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:

Mobile content consumption is on the rise, and online video is a big part of this, driven by the propagation of smarter mobile devices, Wi-Fi, as well as faster and more affordable 3G data plans. Morgan Stanley found that video already accounts for 69% of mobile data traffic globally. 

According to analyst firm Telsyte, nearly 90% of all mobile phone users in Australia will have a smartphone as their primary device in 2015. up from just under 50% in 2011. That equates to 18.5 million smartphone users.

Removing the complexity behind Video delivery for you is one of the goals of Brightcove Video Cloud - and with our Video Cloud 11.11 release, we have taken that one step further.  We have released a new JavaScript player API that works with our Smart Players - whether they render as Flash or HTML5.  This allows you to build once, and use regardless if the player renders on a tablet or PC - saving you time and preserving the user experience you work hard to create.

We are extremely excited about our newest video case study with the National Football League's Miami Dolphins. The Dolphins are one of the most storied franchises in the NFL, with a long history of success and a loyal, energetic fan-base.

Yesterday we announced that the Prisma Presse group, a major French publisher of magazine and online media, has chosen Brightcove Video Cloud to handle all of its video content. Video Cloud will enable the organization to enhance the value of its video initiatives by tailoring content to each of its sites' specific audiences and themes. 

With 23 hardcopy titles and related online media publications, Prisma Presse sites cover topics ranging from TV, to business, to celebrities and general-interest content.

We are very excited today to announce the launch of a new feature on our website, the Brightcove Learning Center, which includes a host of new resources and information on our products and how organizations are using them to advance their business. In the Learning Center you will find customer case studies across a variety of industries, presentations from webinars, whitepapers, new product demo videos, and more.

The Brightcove product team is excited to share some cool new feature enhancements that improve HTML5 playback experiences and expand support for Android devices. 

As you may have heard, we're celebrating one year of support for HTML5-compatible Smart Players and iOS mobile browser video experiences by giving away one new iPad 2 each week to a trial user. This week, Clint Coons is our lucky winner!

As you may have heard, we're celebrating one year of support for HTML5-compatible Smart Players and iOS mobile browser video experiences by giving away one new iPad 2 each week to a lucky trial user. This week, Austin Bousley is our lucky winner!

Apple drew a line in the sand when it announced that iPad and other iOS devices would not support Flash runtimes. That decision had a big impact as far as web-based video is concerned. At the time, nearly all online video was built on Flash, and in response, video producers like ourselves scrambled to provide alternative solutions to support mobile playback on whatever device video appeared on.

At the start of the year, we hosted a series of webinars offering strategy tips and examples from the field to help our customers get started with their online video planning for 2011.

Just one year ago, we were waiting with baited breath for the release of the first iPad, and fielding questions about what Apple's HTML5 video requirements meant for publishers and viewers alike. 

We are happy to announce today that The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), the nation's largest animal protection organization, has teamed with Brightcove to launch new online and mobile video offerings. Brightcove enables the HSUS to deliver an integrated, high quality video experience for its website, www.humanesociety.org, as well as to mobile and HTML5-compatible mobile devices.

South by Southwest Interactie begins today! Our very own Jesse Streb will be representing Brightcove in his session on Monday, March 14. Be sure to add it to your schedule! 

Designing Video-Rich Websites For All Three Screens

Monday, March 14 11:45 AM
Ballroom E

Data from MeFeedia suggests that the "in 1 year, the amount of video available for playback in HTML5 has jumped from 10% to 63%." The company used its own video index to analyze about 30M videos sourced from 30K video sites. MeFeedia is a video aggregating site, that pulls from video sources, including YouTube, Vimeo, and Brightcove-supported sites.

Everyone is a-buzz with excitement for Apple's latest announcement: the iPad 2. Over at Brightcove, we're pretty excited by fact that so many of the new features contribute to video activities on the device, whether it's watching, producing, or sharing video. 

Microsoft announced the other day in a blog post that they are firmly backing the use of H.264 (as opposed to WebM) codec in HTML5 native expressions of embedded video. This comes shortly after Google announced that they would not support the MPEG LA licensed standard in its Chrome browser in favor of the open WebM standard.

If you are eager to learn more about HTML5 Video, here is a collection of some of the best resources we have found to explain the state of HTML5 today, along with some tools to help you get started supporting HTML5 video with Brightcove. This list is included in our newest whitepaper, HTML5 Video Facts & Fiction that is available for free download. 

The next generation of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards promises to usher in new levels of interactivity and interoperability on the Web, but the transformation won’t happen overnight. The media is buzzing about the promise of what HTML5 has to offer for the future of online interactive experiences, but buzz often generates along with it a lot of hype.

As we dive headlong into the new year, a lot of you out there are busy laying plans to set your organizations up for success for the rest of 2011. Now is the best time to think about how you can up the ante with your online video strategy in the coming year. 

We've enhanced the Brightcove Smart Player feature to now support players that include a playlist. Smart Players enable you to automatically deliver your video in Flash or HTML5, depending on your viewer's device capabilities. Using a single embed code, Smart Players automatically detect the devices viewing your video and deliver the appropriate format for that environment. Smart Players support all of Brightcove’s advanced styling features, including point-and-click style editing and BEML customization.

A few weeks ago, Google released an online guidebook to help answer some of the most basic (and therefore most important!) questions about the nature of the web today. Illustrated by Christoph Niemann and written by the Chrome team, "20 Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web" is an interactive web-based book built using only HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS.