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.

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.

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>

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.