Today we announced the general commercial availability of App Cloud, our second major product. You can learn all about it here. This post is the back story for why we built it.

Let’s begin with a few somewhat controversial assertions:

One of the perennial questions discussed in the mobile world over the past two years has been whether mobile apps or mobile web sites will "win" in the end.  The media likes to pitch it as a winner-take-all situation where five years from now consumers will predominantly be browsing on devices or using apps, but not both.  I've also heard partisan platform vendors pushing this idea.

I was just reading a post by Matthew over at Gigaom that is a summary of our Online Video & the Media Industry Quarterly Research Report for the third quarter of 2010.

Comscore just released a new report on the trends in mobile video consumption in Europe, and it's really interesting and promising.  You should download the full report here, but here are few of the highlights:

Google's release of the new open source, royalty-free WebM video format and VP8 codec is big news today. Brightcove is enthusiastically joining Google, Mozilla, Opera, Adobe, and others in pledging support for WebM. Our COO and CTO are on stage out at Google I/O to tell the crowd what we're up to.  As you will see below, we believe that WebM is changing the landscape of online video in important ways that you'll want to understand.

Interest in online video continues to accelerate across many industries and throughout the world. Customers are getting more numerous, but they are also getting more sophisticated and demanding. We stay ahead of this wave of requirements by implementing agile development operating on 30 day iterations that resulted in a shipping release every month.

Today Facebook rolled out the Open Graph and their new set of Social Plugins at the f8 conference in San Francisco. As you will see later on on in this post, we believe this is a massively important innovation for the Web and we’re happy to be one of the launch partners that Facebook has been working with.

The eruption of Eyjafjallajökull can shut down air traffic in Europe, but it can't shut down Brightcove and the global Drupal community.  Many US-based Brightcovers are stranded in the UK along with hundreds of Drupal fans (a.k.a. Drupalistas) across Europe who had planned to attend Drupalcon San Francisco. The following map shows just a few of the affected Drupal community members:

Small online video platforms are becoming increasingly aggressive in their attempts to compete with Brightcove. We have seen them pop up in a variety of deals doing and saying all kinds of things to try gain advantage. Most of the time, customers are able to see through the smoke and we don't pay much attention. But today, in an inexplicable act of desperation, one of these vendors crossed an ethical line that could have harmed customers and the industry, and we think it is worth mentioning here.

As commercial availability of the Apple iPad draws near, we have been getting a lot of inquiries from customers looking for guidance on what they need to do to deliver great video experiences on these devices that exclusively support the HTML5 approach to video. These customers are excited about the possibilities of the iPad, but they also have concerns about what it will take to deliver great video experiences in this environment. They want to know what the tradeoffs and gotchas are, and what we're doing to help them navigate this new landscape.

Ashkan Karbasfrooshan of WatchMojo has published an interesting take on how to make money with online video over on TechCrunch.

It's been a year since I joined Brightcove in December of 2008. I have come to appreciate and understand online video technology and online video strategies at a much deeper level that I ever did during my many years at Macromedia and Adobe. In looking back, I can see the emergence of several key trends that are shaping the market in 2010.

This week I have been here in Japan helping with the launch of our new fully localized product.  I lived here for four years as a young adult, and it's always fun to come back and reconnect with the culture and brush up on my Japanese.

In the past decade, I think I've done at least seven different product launches in Japan. Our local Brightcove team has delivered more results with with fewer resources than any other Japanese product launch I have seen. It has been incredible to watch.

As has been widely reported, Yahoo! has finally announced their decision to discontinue the Maven product that they purchased last year for $160 million. 

This may be news to many, but it seemed pretty clear to most Maven customers that their video platform was in trouble long before Yahoo!'s formal announcement that they were shutting it down.  At Brightcove, we've had a front row seat to the Maven customer migration over the past year.

If you are involved in interactive advertising, it's time to submit your best work to IAB annual MIXX Awards 2009. Details and the submission form can be found here.

Intuit is running a competition to award over $300,000 in grants to small businesses.  Contestants submit videos of their ideas to the Intuit site. The whole thing is powered by Brightcove.

I am often asked at cocktail parties whether YouTube is a competitor to Brightcove. My answer is usually something like "Not really. YouTube doesn't work well for putting video on business web sites, and that's what Brightcove is focused on."  Most people accept that answer, and I'm happy to report that our market research backs it up.

If you’re creating informational videos about your products and services, can you use copyrighted content for b-roll and graphics? Are you allowed to include photos from Google images, or screen shots of news stories in your video? Can you have copyrighted music playing in the background of your video? What if the music is directly incorporated in the context of the video?

The Wall Street Journal is running an article this morning about the new cable company idea for creating walled online gardens of content available only to their subscribers.

"The programming available on the proposed Web services would likely be in a streaming format with ads, accessible in and out of the home, and without any additional charge to cable-TV subscribers, the people familiar with the situation said."

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:

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.