Brightcove Blog

Earlier this week, Fox Entertainment Group’s mobile business launched its first-ever commercial iPhone application for its popular show “Family Guy.” The app was launched in collaboration with Brightcove, Rhythm New Media, a Brightcove Alliance Partner, and Sideshow, an interactive agency.

The app is available for $1.99 in the app store and fans can watch clips, play games, and create video mixes from short clips. These mixes can then be uploaded to Brightcove and easily shared with friends.

The “Freakin’ Sweet Family Guy” app will include up to 20 show clips, as well as links to purchase full-length episodes from iTunes. The app includes four main character-driven video channels – “Best of Stewie,” “Brian’s World,” “Peter’s Life Lessons” and “The World According to Chris.” Clips are supported by pre-roll video ads, which will generate new monetization opportunities for Fox advertisers.

Fox Entertainment Group, a long-time Brightcove user, is another great example of how our customers can extend the capabilities of the Brightcove platform to mobile devices like the iPhone to reach their audience in new ways. We have no doubt the popularity of “Family Guy” will make the new app a major win for the Fox Entertainment Group team.

-Chris Little

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Brightcove invites you to a New York City developer meetup. Come join us for a night of networking, drinks and solution presentations with the Brightcove engineering team.

When: Thursday, June 25th, 5:30 PM
Where: MicroTek New York City Training Center, 90 Broad Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY

To learn more, RSVP and find directions, click here: http://anyvite.com/mkfjptw0zk

Please feel free to forward this invitation to anybody else who might be interested in going.

We look forward to seeing you there!
The Brightcove Team

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There was an exciting development announced today by Brightcove Alliance partner, JS-Kit, which was highlighted in our Pro Service blog, More Eyeballs. Here's a re-post of today's news:

Our friends at JS-Kit have a very exciting announcement today. They used the Brightcove 3 player framework to integrate comments into a standard Brightcove player template. Brightcove video publishers can deploy comments in their players without writing a line of code.

For those of you new to JS-Kit, their tools are some of the most popular on the Web for building social features into your sites, blogs, and now video players. On the front end there's easy to customize comments, ratings, polls and survey tools. On the backend there's a really nice set of web-based moderation and management tools.

The new Brightcove video comments functionality relies on that same backend, but renders the comments right inside of a video player.

After working with JS-Kit on quite a few major video portal projects, we are really happy to see them take this next step. Enjoy.

Eric Elia
VP, Professional Services
http://www.twitter.com/ericelia

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We're happy to announce that Philly.com has chosen the Brightcove platform to publish and distribute video content for its site. Philly.com is the flagship Web property for the Philadelphia Inquirer, one of the highest circulation newspapers in the U.S., as well as the Philadelphia Daily News, the Philadelphia area's leading tabloid.

Philly.com produces news, lifestyle and leisure video programming, including ongoing original video series like Philly Dish, Philadelphia Business Today, Philly Gossip and Down the Shore. This unique blend of news and lifestyle content combined with the advanced features of the Brightcove platform will enable Philly.com to reach a broader audience and deepen engagement with their online programming. Brightcove platform features like dynamic delivery the ability to display the most viewed videos entice users to watch more video content and spend more time on the site.

Additionally, Brightcove's ease of integration with third party ad networks will enable Philly.com to expand its monetization strategy.

Philly.com is just the latest newspaper publisher that has selected the Brightcove platform to support their online video needs. In addition to Philly.com, Brightcove works with leading newspaper publishers around the world including the New York Times, Guardian News & Media, Hearst Communications, La Vanguardia / Grupo Godo, OMS, South China Morning Post, Telegraph Media Group, Times Online and Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive.

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In early May, Brightcove participated in the Next09 conference in Hamburg, Germany. Brightcove CEO, Jeremy Allaire, spoke on a panel at the event with sevenload CEO Axel Schmiegelow about the social media revolution and how to build communities and brands. Brightcove also announced a distribution partnership with sevenload, one of Europe's leading social media networks for video, photos and Web TV content, at the event.

Following the panel, Jeremy was asked to elaborate on Brightcove's value proposition, the online video market in Germany, the competitive landscape for online video platforms, and what he sees as the next big thing in video. Jeremy spoke at length about the challenges for online video in the German market, noting it is still a new business for major media companies in the country and thus the value of video advertising is not commonly understood yet. Jeremy also gives his predictions on how the competitive landscape in the online video market will play out over the next few years. He also singles out mobile video as one trend that will bring about a revolution in how content is consumed in the future.

Check out the full interview below. You can also tune in to Jeremy and Axel's full panel here.

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Since announcing the company was standardizing on the Brightcove platform last year, AOL has seen great stability and flexibility in making the transition to Brightcove. In a recent conversation with Beet TV, Victor Hasemen, director of AOL Video, articulates why the organization opted to make the switch to Brightcove and how their long term video strategy has evolved with the help of Brightcove.

As Victor notes, there are a number of synergies between AOL, which is a Brightcove investor, Brightcove and AOL's other video partners. Brightcove's global presence enables AOL Video to ensure a consistent playback experience across all of its properties both domestically and around the world. AOL has also been able to achieve faster scale and more robust ingest management and playback experiences. Brightcove has also helped AOL Video to streamline reporting around their video efforts.

In the future, AOL Video plans to roll out more wide-format, 16X9 video experiences across its properties, as well as more original content produced for the Web by its partners.  

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In this month's issue of Baseline magazine, Tony Kontzer highlights the rise of cloud computing and cloud-based services in his story "The Cloud's the Limit with Anything as a Service." Kontzer talks at length about the core issues surrounding these types of services, including the ability to manage spikes in demand. This is particularly important when it comes to online video, as more and more companies are incorporating video into their marketing mix via cloud-based services.

Kontzer references Kohler, a Brightcove customer, as an example of using cloud-based online video platforms effectively. Kohler decided a few years ago to work with Brightcove instead of investing in building its own online video infrastructure to support its more than 50 online properties on which video was a growing component. As John Engberg, Kohler's manager for global media and Web development notes, going with Brightcove was one-tenth of the cost of what it would have been to build and maintain an internal solution.

As Engberg points out, the decision to go with Brightcove has certainly paid off. In 2008 alone, visitors to Kohler sites watched 4 million videos on a variety of topics. Kohler also tapped Brightcove for its recent Save Water America campaign to raise awareness about water usage.

Kontzer sums it up best, noting Kohler's effort "demonstrates a model for future cloud adopters: tapping the cost efficiency of the cloud to create inexpensive, temporary public-education and fundraising campaigns."

Check out the full story here.

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Cooliris, the browser plug-in that advances visual navigation for the Web, desktops and mobile, recently launched integration with the Brightcove platform to allow publishers to easily deliver top quality video content through basic feeds in the Cooliris 3D interface.

The Cooliris 3D Wall is designed to help users consume the overabundance of rich media on the Web and discover great content. We allow users to scan an expansive wall of content from popular sites like YouTube and Facebook, professional news and entertainment organizations, popular gaming sites, and users’ own computers. We’ve also attracted a vast array of popular and premium content providers, as users can peruse Hulu for popular TV episodes, news headlines from the New York Times, or browse sports and celebrity news.

We work closely with online publishers to enable a more engaging experience for their users. Publishers have been quick to syndicate to Cooliris because of increased views of their monetized content and additional traffic to their own site.  Equally important is the higher level of engagement that Cooliris provides, which helps publishers drive incremental views of their content. Ads presented in Cooliris also attain best-in-class engagement numbers, with users clicking ads 6X more often than traditional online video ads.

For more information, click here for the five-step guide of how to include your content in Cooliris.

Matt Wahl
Product Manager
BD@cooliris.com 

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Rainbow Media, a long-time Brightcove customer, continues to expand its online video efforts and produce more video exclusively for the Web. Michael Depuy, director of product development at Rainbow Media recently sat down with Beet TV to discuss the organization’s latest online video initiatives, including IFC.com’s plans to introduce an original Web series each month from July through November and AMC’s new video-centric iPhone app for its show “Breaking Bad.”

Rainbow Media has also seen success to date with its user generated content campaigns. In fact, the organization has signed two development deals with creators based on video submission contests. Rainbow Media also granted a walk on roll on the popular AMC show “Mad Men” as a result of one of its contests.

The organization is still developing its long-form content strategy, but fans can currently watch complete episodes of the 1960s series “The Prisoner” before AMC launches a reinterpretation miniseries of the show later this year.

Also of note, Rainbow Media was recently awarded 6 Webby Awards across its online properties.

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We are very excited to announce Brightcove's first major customer in Spain, Grupo Godo, publisher of La Vanguardia and other popular titles including the popular sports newspaper Mundo Deportivo. The first property to launch is La Vanguardia, an international leader in online news, entertainment and sports information and Spain's highest-circulation daily newspaper. With Brightcove, La Vanguardia and other publications such as Mundo Deportivo will significantly expand its ad-supported online video offerings including breaking news, daily and weekly editorial features, and bringing to light a deep archive of past video reports. The first marketers to launch advertising campaigns with the new online video offerings include Sony, Peugot and Nissan. (Read the full press release).

Brightcove is an important partner for many leading newspaper organizations around the world, such as the New York Times and Washington Post in the US, Telegraph and Guardian newspapers in the UK, and more than 60 regional newspapers in Germany. As we noted in an early research report from Brightcove on newspapers, the industry is evolving rapidly to adapt to shifting consumer behavior and the migration of advertising from traditional print and broadcast to the Internet. We are excited to be a strategic partner for leaders in the newspaper industry embracing the change with powerful new online video offerings and monetization opportunities.

We are also happy to announce that the deal with La Vanguardia in Spain was done in conjunction with Brightcove partner Universe Inside Entertainment, a Barcelona-based full-service company supporting Brightcove customers in the region.

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