My friend Jeremy Allaire busted out of the gates again today with a story that’s all over the web about his firm Brightcove, which is not just any old startup. 
It’s backed by Barry Diller’s IAC/InterActiveCorp and America Online, among others. And it boasts a management team with senior execs from Allaire, Macromedia, ATG, Comcast, Lycos, News Corp., MediaVest, and Discovery Networks. The firm just announced the launch of its Brightcove Network, which is aimed at what it calls “video prosumers” — the ranks of which are dead certain to be growing. I know for sure that will include me, but it won’t be just us tech-savvy folks.
As background, you may recall I published an interview with Jeremy earlier this year, onsite from the PC Forum conference in San Diego. And I also chatted at dinner one night there with his PR people, who had recently secured a front-page feature on Jeremy in the Wall Street Journal. Then, this morning, my buddy Mark Druskoff shot me an email on all this Brightcove attention today (he’s the former editor of Minnesota Business magazine, now working in Texas). He also pointed out that Barry Diller will likely earn the distinction of being this year’s highest paid executive. Yes, and a good guy for Jeremy to have on his board.
Here’s the latest Brightcove news as the WSJ covered it today (subscribers only), and CNet did a piece as well. For other background, here’s a TechCrunch post just out by Marshall Kirkpatrick, and a great wrapup on what it all means from Forbes.com, entitled “AnotherTube.”
Call it the revenge of the media industry. This is about professional video, or at least semi-professional — something more polished than raw crap, anyway. 
Let’s face it, consumer-generated video is hardly what everybody wants to spend most of their time watching on the Internet going forward! Hey, this broadband video thing is just getting going. And no firm, startup or otherwise, is better positioned than Brightcove to take advantage of what will be a very, very BIG market — all kinds of video, from professional on down to user-generated. 
Think online video marketplace, with every angle covered…and everyone makes money. Unique concept, huh? Making money. Quick, somebody get the YouTube-Google folks on the line — they’ll want to look at this!
I think Abbey Klaassen of Ad Age gets it right today in her commentary, in which she doesn’t hold back the optimism of her employer on this news: Meet the Next Media Mogul: Jeremy Allaire.
I would not bet against her being right.
USA Today also ran an excellent piece: Brightcove to take Web video to next level….which includes some key analyst reaction.
It seems like there are a lot of companies trying to do this now. I guess it’s interesting, but somehow I still can’t get into watching anything over 30-60 seconds online.
Emil, I would agree. The small screen is just not ideal for long videos — and I think we can assume that most people will continue to have TVs that are bigger than their monitors. Heck, I’m just on a 12″ Powerbook!
So, yeah, 30 to 60 seconds is a nice length. But I read an AP story today that Boston University now has a class to teach kids how to produce real *15-second* videos for cell phones! Based on the Amp’d Mobile platform — which assumes kids will *pay* for these things! I think short-form videos … really, really short ones … just may have a future in our lives.
The age of “15 seconds of fame” may actually be closer than we think!
Barry Diller’s InterActive Corp seems to be doing very well, as these just-released financial results show.
Hey thanks for the info. I’ll definately check it out. I really don’t like the quality of the stuff up on YouTube, and I’d been considering using the amazonaws. Thanks for the info.
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PING:
TITLE: Clarifying Brightcove’s Position
URL: http://blog.brightcove.com/blog/2006/11/clarifying_brig.html
IP: 10.0.20.4
BLOG NAME: The Latest from Brightcove
DATE: 11/05/2006 09:21:31 AM
There’s been a lot of blogsphere chatter and discussion about what we are up to, including a discussion on the types of content and creators that we’re focused on, the kind of value we’re trying to provide, and how it