Brightcove is pulling the plug on Brightcove.TV, its consumer-oriented video showcase. In an e-mail to the site’s members, Brightcove says that it will no longer be accepting video uploads after December 17. The YouTube-wannabe site was never one of Brightcove’s strengths, which is serving video for professional and semi-professional content creators. That is something that the company will continue to do, primarily through its customers’ own Websites and in embeddable players throughout the Web (like the one below). This is not the end of the world for Brightcove, which should still have some of that $60 million it raised last January to plow into its main business.
I asked Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire why he decided to throw in the towel on Brightcove.TV. His response:
We are not throwing in the towel on Brightcove.TV, we are eliminating its use as an end-user sharing service. Note that the vast majority of programming on Brightcove.TV are professional channels published by media businesses that use our overall platform for their websites and syndication. It will continue to operate as a content showcase of pro publishers using the Brightcove Platform.
He further states in this blog post that the eight million monthly unique visitors to Brightcove.TV (as reported by comScore) is “dwarfed by the adoption of our Internet TV platform by media businesses around the world.” He counts 4,000 such media publishers, who collectively attract “over 120 million uniques visitors per month across thousands of websites.” Brightcove.TV was always a sideshow.
Even though Brightcove.TV will continue to operate and showcase videos from Brightcove’s partners, it will no longer accept videos from consumers. I am tempted to put it in the deadpool, but will refrain for now. If it disappears completely, or arises Zombie-like in the future, we will let you know.
Maybe the problem was that not enough regular people uploaded their clips to Brightcove.TV in the first place. Instead it is filled with cheesy trailers like this one for, ahem, Dead or Alive: