video thrives more if it’s much more integrated into a website. And there have been some great techniques developed about how to present, in the context of a video, other relevant content that can entice the user to go and do the next thing. YouTube is the master of this.
So you’ve got the video player experience, and then you’ve got all of this usage data about the video. We’ve surfaced that data much more clearly in Brightcove 3, so that Web developers can dynamically integrate information about video into their sites in real-time fashion. You might have a view showing what content is most related, or most recent, or most popular. It’s all about driving more page views and increasing time spent on your site.
The third big piece that’s new is the high-quality media. The quality and length of the video content available on the Web is increasing. For that, we’ve created a new capability called Brightcove Dynamic Delivery. The goal is to make it much easier for content publishers to offer video at the highest quality possible, up to HD quality, and for long-form videos. Say you shoot a video with an HD camera. You can drop it into our system and we’ll generate many different versions, from the low-end mobile version to the HD version that would work on a cable modem. We then optimize the video stream on the fly based on the quality of the network connection.
We’ve also updated our ad products to introduce a new set of ad formats that are designed to work with long-form content. So you can have breaks in videos with interactive Flash experiences, for example.
Another big new thing with Brightcove 3 is the new way we’re packaging the service for the marketplace. We’re pricing it in three tiers—“basic” for small businesses and small media outfits, with a core set of capabilities that are quite powerful. “Pro” is aimed at medium to large media companies and adds a lot of capabilities that are important to them. “Enterprise” is really for large corporations and media conglomerates that are going to use this across lots of divisions and properties.
The really exciting thing here is that with Brightcove 3 Basic, we are going to introduce a price point that is affordable to a mass market of professional websites. We’re talking about four figures per year.
X: Some websites such as Fox’s Beliefnet have been using Brightcove 3 for a while — so what’s the actual news this month?
JA: We’ve had Brightcove 3 in a closed beta, or pieces of it, since last winter. On October 14 we will launch it commercially. Showtime rolled out a complete implementation of their video site using the beta, so people knew that Brightcove 3 was coming, and we’ve talked a little bit about the things people are doing. But the details around it have not been public until now. Also, several big brands are launching video features based on Brightcove 3, including Comcast, Fearnet, Rainbow Media, and AMC.
X: What about people using earlier versions of your platform? Will they have to switch over?
JA: Anything people are operating with the existing Brightcove service will continue to operate. They can migrate over to the new framework at their own pace. All new customers starting this quarter will just have access to Brightcove 3.
