Do you love online video? Do you want to share your knowledge with others?

Then consider becoming a guest blogger for the Brightcove Blog. We value the knowledge and experience of the entire Brightcove ecosystem, from our valued customers to our technology and solution partners. If you have an idea that you feel would be beneficial to our shared audience, we welcome the opportunity to consider it as a post for the Brightcove Blog!

Every quarter, Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire and COO David Mendels present a webcast for customers with an update on newly released platform features and a preview of our product roadmap. It has been a busy few months and a lot was covered during the webinar, so we wanted to share a summary of some of the key highlights.

Livestreaming from Drupalcon 2011 brought to you by Brightcove and Telestream!

Last week I had the pleasure of attending Drupalcon Chicago, a celebration of all things Drupal, bringing together the people who use, develop, design, and support the Drupal platform. Thanks to the technology behind Brightcove, our CDN partner Akamai and their HD live capabilities, as well as Telestream, I was able to broadcast a live international event all from the sound and lighting booth of the Chicago Sheraton Towers.

Here are some pictures of the view from the booth:

This morning we announced the launch of a new government sector initiative, which includes a partnership with trusted government IT solutions provider, Carahsoft Technology Corp., and the appointment of government technology veteran, Chris Hill, to director of public sector sales. The new initiative will expand on Brightcove's momentum in the public sector, as the company already counts several major organizations, including the U.S. Department of State and U.S.

We are pleased to announce today that BestTV, Israel's preferred provider of online video technology and services, will become the exclusive reseller and service provider for the Brightcove offering in Israel. Following the agreement, BestTV will offer migration services to the Brightcove platform for its existing customers as well as for new prospects.

Getting Live Streaming done right will give a massive boost to your online video initiative.   
 
Learning how to do it right from the experts can save you at lot of time and headaches as you try to navigate this new form's many pitfalls.

In the last of our series on PPV, Nigel Regan, CEO of Randicoot, has an animated and colour look at one of the key challenges facing Pay Per View strategies: that of earning and honouring a consumer's trust.   You can find out more about Randicoot here: http://www.brightcove.com/en/partners/randicoot

Reward, reward, reward!

In the second post of our 3 part series, MPP Global's Scott O'Neill takes a look at the landscape from an established providers perspective.   Especially looking at how a major broadcaster and Brightcove customer is currently leveraging PPV technology in their monetisation strategy.  You can find out more about MPP Global here: http://www.brightcove.com/en/partners/mpp-global-solutions

We recently posted about the great work that our solution partner, Adjust Your Set, has done using the Brightcove platform to build new video-rich websites for leading retailers in the UK, including Thomas Pink.

We are very excited to announce a wide-ranging new partnership with TubeMogul. The collaboration involves several components:

One of the very first solution partners in the Brightcove Alliance, Adjust Your Set, has teamed with Brightcove to use our market-leading online video platform to build new video-rich websites for leading retailers Marks & Spencer and Thomas Pink.

In October we kicked off a Site of the Month competition for Brightcove partners. Brightcove partners across EMEA were invited to submit sites to sotm@brightcove.com that showed innovative use of video technology, had sophisticated technology integration or were just plain cool looking.

We're also very happy to announce that we have partnered with Boxee, the first "social" media center, to provide our media customers with turn-key distribution options to the living room television via Boxee's interface.

Earlier today, Brightcove Alliance partner Goodmail Systems announced an innovative new technology integration with the Brightcove platform that enables publishers and marketers to deliver streaming video experiences within emails.

Email & Video Equal a Winning Combination

Qik, a live mobile video provider, recently joined the Brightcove Alliance, a global ecosystem of more than 160 technology, distribution and solution providers integrating with and building on the Brightcove online video platform. The following is a guest post from Qik's co-founder, Bhaskar Roy, detailing the new partnership and how Brightcove customers can benefit from the integration.

Our friends at JS-Kit have a very exciting announcement today. They used the Brightcove 3 player framework to integrate comments into a standard Brightcove player template. Brightcove video publishers can deploy comments in their players without writing a line of code.

When we had a few free moments, a couple of us on the Proserv team cooked up a pipeline adapter to integrate with some of our mutual customers. There have been several requests over the last couple of months from customers that want their video indexed alongside other content types. The adapter is now a Packaged Application in the same vein as SEO, iPhone, and Closed Captioning.

In this month's issue of Baseline magazine, Tony Kontzer highlights the rise of cloud computing and cloud-based services in his story "The Cloud's the Limit with Anything as a Service." Kontzer talks at length about the core issues surrounding these types of services, including the ability to manage spikes in demand. This is particularly important when it comes to online video, as more and more companies are incorporating video into their marketing mix via cloud-based services.

Cooliris, the browser plug-in that advances visual navigation for the Web, desktops and mobile, recently launched integration with the Brightcove platform to allow publishers to easily deliver top quality video content through basic feeds in the Cooliris 3D interface.

At Streaming Media East this week, we're very pleased to announce a new partnership between Brightcove and VUDU, a leading provider of digital technologies and services that deliver Web entertainment content to HDTVs and home theater, which will enable Brightcove media customers to distribute high-quality, advertising-supported content directly to the set top box.

Yesterday during their panel at the Next09 show, Jeremy and Axel Schmiegelow, the CEO of Sevenload, announced a partnership between the two companies.  We are very excited to be working with Sevenload who operate one of the largest video portals in Germany and several other territories.  Brightcove customers will now be able to easily have their content syndicated into a channel on Sevenload and,

Today, from the Next09 conference in Hamburg, Germany, Brighcove CEO Jeremy Allaire will announce two important new developments for Brightcove in the region. 

So, let's say you're surfing one of many online video sites powered by Brightcove and you see something you would love to have. Say one of the characters in a video is wearing a must-have summer dress and that dress is currently available through a popular retailer. Wouldn't it be cool if you could just click an icon to expose all products in the video and buy it right there (or bookmark it if you aren't ready to buy)?

Today at the NAB Show in Las Vegas Adobe and Brightcove will announce a new and far-reaching strategic alliance that deepens the integration and alignment between Adobe's software platform and Brightcove's online video service. The alliance also sets in motion a new sales and marketing framework between the two companies to jointly acquire new customers on a worldwide basis.

The Adobe and Brightcove strategic alliance focuses on four core areas:

What's the best way to create an MRSS feed for a distribution partner? In this new article, Chris Little describes how to use MRSS output from the Brightcove Media API to create feeds for your affiliates. Read more.

Here at Brightcove HQ we gets lots of interesting data, and this little nugget recently caught my eye.

Average completion rates across all Brightcove partners - this is the amount of a single video that people consume - has risen dramatically between 2005 and 2009

Every year, television networks send members of the Academy of Television Arts and Science piles of DVDs with elaborate packaging in an attempt to get them to nominate and vote for their original programming for Emmy awards. This year, Showtime has teamed with Brightcove to revolutionize the way television networks do Emmy campaigns.

We are very excited to announce that IAC and Brightcove have entered into a corporate-wide partnership enabling any of its businesses to use our Internet TV platform to launch broadband video initiatives.

Today we announced a broad strategic partnership with Limelight Networks.  For those deep in the business of multimedia content delivery on the Internet, you'll recognize Limelight as one of the fastest growing providers of extremely high-quality content delivery services for renowned brands such as NBC, ABC/Radio, and Fox's MySpace (who's "media delivery" encompasses the vast quantities of images, audio and video that are pasted throughout the 70+ million MySpace member pages).