We’ve been working closely with Twitter to enable our customers to provide full video playback and sharing within Twitter. The launch of the new Twitter.com, enabling playback of embedded videos in activity streams, is a powerful new development for media companies and marketers alike. This new platform capability will help drive revenue, increase audience size and improve customer loyalty.

Over the last five years Brightcove has had the opportunity to work intimately with some of the most sophisticated corporations pushing the boundaries with online video. Though we obviously strive to play a strategic and critical role for an organization in driving their initiatives with online video, we are also humble enough to recognize that no single vendor can provide a total solution.

Hello Brightcove Developers!

We are looking for volunteers to join a new beta program that allows one to natively integrate player component configuration via BEML into the Publishing module's player settings edit dialogs. At the moment we're calling this "Design-time BEML" and we're looking for feedback on usefulness, bugs and general feedback.

Important note: This blog post describes a feature in Brightcove 2 that has been superseded by a later release. For the best approach to using badges in the current Video Cloud release, see this example.

We were recently encouraged by our partners at The N to create a Flash application that highlights the active programming of a Brightcove player.

We really like how this feature turned out, and hope you do as well.

Coupled with some recent national press, and with Apple's spectacular announcements, the amount of interest and discussion about the future of Internet Television has really exploded. The popular son, the iPod, has garnered most of the press, but I personally found Apple's entrance with Frontrow to be a lot more exciting.

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!

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."

Chris Anderson has posted a very interesting article discussing acceptable levels of piracy. He is worried that "uncrackable" DRM will have adverse effects on one's ability to access and manage media.

"We've seen all sorts of failures of this sort before, from dongles to laborious and confusing registration schemes. Each seems better at annoying consumers than at building markets."

Moore's Law powers an ever growing number of innovations that dramatically affect our society and culture. Dear to our hearts is computing's effect on the cost of video production. Not only is high definition video available to the masses, but anyone can author their own documentaries and stories.

OurMedia was recently selected as a U.S. nominee to the UN World Summit Awards under a category for organizations that promote "bridging the digital divide" and "utilizing the Internet to empower the public".

The gang at OurMedia should feel very proud for the progress they have made over these last few months. More important than the technology platform is the education they have brought to the public on the issues of open distribution and citizen's media.

Keep up the good work!

Working for an Internet TV start-up, I find it ironic that I typically can't find time to watch television. By the weekend, when I finally carve some hours to recharge, I attempt to catch up on some TiVo'd programs. Being a geek at heart I enjoy a program on Science Discovery called "Discoveries this Week" - a nice recap of interesting science and technology stories. The latest episode had a short segment on the Gigapxl Project. I am completely enthralled with their work!

In anticipation of the upcoming Star Wars release I would like to highlight a recent article in News.com ("Homegrown Star Wars, with big-screen magic intact") on the fan-fiction film "Star Wars: Relevations".

Besides being another good use case on consumer produced media and Remix Culture (ideas, not source material), I found this tidbit quite fascinating.

In response to our posting on NIN releasing GarageBand source, Josh Hawkins discusses the question we posed on the future of video producers releasing their own source material.

Trent Reznor has recently released a song from the upcoming NIN album "With Teeth" packaged together in GarageBand format. (Download from here)

I came across this blog entry by way of a search feed trolling for Brightcove references. Like us, Michael is very excited about the opportunity for democratizing media  distribution. I enjoyed his zeal and vision.

We find video to be an interesting medium because of the wide diversity of content that is available. Unlike music/audio, which typically centers around entertainment value, there is a wider distribution available across all genres of video. With increasing media control falling into the hands of viewers, Brightcove believes that people will increasingly expect video availability to parallel the diversity of content we currently find in the "text web."

In general, friction is an artifact that we try to remove. Friction is a literal drag on mechanical devices. Outside the physical world, businesses focus their efforts on creating frictionless environments. In many ways, the power of the Internet is about removing or at least diminishing the economics of scarcity - limited television channels and limited shelf space are all forms of friction.

A couple of days ago Tareef and I met with Larry Goldberg and Brad Botkin from the Media Access Group at WGBH. The Media Access Group has been instrumental over the last 30 years by pushing technology and developing standards to ensure fair access to media.

By Bob Mason, VP Technology

For many of us Chris Anderson's article on The Long Tail crystalized and brought into focus a set of ideas that have consciously (or not) been driving our own thinking. Associated with this theme, we, and others, are very excited about the prospects of promoting "media democracy" through Internet Television.