Eric Elia (@ericelia) is a member of the founding team at Brightcove, and is currently the vice president of TV solutions. Brightcove, a video and app solutions provider, went public on Feb. 17 on the NASDAQ and now trades with a market cap of $509.3 million.
When we started Brightcove seven years ago, we expected a five-to-10-year transformation period until we reached a world of purely Internet-based, on-demand TV, motion pictures and “long tail” content. Sometimes it’s hard to see change happen when we are in the middle of it, but amazing to look back and see just how far we’ve come. I look at the past seven years as driven by three waves of innovation. → Read More
Brightcove may not have had the sexiest IPO in the recent wave of offerings, but the company’s return so far definitely beats Zynga and Groupon’s performances since their debuts. After launching its video platform six years ago, Brightcove went public just a few weeks ago on the NASDAQ by raising $55 million. The company’s shares have climbed 80 percent since the offering to $19.86, giving the company a market capitalization of $523.8 million.
We caught up with chief executive Jeremy Allaire, who is now positioning Brightcove as more than a video services provider. While the company has been known for powering video players for premium brands like The New York Times, Conde Nast and Macy’s, Brightcove is trying to find a broader base of customers with a new suite of app development services. → Read More
Online video service Brightcove has just made its public debut on the NASDAQ under the symbol ‘BCOV’, with an opening trade of $14.50. This is up over 30 percent from the company’s original pricing of $11 per share, after setting the range of $10-$12 per share. At $14.50 per share, Brightcove is valued at $382 million.
Brightcove sells online video publishing and distribution services, including Brightcove Video Cloud, an enterprise-friendly online video hosting and management platform, and Brightcove App Cloud, a software application development and management platform designed to help customers publish and distribute video through software apps across multiple Internet-connected devices.
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Viewing web video content on three different devices is likely to yield three different outcomes. Even if it’s possible to get the whole video to play properly, often there are inconsistencies in how the player reports itself, how the video is requested and cached, and how it is filtered or displayed. It’s bad enough for a user, but for advertising it could be fatal. If you can’t guarantee the content, how can you guarantee the ad?
Brightcove is taking this problem head-on with a new set of HTML5-compatible “smart players” and an ecosystem that tries to recognize and account for the discrepancies between Webkit renderers, OSes, and so on. → Read More
Online video platform company Brightcove this morning announced that it has filed a registration statement on Form S-1 with the SEC in connection with a proposed IPO of its common stock. The company is looking to raise up to $50 million through the offering.
Brightcove offers cloud-based solutions for publishing and distributing video and other digital media. → Read More
Brightcove is no longer just for videos. Starting today, it is launching an entire new product line for making mobile and web apps called Brightcove App Cloud. Developers will be able to use App Cloud to create their apps once and then deploy them to the iPhone, iPad, Android phones and tablets, and beyond. It creates HTML5 apps as well as mobile touch websites, and it is not limited to video apps.
In the video above, Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire explains what App cloud is and answers some questions about what appears to be a departure from the company’s primary focus of providing an online video platform. The App cloud apps don’t need to be video apps, but they are geared towards media apps. Just as Adobe spits out iPhone apps from its Creative Suite, so too will Brightcove App Cloud—except, as Allaire points out, Brightcove App Cloud isn’t based on any proprietary technology. It is all open technologies such as HTML5, CSS and Javascript. → Read More
Brightcove was issued a broad patent for the “Distribution of content,” which covers the basic features of a professional online video platform. Patent No. 7,925,973, which was applied for on August 12, 2005 by CEO Jeremy Allaire and CTO Bob Mason, describes some of the basic features of all professional online video players such as customizable players, digital rights management, and syndication. In other words, how video is experienced, and how it is controlled—essential aspects for professional video publishers.
Of course, Brightcove has done just fine so far without that patent. Brightcove is now streaming 700 million videos a month, I have learned, which it believes would place it among the top five online video platforms on the web. → Read More
In the third quarter of 2010, BrightCove and Tube Mogul’s Online Video & The Media Industry report showed that Facebook passed Yahoo to become the No. 2 source of traffic to online videos at media sites. (The study measures videos across the Brightcove network, with a focus on newspaper, magazine, broadcaster, brand, and online media sites). Facebook has continued its reign as the second largest referrer of traffic, behind Google, in the fourth quarter of 2010 according to a new report from the video platform companies.
Facebook exhibited the healthiest growth rates in terms of referral traffic, now accounting for 11.8% of all referred video traffic to media companies. The report says that the social network’s growth is mainly attributed to Facebook’s increasing support for white-listed embedded video that plays in-stream, allowing for contextual viewing without requiring any redirect of traffic. Google accounts for 60% of traffic whereas Twitter only accounts for around 2% of traffic. Clearly, search drives views. → Read More
When it comes to getting people to watch online videos from media sites, Google is still the largest source of outside traffic. Search drives views. But the second largest source of traffic is not Yahoo, Bing, or another search engine. It is now Facebook. According to a report on Online Video & The Media Industry put out jointly by Tubemogul and Brightcove, Facebook passed Yahoo in the third quarter to become the No. 2 source of traffic to online videos at media sites. (The study measures videos across the Brightcove network, with a focus on newspaper, magazine, broadcaster, brand, and online media sites).
In the third quarter, Facebook shares accounted for 9.6 percent of online video traffic. Google still towers above Facebook with more than 50 percent of the referring traffic coming from search, but that is down from the second quarter when it was above 60 percent. In fact, across all search (Google, Yahoo, and Bing), referral traffic to videos on media sites is down. → Read More
Editor’s note: Online video is going through many changes as people begin to connect their TVs to the Internet and social sharing over Facebook and Twitter influence what people watch as much as search. In this guest post, Jeremy Allaire, founder and CEO of online video platform Brightcove, gives his view of where online video is going next year. Allaire’s last guest post for us was on the standards war in mobile video formats.
Web video is just getting started, and 2011 promises to be yet another year of transformation in the online video landscape. The stage is set for mainstream connected TVs, Over-the-top adoption, and even more videos watched directly streamed from website. Here are the five biggest trends in online video that will play out in significant ways for end-users and publishers alike.
1. Connected TV Platform Wars
The past year saw the definitive emergence of platform wars in the handheld computing landscape. This year will see those wars expand into new territory, the Connected TV platform market. Input 1 on the TV is the new homepage or start screen. We should expect that the battles will look incredibly similar to the market that emerged for smartphones over the past several years, but with some other entrenched players. Google vs. Apple vs. the dominant TV brands. In fact, these platforms will largely be based on a similar architecture, offering app and content publishers a common model for creating device-oriented applications and Web experiences.
Apple will ship an iOS-based Apple TV display and will open up Apple TV to third-party apps beyond Netflix. Developers will have a common model for building apps across the phone, tablet and TV, as well as a suite of new APIs for phone and tablet apps to interact with TV apps (think remote control type activities, gestures for games, etc.). Its platform will also support HTML5 with a set of design standards for TV Web 10-foot experiences. → Read More
Once a year around this time, Brightcove rolls out a bunch of new features to its online video platform and calls it a new release. With Brightcove 5, this year the service is becoming even more Apple-friendly than ever before. Not only is there more HTML5 goodness baked in, but it now supports Apple’s HTTP streaming for video apps and also offers a template for creating video apps on the iPad.
Brightcove started paying closer attention to how videos play on Apple products last year with Brightcove 4, which added support for an iPhone video player. Then as it became clear that Apple would not support Flash players in its mobile devices, Brightcove started transcoding to HTML5 and laying out a roadmap to add support for analytics, advertising, and custom players. → Read More
Online video platform Brightcove took another step towards an eventual IPO today by hiring a new chief financial officer. Christopher Menard is the new CFO. Previously, he was the CFO at Phase Forward, a clinical trials enterprise software company bought by Oracle last April for $685 million. Before the Oracle acquisition, Phase Forward was a public company. → Read More
Videoplaza, the video ad server startup, has moved swiftly to make its Monetizer AdPlayer product ready for the iPad’s European invasion.
That’s because it now supports HTML5, enabling videos to be monetized on Apple’s tablet. Remember the iPad doesn’t support Adobe’s Flash Video, the current industry-wide standard for delivering online video, so it’s the HTML5 way or the highway as far as Apple is concerned.
