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Today, we formally announced and introduced Brightcove 3, a major new release of our online video platform.

It was about three years ago that we launched the first beta of our online video platform. At the time, there were few media companies using online video in a serious way, and our industry category (Online Video Platform, SaaS platforms for publishing, distributing and monetizing video) didn’t even exist.

In those few short years an enormous amount has happened. As a company, we’ve grown from a couple of dozen people to over 160 people. We’ve signed on hundreds of major brands in media who use Brightcove to operate their online video business, and hundreds of smaller companies and organizations using Brightcove. Our platform now reaches over 135M unique viewers every month. From this vantage point, we’ve learned an incredible amount about the challenges and opportunities facing companies investing in online video.

We’ve also seen online video expanding its horizons well beyond the media industry and into nearly every corner of the professional Web, as corporations, governments, non-profits and educational institutions look to use video as a cornerstone of how they communicate, market and inform on the Web.

Over the past year, we’ve tried to take all of that learning and shape it into our next-generation platform, Brightcove 3.

So what’s new and exciting in Brightcove 3? Best bet is to explore our new website and the product sections for a lot more detail, but below is quick summary of some of the things we’re launching.

Brightcove Editions

Before delving into platform enhancements, I wanted to highlight one of the very exciting new developments for Brightcove, which is the introduction of new tiered editions for the service. With explosive growth in online video, we’re seeing a very wide range of customers emerge who want to use a service like this, from small businesses and non-profits, medium to large corporations and media companies, to global enterprises and conglomerates.

With Brightcove 3, we now have three editions – Basic, Pro and Enterprise – that have been designed to meet the varying needs of different organizations. Brightcove 3 Basic will be the first time we’ve offered a lower cost edition of the service, which we hope will help bring great video experiences to every professional website in the world.

Revamped applications and user experience.

We’ve completely redesigned and built the Brightcove Console into a new suite of application modules dubbed the Brightcove Studio. This collection of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) provide a dramatically faster, easier to use and more powerful set of UIs for managing online video sites and operations. We’ve tried to accomplish a few things with this, including a much clearer separation of the workflow and roles involved in a site, with dedicated tools and interfaces for production, editorial/programming, design, development and business analysts. We’ve also tried to create an interface that is enjoyable to work in, and can scale from the smallest operations to a giant companies with hundreds of sites and properties.

New player architecture and framework.

We’ve completely re-built our player architecture. As part of this, there are some amazing improvements, including:
- Much faster and higher performance.
- A new XML-based, extensible framework for custom player and template creation dubbed BEML (Brightcove Experience Markup Language). With BEML, even an HTML designer can rapidly author new video experiences and re-use them across their site.
- Player Plug-Ins. We’ve opened up our player architecture for developers and third-parties to easily author plug-ins that add new functionality to their online video applications.
- Localization ready with player UIs available in most European languages and Japanese, and support for any language.

Contextual video publishing.

The first generation of online video was often about creating video ‘channels’ and sections of a website. Going forward, online video will be a lot more about context, and integrating video deeply throughout websites. To accomplish this, we’re introducing a new suite of developer APIs – the Brightcove Media APIs – that will allow a web developer to easily and dynamically integrate video throughout a site, increase SEO results on video, deepen user engagement around video, and overall make video a more intrinsic form of content on the Web.

High-quality video.

While we have always prided ourselves on providing a viewing experience that was high-quality (especially compared to UGC video sites), the bar is continually being raised as end-users want to watch more content, in higher quality and for longer periods of time. With Brightcove 3, we’re introducing a feature called Dynamic Delivery, which enables a publisher of content to easily offer their content in gorgeous, up to HD quality. We automatically handle ingesting and transcoding high-quality source material into multiple renditions of Flash Video or h.264 video, and then at playback time optimize the video stream on the fly based on the users network connection speed and player window size – e.g. a fast connection with full-screen viewing can now readily see long-from, up to HD quality with uninterrupted streams. This all works in Flash Player without the need for additional downloads or plug-ins.

Open ecosystem / developers.

Across everything we’re doing in Brightcove 3, we have looked to open up our platform to developers and 3rd parties. We’ve introduced a new suite of client or player APIs with full SDKs for Flash and JavaScript developers. We’ve launched a new XML format for video experience creation. We’ve also introduced the new Media APIs, which provide an XML/REST API into the Brightcove back-end services for reading, writing and ingesting into our service. We’ve also introduced standard integration APIs for key systems such as advertising and analytics. There are dozens of third party companies building on these hooks, and we’ll have a lot more to say about that in the near future.

There are loads of other goodies in Brightcove 3 as well, including a new set of video analytics tools as well as automated connections into existing website analysis systems.

On the advertising front, we’ve revamped our advertising system to support the new IAB Digital Video 2.0 standards, and added a new ‘connector’ model that allows Brightcove to work with nearly every major ad serving platform, and a wide range of 3rd party video ad networks that can bring monetization to video publishers.

We’ve also enhanced our approach to syndication and video distribution, introducing a new API-based syndication model that allows affiliates and distribution partners to integrate a publisher’s content in deep ways into their sties and applications, while still allowing the publisher to retain control over the advertising associated with their content.

Brightcove 3 is the result of a huge amount of work and is a milestone for Brightcove and also we think for the online video industry. We look forward to your feedback!

Thanks,
Jeremy

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Reed MIDEM has just published video footage from the keynote speech Jeremy Allaire delivered during MIPTV's Online Video day. CNBC is also featuring highlights from the conference, including a live Power Lunch interview with Ross Westgate from CNBC Europe.

MIPTV was the backdrop for some exciting Brightcove announcements. Brightcove unveiled a powerful lineup of new distribution partners including Bebo, Meebo, RockYou, Slide and Veoh. Media companies using the Brightcove Internet TV platform can now take advantage of expanded distribution through social networks and video portals while maintaining control over their content and advertising (read more). The distribution partners have a combined audience reach of over 300 million monthly uniques and Brightcove customers like The Weather Channel, Sony BMG, and VBS.tv are already taking advantage of the opportunity (see coverage in The Guardian, Broadcasting & Cable, C21, Media Week).

At MIPTV, Brightcove also announced that Ministry of Sound, Europe's largest independent record label, has adopted the Brightcove Internet TV platform to launch an aggressive online video initiative that will include advertising-supported distribution on its own websites, as well as through viral widgets available on MySpace and Bebo (see coverage in Billboard Magazine).

-- Josh Hawkins

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The Boston Globe has just published a new installment in their online video series, "Office Invasion," featuring Brightcove. Go behind-the-scenes with the Globe's technology business editor, DC Dennison, and producer, Scott LaPierre, as they invade our Cambridge office, and our snack bar!

-- Josh Hawkins

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Today, Brightcove announced support for Google AdSense for video, a new contextual advertising product for online video. While Brightcove does not sell advertising, our Internet TV platform has a number of integration points with advertising servers and advertising networks that help our customers monetize video. Our support for AdSense for video will provide an additional and complementary option available to our customers (beyond the direct ad sales they are already doing) to monetize their Internet video distribution.

Internet video continues to grow at an accelerated pace. The Brightcove platform reaches over 130 million unique users per month across hundreds of major brands. It's clear that flexible monetization options are required to maximize the revenue potential of online video advertising.

To take one example, a big challenge that faces online video publishers today is how to monetize remnant inventory. Traffic spikes resulting from weather events or the passing of a celebrity actor can produce a massive influx of additional online video inventory and not enough advertising to fill the extra video streams. With the Brightcove/Google solution, these publishers will be able to opt their remnant inventory into the Google AdSense network and generate ad revenue against these additional video streams - controlling exactly what inventory gets the advertising and retaining 100 percent of their advertising revenue.

Publishers who use Brightcove to program and distribute video will be able to use their own advertising servers to set policies and target Google AdSense ads into the video inventory they specify. These non-disruptive, clickable overlay ads appear in the bottom 20 percent of the video and are targeted based on the content of the video and the context of the webpage where the video is displayed.

We are very excited to introduce Brightcove support for Google AdSense for video as we continue to champion flexible new opportunities for our customers to monetize their Internet video.

Here's a link to our press release.

Google's AdSense for video beta is currently available through Brightcove in a limited closed beta release with select customers. We plan to make the feature generally available to publishers in 2008.

-- Josh Hawkins

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Every year, television networks send members of the Academy of Television Arts and Science piles of DVDs with elaborate packaging in an attempt to get them to nominate and vote for their original programming for Emmy awards. This year, Showtime has teamed with Brightcove to revolutionize the way television networks do Emmy campaigns. Showtime will forgo the high-volume of mailings for a more eco-friendly alternative strategy. Showtime will use Brightcove's soon-to-be-released Internet TV service "Brightcove Show" to stream broadcast-quality, full-screen broadband video of entire seasons of series - such as Weeds, L Word, Dexter - at a secure website available to voting members of the Academy - all available through standard Web browsers and without the need for special software plug-ins.

The campaign marks the first initiative in a broad partnership between the two companies, which includes use of the Brightcove Internet TV platform for the programming and distribution of advertising-supported video content on www.sho.com, the network's official home on the Internet.

Here's a link to the full press release. And here are some stories about the partnership:

The Hollywood Reporter - "Showtime's Emmy Screeners Now Online"
Broadcasting & Cable - "Showtime, Brightcove to Take Emmy Awards Screening Online"
Multichannel News - "Showtime to Stream Emmy Screeners Online"
Variety - "Showtime's Emmy Screenings Online"

-- Josh Hawkins

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We are extremely excited to announce that Gruner + Jahr, Europe's largest magazine publisher, has chosen Brightcove as the Internet TV platform for its many media brands. The corporate-wide deal enables any G+J media business to use Brightcove to publish and distribute advertising-supported Internet video content through their popular websites.

The announcement today marks Brightcove's first major media customer in Germany and entry into mainland Europe, which follows similar corporate-wide deals with magazine publishers in the United States (e.g., Time Inc., Meredith, Hachette Filipacchi Media US, Rodale) and the United Kingdon (e.g., Emap, IPC Media, Hearst's National Magazine Company, Hachette Filipacchi UK). 

Click here for the full press release.

-- Josh Hawkins

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We are very excited to announce that IAC and Brightcove have entered into a corporate-wide partnership enabling any of its businesses to use our Internet TV platform to launch broadband video initiatives. The first three businesses to launch under the partnership include Ticketmaster, Citysearch and 23/6, with others to launch in the coming months.

IAC's network of online properties ranks as the 8th largest in the world (comScore, October 2007) with over 171 million unique monthly users worldwide.

IAC Chairman and CEO, Barry Diller, said of the deal, "Brightcove is in tune with the new content consumers want and has been able to recognize the need for effective video distribution in a world where computer screens are replacing television screens. By making this platform available across IAC we can continue to deepen engagement with our online audiences, expand the reach of our brands, and open powerful new revenue streams through online video advertising across our sites."

Full Press Release

-- Josh Hawkins

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TechCrunch reporter Eric Schonfeld caught up with Jeremy Allaire at the recent Boston MeetUp event. Topics covered in the interview include Brightcove Show, the Hollywood writers strike, ad networks, and recent developments at Brightcove.

-- Josh Hawkins

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