choice for online video publishing and distribution. No other service comes close to the integrated array of features and facilities that Brightcove as put together so far."

Robin Good has written the most detailed third-party review we've yet seen of the Brightcove service. It's gratifying to see someone really get their hands dirty with player design and customization, and Brightcove's online syndication capabilities. There are many ways to simply post and share a video on the Web - Brightcove is about helping people build comprehensive and multifaceted Internet TV businesses. Mr. Good captures this well.

Enough of my jabbering - please read on.......

- Robin Good's Brightcove review

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Business 2.0's Erick Schonfeld has a nice take on the atomization trend in digital media. Call it microchunks, slivers, snacks. Relevance and accessibility are paramount. VC Fred Wilson articulates these principles well:

First, of course, microchunk it: Reduce entertainment to its simplest discrete form, be it a blog post, a music track, or a skit.

Second, free it: Let people download, view, read, or listen without charge. Third, share it: Let consumers subscribe to content through RSS- and podcast-style feeds so they can enjoy it wherever and whenever they like. Finally, the moneymaking part: Put ads and tracking systems into the digital content itself.

BTW, kudos for the All Your Base reference. Can you imagine if Mahir had iMovie?

  -- Eric E.

Link: Now Serving: The Media Microchunk - Mar. 13, 2006.

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This recent column from the widely-read Lefsetz Letter made the rounds at Brightcove this weekend. A little self-referential here (but it is the Brightcove Blog after all), but I thought very relevant. The column credits the TV industry with understanding the need to license aggressively and to try to reach the widest possible audience. Channing Dawson, a respected innovator from Scripps Networks, describes letting content flow "like water" to be wherever your viewer is, rather than working to drive that viewer back to the mothership. Good point. There's a reason Starbucks has two outposts directly across the street from each other on Market Street in San Francisco (probably NY, Seattle and DC too). Make it as convenient as possible for your customers or viewers to find and consume your product. Period.

Lefsetz (not sure if he/she is the column's writer as well) makes another great point about the potential lost revenue that the music industry would have earned if it had embraced digital distribution six years earlier.

We’ve got to go back six years to Napster.  Thomas Middelhoff wanted to license the music industry’s wares to Napster.  End result?  His company Bertelsmann and the investors in Napster were sued by the likes of Universal and are STILL IN LITIGATION!  To what purpose?  So that Universal can put a few bucks in its coffers?  Aren’t these dollars DWARFED by what they would have received if they’d made a deal for their music on Napster HALF A DECADE AGO??

Yes, the dollars are dwarfed.

Last summer, Mitch Singer, a senior legal exec at Sony Pictures, delivered one of the most compelling presentations on this subject - as a wakeup call to the motion picture industry. He projected backward off of the current clip of digital music sales. Had the major labels embraced digital in 2000 rather than 2003, the industry would have recovered $24.2B in lost revenue. Singer then goes on to track several parallels between long-form video programming and motion pictures versus music, making the point that Hollywood must learn the lessons from those who have stumbled before them. He compares 1999 vs. 2006  audio vs. video file size, cost per GB of hard drive storage for consumers, broadband penetration and minutes to download a song in '99 vs. an hour of video in '06. Compelling stuff.

The early enthusiam in the press around Brightcove has been extremely gratifying and appreciated here in Cambridge. As a citizen of the industry, I think the WSJ piece and the kind welcome we've gotten in the blogosphere represent something bigger though, and that is the consensual desire by the consumer, press and an enlightened entertainment industry for extreme choice, control, and convenience in how media is purchased and enjoyed.

  - Eric E.

Link: Lefsetz Letter - Blog Archive - Licensing.

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Since the TiVo is recording "Curb Your Enthusiasm", I thought I would catch up with some of my vlog watching this Sunday evening. Rocketboom had some wonderful programs last week, very entertaining and sometimes even informative!

In particular I enjoyed watching the documentary, Ideal World, produced by Pierce Portocarrero and Glenn Thomas, on the virtual world of Second Life. I have read about the residents of Second Life producing their own videos, but I really enjoyed Pierce and Glenn's first episode, which was quite well done. I think seeing some connection to the real people behind the virtual personas will make a great story. I'll make sure I keep tabs on the latest footage that comes out of this project.

.bob

...via Rocketboom

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I came across this interesting new statistic from Chris Lanier's blog:

"Sales of Media Center PCs have skyrocketed since July 9, according to a recent study by Current Analysis. For the week ending August 20, 2005, Media Center PCs accounted for 43% of all desktop personal computers sold in the U.S. retail market, based on data from a sampling of U.S. retailers."

The Red Herring discusses the research report from Current Analysis. What I find odd is that for the month of June Media Center sales were barely 15% of the total PC volume sold. That's a huge jump in a short period of time!

With the recent price cuts (Media Center PCs can be purchased for less than $900), PC manufacturers are really starting to push Media Center. Perhaps this spike is associated with college students buying "Entertainment PCs" for their dorm?

In any event with Intel's new VIIV platform we firmly expect continuted mainstream growth of Media Center. Of course, as gamers pick up their new XBox 360s, which includes native Media Center Extender support, this may form the foundation for the largest growth in Media Center PC adoption.

Also noted in the research is that the majority of Media Center PCs sold did not have a tuner card, and hence are not used as a DVR. As more consumers bring DVRs into their home from TiVo or directly from  Cable/Satellite MSOs, I think it would make sense for the Media Center platform to form a cooperative relationship with these external DVR devices. We can start to see this open  platform forming with TiVo's Tivo2Go service, but I would be surprised to see Comcast or DirectTV open their boxes in the short-term. Perhaps this sort of home integration could be leveraged by the Telco's when they role out their IPTV networks over the coming years. For example, a Microsoft IPTV-powered TelcoTV box could automatically integrate through a home network and allow secure portability to Media Center PCs.

2006 could be a big year for Media Center.

.bob

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