And specifically, Monetizer AdPlayer now offers a plug-in for Brightcove, which has already rolled out a HTML5-friendly version targeting the iPad – see the video demo below. → Read More
You can hardly run into a media site these days that no longer includes online video (even we are getting ready to launch TechCrunch TV). But which kinds of media sites are getting the most views? In a joint report put out today by Brightcove and Tubemogul (embedded below), the non-YouTube sites seeing the most success with online video are those of the broadcast TV networks and Web-only media brands, followed by magazine sites and music labels. Newspaper sites are lagging when it comes to both total video views and growth.
In terms of how people are finding these videos, a little more than half (51.75 percent) are navigating directly from the publisher’s main site. Following that, Google search is the next biggest source of video-viewing traffic (38.92 percent), followed by Yahoo (5.58 percent), Bing (2.29 percent) and Facebook barely registers (with only 0.40 percent). Twitter is even smaller, but people who find videos are more engaged than any of these other sources of traffic, on average watching videos longer across different media categories. → Read More
When Steve Jobs tells the technology industry to get in line, it gets in line pretty quick. All the initial hair-pulling and angst surrounding Apple’s decision to not support Flash on the iPad is already mattering less and less. At least for video, most of the major online video platforms such as Brightcove and Ooyala are supporting HTML5 playback in the iPad browser. YouTube might eventually get there as well.
Now Kyte is jumping on the HTML5 bandwagon. Kyte videos will stream in an HTML5 player in the iPad browser using the same embed code that triggers a Flash player on other computers. But Kyte is also going to release a software developer kit (SDK) which will let its media partners create apps specifically for the iPad. The SDK will also let them create versions of the same apps for the iPhone and the iPod Touch. This will replace the iPhone framework Kyte released last year. → Read More
The lack of Flash on the iPad is a sore point for many and often listed as one of its greatest potential weaknesses. Not allowing Flash on the iPhone is bad enough, but on the larger iPad with full-screen browsing, its absence will be much more noticeable. Or will it? Already the Web is adapting. Videos powered by Brightcove, for instance, will stream in an HTML5 video player when it detects an iPad. On the iPhone browser, the video thumbnail will open up the Quicktime player. It will also work on Android phones.
Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire is agnostic about the Flash Vs. HTML5 debate. “HTML5 is great,” he says. “It is an open standard, and firmly entrenched in the Apple device platform. Flash can’t reach those platforms for political and business reasons.” But HTML5 simply cannot do everything Flash can, especially when it comes to supporting advertising, audience measurement, customized players, and social sharing. So he decided to bring HTML5 video to parity with Flash for anyone who uses Brightcove. (Note that this is for videos playing in the browser. Brightcove already supports video playback in iPhone apps). → Read More
The war between the enterprise-grade online video platform providers rages on, and Brightcove will announce later today at the SXSW conference that it was won another small battle by signing up EMI Music, one of the “big four” record companies.
The EMI Group company will use Brightcove as its online video publishing and syndication platform of choice in North America, across all of its website properties and to some of its third-party syndication partners. → Read More
Which online video companies will get bought in 2010? Venture capitalists are desperately looking for exits while the usual suspects are sitting on more than $80 billion in cash: Microsoft ($20B), Apple ($40B), Google ($15B), Amazon ($3B), and Yahoo! ($3B) just to name the cash positions of a few potential acquirers. Theoretically, it should be a match made in heaven, but the sheer number of venture-backed video startups is staggering so when the music stops, not everyone will find a dancing partner.
Once you assess what drives companies to merge or acquire one another, however, it seems like we’re about to enter a period of mergers between video competitors and see a series of acquisitions by larger companies looking to accelerate their video strategies, with a common theme being increasing both monetization and margins.
With that in mind, let’s look at those 10 potential deals. → Read More
Recently a war has broken out in Europe about who will power online video for media owners. The two main players tussling it out are both from the US: Ooyala and Brightcove.
Last month Ooyala, a provider of video platform applications and services, and the UK’s Telegraph Media Group signed an agreement for Ooyala to power online video on the publisher’s websites and co-develop new technologies.
Today Ooyala is partnering with Middle East based social media platform developer H2O New Media, giving it distribution rights to Ooyala’s video platform, Backlot. It wil be used to stream video content from the growing Middle East television and media sector.
But (also today) Brightcove is fighting back. → Read More
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