We are happy to announce that smartycontent, a multimedia communication aggregator in Spain, has chosen Brightcove Video Cloud to power its i_smarty multimedia content player. smartycontent's service was launched with more than 7,000 video and has grown to reach an audience of 12 million unique users. 

Growing faster than any other segment of online advertising, online video advertising generates hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue each quarter for publishers from major media companies to special-interest websites.

We recently published a new Video Cloud customer case study with Cars.com, one of the Internet's largest automotive classified websites. Cars.com generates more than 10 million monthly visitors that use the site to browse, research and purchase new and used vehicles. The site began to feature editorial video content in 2007 as part of its commitment to giving car buyers the information they need to make confident buying decisions. 

We recently published another new customer case study with International Data Group (IDG), the world's largest technology media, research and event management company. Approximately 200 magazines and newspapers and 460 websites are in the IDG family, including popular technology websites like cio.com, computerworld.com and pcworld.com. 

Business got a whole lot more interesting this week for burgeoning media companies who are just starting to make money from their nascent online video efforts.

Here's another use case for resizing a player: you want as large a screen as possible for the video while it's playing, but you don't want to give up all that real estate on the page when a video isn't playing.

Brightcove customers are a business-savvy bunch. Some of the worlds largest media publishers use Brightcove to realize ad-supported video monetization strategies.

ComScore's 2010 Digital Year in Review presents some interesting stats on the state of online video advertising. The report suggests that by the end of the year, 16% of videos watched (in terms of titles) were advertisements, compared to only 12% just six months prior.

The Super Bowl is unquestionably the biggest day of the year for marketers. And this year, the event broke TV ratings records for the second year running, reaching an average audience of 111 million viewers.

AdweekMedia has a great feature covering how technologies are changing communication and advertising practices. The article features insights from Madison Avenue's thought leaders who describe how "technologists are infiltrating all departments" in agencies as they integrate their once silted digital arms.

We are thrilled to announce that Major League Gaming (MLG), the largest professional video game league in the world and largest provider of cross platform online video game competition, has chosen Brightcove to support the launch of its new video portal, MLG.tv.

To all of our readers in London, make sure to check out the 2nd Annual Future TV Advertising Forum, taking place December 2nd and 3rd. The event features more than 60 speakers from the global advertising and broadcast industries, including Verizon, Mediacom, Viasat, Mediaset, BSkyB, GroupM/MEC, Ogilvy, Unilever, UPC, Ford, Orange, and many more.

If you want to monetize your mobile videos in an iPhone app, Apple's iAds ad network is the only way to go. We have a new article that describes how to integrate iAds into an iPhone app created using the Brightcove App SDK for iOS. Using iAds is not too complicated: you can add iAd banners to your app the same way you would add a button, label, or any other UI element to your app in the iOS SDK. For details, read Monetizing your iOS app with iAds.

We're happy to announce that freenet.de GmbH, one of the largest telecommunications and Web content providers in Germany, has chosen the Brightcove online video platform to support their fast-growing video initiatives. freenet is taking advantage of the full functionality of the Brightcove platform to support video on their portal site, freenet.de, and other special interest portals, as well for its advertising partners and customers of its media unit, freeXmedia.

The Great Debate ended in a draw.   The very entertaining session between 2 industry heavyweights ended in a bit of a love-in where they ended up educating the crowd more about how the sport will evovle then tearing into each other.  

Today from the ring at the IAB UK we're streaming LIVE the Great Debate: Buyer vs Seller.   Thanks to Live Talkback you can be part of the action.   Answer the questions below retime to help frame the current mindset.   Then throughout the debate change your answers and help figure out if you were swayed by the debaters!

So I just had word from our friends at the IAB UK that tomorrow's event is almost sold out!   That's a capacity of 90 people coming to get ring side seats for the showdown between the Media Buyer and Media Seller.

Tomorrow we'll be live streaming the event from this blog so come back at 3pm BST (British Summer Time) for kick off.   We're also going to be deploying some cool interactivity tools from our friends at Live TalkBack that let the audience be part of the fun!

In the red corner, weighing in at 98.2KG, 56 wins, 5 loses and 37 knockouts, wearing the Buyer shorts:
Oliver "Float like a Butterfly, Sting like a Bee" Newton!

In the blue corner, weighing in at 100.2KG, 32 wins, 4 loses and 27 knockours, wearing the Sellers shorts:
Tim "Smokin' Joe" Hussain!

Today we're kicking of our Summer Video event with the IAB UK.   A series of 3 events over the summer months to look at issues that will fundamentally change the way online video advertising will effect your business.

Today we're starting with a dissection and dissemination of the VAST/VPAID standards.   At 3pm BST (GMT+1) we'll be kicking off a session looking into how these new standards will effectively change your business for the better.

Earlier today, we teamed up with Advance Internet to announce an agreement to provide new video technology and tools that will enrich the experiences of the audience, advertisers and content creators in the 12 markets served by Advance Internet’s leading local websites across the U.S.

The Brightcove Video Monetization Summit is now underway in New York City.  The event is sold out and the location has quickly become standing room only.  The good news is that you can catch the live stream on the web by registering here. We hope you'll join us. 

This is the second in a series of articles on video advertising.  I'll be writing about what VAST is, why this standard is so important, and what's happening with VAST 2.

This is the first in a series of articles on video advertising.  To start this series off, I wanted to give a general overview of how video advertising works from the point-of-view of a Brightcove player.  The slides below are adapted from a presentation I gave at 360Flex a few months ago.

Over the next month or two, I'll be writing a series of technical articles on video advertising.   You'll learn more about how the ad lifecycle, the standards that have emerged for video ads, and what's in the video ad future.  If you're a developer who doesn't know much about advertising, this is a great time to learn!  So, before you install Adblock on this series, here's a few reasons to read more:

It's hard to believe we're only a few weeks away from Adobe's 360|Flex conference, which is set for March 7 - 10 in San Jose. We are happy to be a Bronze sponsor for this year's event, which should prove to be another well-attended and extremely valuable gathering for the Flex community.

Brightcove's Advertising APIs include a method named requestAd(). When you call that method, the player instantly makes an ad call the same way as it would with any other ad cue point. However, having control over precisely when to call the ad server can be very beneficial. The method takes one argument, and that's for any key/value pairs you want to send to the ad server. This can allow you to do some very granular targeting to deliver more contextual ads to the viewer.

At Brightcove Account Management, we're always looking for better ways to keep our partners informed. As a team, we share these little tidbits internally and I thought it might be fun to broaden the distribution. If you have suggestions, please shoot me a note or add a comment.

Brightcove's external ad feature opens up a wide world of possible ad formats. John Huebner's new article in the Developer Center gives one example: banner ads that appear to fly out from behind the player when they're displayed.

By providing recommended videos, online publishers are able to keep users engaged for a longer period and entice them to come back to watch more. Thanks to our Engagement-based technology, publishers can now serve up recommended videos that truly have personal meaning for users.