Jeff Whatcott's Station

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.

The Japan localized product and documentation look great.  I've been using and demoing the Japanese product for a couple of weeks now and it is rock solid.

We had a packed press conference on Tuesday morning at the ultramodern Tokyo International Forum in central Tokyo.  The reporters were attentive and wrote great articles.  We even made it in the print editions of two of the leading business newspapers.

The press conference was followed by an even more packed reception at the ultra-cool Q.E.D Club in Meguro.  The who's who of media and advertising in Japan were there, including many current and prospective customers and partners. It was a great time with great people, and you could feel the excitement of a new market being born.

We also had many valuable meetings this week with customers and partners where we could strategize about how to build healthy business with online video. I learned a lot, and got more and more excited as the week wore on.

The Japan market is a little behind the US and Europe in terms of online video market maturation, but the core ingredients for success are in place.  Japanese homes and mobile devices are blessed with incredible bandwidth.  Japan has a very visual-oriented culture that is naturally drawn to video.  And the overall online audience is very large and very wealthy by world standards.  The same basic patterns we've seen in the other markets are playing out here, but with a distinctive Japanese flavor.

And of course, the Brightcove business is off to a strong start with many of the top brands like Tokyo Broadcasting System, Inc., Sony Music Network Inc., Asahi Breweries Group, Shueisha Publishing Co., Ltd., and Orange Page Inc. as paying customers. Even more major brands will be announced soon. Our local team is making all the right moves to accelerate market development, including the offer of a free 30-day trial. It's incredibly exciting. 頑張りましょ！

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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.

Since the announcement, there has been a parade of upstart online video platforms trying to make headlines with "Maven Rescue" price discount programs.  One has to wonder whether the Maven customers who are wooed by such offers are jumping from the frying pan into the fire.  Moving from a platform with a death sentence to a platform with little or no track record meeting the needs of sophisticated customers seems like a bad idea.  Given their recent experience, I am betting that Maven customers will see through the smokescreen and focus on making the right long term choice for their business.

At Brightcove, we don't have any a gimmicky Maven customer migration program per se.  However, we do want to invite Maven customers onto our platform.  We are the profitable company that originally defined the online video platform market.  We are reliably operating at scale for top brands all over the world, and we're in this business for the long haul.  We have successfully migrated former Maven customers before, and we can do it for you.  And don't worry - our pricing is very competitive.  Just ask for a quote and we'll prove it to you.

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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.

It will be fun to see this year's entrants duke it out in all the various categories, especially the Digital Interactive Out-of-Home Advertising and Branded Content categories added this year. 

One thing I really like about the competition is that it is not just a beauty contest. The evaluation criteria span multiple facets of each campaign, including strategy, creative development and execution, media placement and integration, effectiveness and ROI.  This holistic approach is very much aligned with the way CMOs and their agencies should think about campaigns.  Excellence in marketing should be more than skin deep.

The deadline for submissions is July 10, so head over to the site and get your submission in now.

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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.

This kind of campaign can be a great way to stimulate awareness and engagement with your brand.  Intuit has tapped into the creativity and entrepreneurial nature of their small business customer and prospect base by offering a win/win proposition.  I am hoping we can convince our friends at Intuit to share their key campaign metrics and lessons learned.  Stay tuned.

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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.

We recently ran a series of surveys with our prospect database.  This database includes people who have registered with us and opted in for communication, but have not yet become sales leads.  In the survey, we included an open ended question asking why free video solutions like YouTube fail to meet their needs.  We manually categorized and sorted the answers and the following list is the result.

Top Reasons for Not Using a Free Video Solution

1. Want to deliver a higher quality experience for my audience
2. Want full control of my brand
3. Need a viable long term solution
4. Want to control the advertising in my content
5. Don't want advertising in my content
6. Want to customize the player experience
7. Need access to advanced analytics
8. Need to manage a large number of titles

The common theme across all of these items is the desire for control.  Other demographic information from the survey tells us that these prospects are using video to drive revenue for their business.  So it is natural for them to be wary about losing control.

The good news is that Brightcove is ready to help these prospects overcome the limitations of free solutions by making them into customers.  We offer the quality, staying power, advertising options, player customization, analytics, and content management that they are looking for. We just have to connect the dots.

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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?

If you are publishing video online, you need to know the answers to these questions in order to stay out of court.  Currently, the Associated Press and artist Shepard Fairey are involved in a lawsuit over his “Hope” portrait of President Obama, which was based on the work of an AP photographer. Similarly, Universal Music Group is suing a mother of two for playing Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy” in the background of a video she shot of her toddlers eating. If a mom can get sued, then marketers, agencies and brands are even more likely targets.

The central issue behind these horror stories is the Fair Use doctrine of the United States Copyright Act and its equivalents in other countries around the world.  Fair Use is an often misunderstood set of guidelines governing when and how you can use the work of others in your media, including online video.  As the amount of video and media you put online increases, so does the likelihood that you might use someone else’s content without their permission. Sadly, many video producers, agencies, and marketers don't fully grasp how Fair Use works, at that puts them at risk.

To help set it all straight, new media expert Daisy Whitney wrote a new EBook on Fair Use.  She released it this week on her site and it’s called “Keeping You and Your Content Out of Court.”  It’s targeted to media producers, video creators and brands making video today, which translates into just about anyone and everyone.  Be sure to check it out.

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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.

While its is encouraging to see quotes like "Online video is our friend, not our enemy" from the CEO of Comcast, I really hope this isn't the model for the future.  It runs counter to the culture of the web and distracts us all from the real potential of video as an integral part of the web.

One big problem with walled gardens is that they break the sharing and linking model of the web.  What happens when I share a link to a great show with a friend who isn't on my cable network? They'll probably get an error message or a completely futile invitation to switch cable providers to watch the video at the link. Why sacrifice the wonderfully strong pass along rates that web video offers?

Similarly, content within walled gardens is often not discoverable by search engines nor is it linkable from blogs and other resources on the web.  And even if it is discoverable by search engines, anyone who clicks on the link will be accelerating into the "you must be a subscriber to view this show" brick wall surrounding the content garden.  Breaking the inherent fabric of the web in this way is highly counterproductive, because it means your content is less likely to be found by it's natural audience, and that is a massive lost opportunity. 

There can also be issues with delivering on the vision of making content available to subscribers wherever they are.  I've experienced this myself with ESPN360, the walled garden I am supposed to have access to through my Verizon FIOS account.  It works OK when I am at home accessing the site over my Verizon connection, though the video quality, even over fiber to my house, is not as nearly as good as our friends at Move Networks would have you believe.  But it's a total FAIL in the office, where it is supposed to work after authenticating as a Verizon subscriber.  All I get is a nice blank screen and a few nasty browser error messages.

Rather than channeling engineering talent into trying to solve these serious problems with walled gardens, I would rather see the broadcast cable companies embrace the web on its own terms.  To borrow a phrase from Reagan during the Cold War, "Mr. Cable Guy - Tear down this wall!"

As Jeremy often says, the future of video content is as an element of integrated web content experiences, not an isolated silo.  It will take leadership and vision from the cable guys to get there, and schemes like this walled garden goose chase are going to continue to hold us all back.

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