Walking into 2010, there are some major changes at the company that I'm excited to share as we cap off what was a very big year for the company and kick off what we expect will be an even more significant year of growth for Brightcove.

It's always rewarding to see threads of one's life woven together.  With that in mind, I was happy to learn today that a ColdFusion developer had crafted a Brightcove Media API SDK for ColdFusion.  In short, this allows CF developers to easily integrate video into their content and database applications, as well as drive dynamic pages with video and related meta-data. 

http://cfbcove.riaforge.org/

Somewhat unrelated to Brightcove, I wanted to quickly note an announcement yesterday from rapidly growing software company PingIdentity (disclosure:  I am a board member of PingID). 

About a week ago we shipped our latest update to Brightcove, BC 3.3.  I'm not going to go through everything in the update, but thought it would be good to highlight several things that I'm very excited about.

For full details on the release, you can check out this blog post from Emily Glass, or the detailed Release Notes here.

Distribution and Syndication 'stuff'

Earlier today we posted a brief piece that talked about our aggregated analysis of growth in online video from the US newspaper industry.  Overall, the data are encouraging across a number of vectors including the volume of content published, the ways in which video is being integrated into the editorial and user experience mix, and the growth in video views.

Over the past few weeks, one may have noticed a surge in blogging and activity from Brightcove. What’s up with this?

A fun example of FP10 and BC3 player APIs to create a 3D video navigation and consumption experience.

http://blog.digitalsurface.org/blog/_archives/2009/3/18/4125794.html

While I was organizing my office recently, i stumbled across an important modern Internet industry relic -- the AT&T PocketNet Phone.  There is a great story behind this device and my explorations with it, and it's fun to think back to this just as the mass market is finally embracing the mobile Web through the iPhone, Android and the like.

First, here are a picture of the PocketNet phone.

Bill Gurley has a short post on his idea for online video ads -- let the user decide what commercial to watch.  My comments have less to do with the proposal, and more with some of his assertions in general about monetization fundamentals for premium online video.

5 Key Costs of an Online Video Business

An earlier post generated some comments from a reader, where he looked to summarize the 5 key operating costs and considerations for an online business. It’s a good summary of my points, and here are some additional points of clarification.

Preetam’s comments are italicized.

+ sales agents and sales costs (could you shed some more light on this?)

Some great activity happening in our developer community, with new open SDKs released for Brightcove's APIs for PHP and JavaScript developers.  It's exciting to see online video moving into being a real set of developer platforms that web developers can use for integrating video and rich media into their sites in easy ways.

Dan Rayburn from Streaming Media and the Business of Video has a new post that attempts to put into perspective the reality of the online video business for most companies.

Great article/overview of how to create custom video search experiences using Brightcove APIs and BEML + Flex.  Includes source code and demo.  

Daisy Whitney from TV Week has a great short video highlighting how online video is starting to pervade the realms of marketing and education.  In the video below, Daisy highlights a couple of publishers who also happen to be Brightcove customers -- the San Diego Zoo and the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD).  

Brian Deitte (one of our senior Flex engineers, and former Allaire/Macromedia/Adobe graduate) has a nice post on his explorations with BEML, our markup language for creating custom video player experiences.

When we created Brightcove 3, we had a number of goals.  One of them was to make it much simpler for an HTML-level web designer to create custom video experiences, rather than the existing model of requiring a more advanced Flash or JavaScript developer to author experiences.

Back in the spring of 2002, we (Macromedia, when I was CTO there) put video as a format into Flash Player 6 (MX).  Over that summer, I took a sabbatical and spent most of my time exploring the new video runtime in Flash Player and prototyping different applications that could take advantage of it.  A few examples included:

Preetham asks some relevant follow-on questions in the comments:

+<JA> "after revenue shares to ad networks, video platform operators, and then to the producer it is really a bit of a joke"</JA>

Cross posting new blog article here for those of you only subscribing to Brightcove Corp Blog / RSS feed.  It's over here on Jeremy Allaire's Station.

One of the first comments/questions on my blog (from Preetham, who appears to work for an upstart competitor to Brightcove, Marcellus TV), was around "cost-drivers for high quality online video services in the non-mainstream content space."

There's plenty to write about here, specifically talking about cost-drivers for a business like ours.  But it got me thinking about a perhaps more important topic, which is the cost-drivers and fundamental economics for Long Tail video content creators and publishers.

Hi-

After many years, I've decided to pick-up my level and activity of personal blogging.  For a bit of history and a first post, check out Jeremy Allaire's Station.

Thanks,

Jeremy

In an effort to build a little more conversation and transparency, I've decided to resurrect a focused personal blog once again.  While over the past several years i have done a little blogging via the Brightcove Corporate Blog, i haven't used a specific personal space where i can write and engage.

We recently introduced support for creating web video pages and applications for the iPhone using Brightcove 3.  It's pretty straight-forward and results in some very sweet video experiences.  One of our creative services team members just posted this helpful demo video, sample application and article to help you get started creating video applications for iPhone.

We are very happy to announce several new additions to our executive team and board of directors. Jeff Whatcott, former vice president of marketing at Acquia and Adobe, has joined as senior vice president of marketing, and Mike Quinn, former vice president of sales with FAST Search & Transfer, has joined as senior vice president of sales for the Americas. In addition, long-time Adobe executive, David Mendels, and former BrassRing and Lotus Development Corporation executive, Deb Besemer, have joined our board of directors.

Today, we announced the formation of the Brightcove Alliance, a broad ecosystem of companies who have announced partnerships with Brightcove focused on enhancing our platform with a massive range of third-party technology, applications, and solutions – nearly 100 companies in all, spanning nearly every size, scale and tier of technology and solution company.

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.

Yesterday, Mashable's Mark Hopkins put together a summary and analysis of our recently posted industry report and article "Internet TV Platforms Come of Age".  In the summary, he brings forward some criticisms and concerns about our ability to generate revenue for professional publishers.

Earlier today, we sent an email to end-users who have been using Brightcove.TV to upload and share personal video clips. In the email, we explained that starting Dec. 18th, we will be removing the upload feature from the Brightcove.TV website. The email raised some questions we will try to clarify in this post. 

Today we announced a new extension to our service called Brightcove Show, which promises to significantly improve the quality and richness of television on the Internet.  In conjunction with our announcement of Brightcove Show, we also announced a technology partnership with BitTorrent, who also today introduced BitTorrent DNA (Delivery Network Accelerator), a peer-assisted hybrid content delivery model for high-quality media on the Internet. 

This week we introduced some new capabilities on brightcove.com that we think you should take for spin.  Dubbed 'Brightcove Personal', the features allow any end-user in the world to freely create their own channels on brightcove.com.  Within these channels, end-users can do a few things:

It's a huge milestone day for Brightcove, as we announce the completion of a major round of private financing for $59.5M.  The financing represents a huge vote of confidence in the Internet video marketplace, as well as specifically for Brightcove as a leader in the Internet TV revolution.  You can read the formal press release here<