Comments for Brightcove Gives Up on Consumer Video

Brightcove Gives Up on Consumer Video

2007-11-27T16:54:26Z

Brightcove has never really been more than a half-hearted consumer video play, opting instead to function as a content distribution network for a large number of high profile media partners. Today Brightcove informed members of its Brightcove.TV site that it will no longer be accepting direct consumer uploads on December 17, 2007. That signals that the company is apparently giving up completely on any dreams of competing with YouTube (or smaller sites, such as Vimeo) as a direct personal video hub.

Instead, Brightcove.TV will become a hub for the distribution and promotion of its professional and network publishing partners. A quick search through the site suggests that perhaps Brightcove's direct consumer offerings never really gained much traction anyway. I was hard pressed to find any videos not from professional content producers or amateur video bloggers -- both of whom would likely be using either paid publisher accounts or the free, ad-supported network accounts (which will still be available).

Though Brightcove has received a lot of press, especially in the wake of its $59.5 million series C funding round closed last January, it has generally been as a CDN-type service for major content publishers, and not as a consumer facing service. While most Internet surfers have likely run into a Brightcove player or two on the web, it seems unlikely that many users interested in sharing video without embedding it on a blog or web site would choose Brightcove.TV over YouTube or other consumer oriented video sites with far larger audiences.

Today's announcements appears to indicate that Brightcove is finally giving up on the idea that it can compete with YouTube as a consumer video destination and is instead focusing completely on its content delivery and monetization offerings.

Comment from Adrian Keys on 2007-11-27

2007-11-27T18:06:05Z

I think that is a great decision. Let's face it the space has become extremely competitive in a short time and YouTube is so far ahead that it probably would require too much to compete.

The truth is Brightcove from the get go never really covered any ground in presenting themselves as a YouTube alternative.

Comment from Joe Duck on 2007-11-27

2007-11-27T20:22:25Z

Was Brightcove a victim of YouTube or the challenge of monetizing content? Video has been very questionably hyped as the "next big thing". It's not clear to me that YouTube will ever justify it's capitalization costs from ad revenues. No biggie for Google because they are awash in cash from online ads that do work. I think a lot more video victims are coming soon - perhaps all but the subsidized ones.

Comment from Chris Charlwood on 2007-11-27

2007-11-27T22:14:16Z

I can relate to their struggles with making $ from consumer video. I run a screencasting video site at http://www.webinaria.com and find that bandwidth eats up a lot of $, and ad click-throughs are relatively low. We're trying to go after more businesses with our software rather than consumers, where the eCPM rates are so low.

Comment from Ravi on 2007-11-27

2007-11-28T00:15:00Z

I think there's a big reason their consumer video efforts failed -- they were horrible at marketing it.

I know just about all of the competitors in the space, and even I didnt know about Brightcove.TV until I was looking into utilizing Brightcove's professional services on my site.

The service was clearly an afterthough that they didnt advertise properly; it's a shame though, because it was one of the better viewers and had a great company backing it.

FWIW, I'm still looking forward to using their professional services for my sites.

Comment from Bill on 2007-11-27

2007-11-28T02:06:49Z

I agree with Joe when he asks, "Was Brightcove a victim of YouTube or the challenge of monetizing content?" Brightcove's shift was probably because of the latter part of his question. We at www.Muzility.com have been challenged by having a monetized video website in the face of free and that's caused us to shift our focus over time. We know what Brightcove has been up against.

Comment from angus on 2007-11-28

2007-11-28T17:42:45Z

I agree with all of the comments on this thread and also would like to ad the following thoughts. I run a free internet TV service in Hastings UK called Hastings Free TV (http://www.tvhastings.org) We've been running about four years and Brightcove was a really large landmark for us when it came about because, as producers of most of our own content, it gave us a great back-end interface which we could manage our TV offering with - and it also distributed and protected our content at the same time through its syndication offerings. Also, if you chose the ad supported network , then it was free. We have a large video capable server in the States and another in the UK and pretty much unlimited bandwidth and storage on those servers (flash video files are small and efficient anyhow) so we could run our own video content off our own servers without much extra cost if we chose to do so. Despite this I would still stick with Brightcove because I really like the quality of their players and the fact that you can manage all your content from their back end so well, and therefore make collections of content, syndicate players, etc. It's an amazing offering and if Brightcove focus on producers and originators of video as opposed to user generated content, then they are focusing on a side of the market that has the potential to really be creative and profitable. As an end user I couldn't recommend the quality of what Brightcove do to anyone more highly. They are an amazing company, an absolute joy to deal with on a consumer service level, visionary in their approach and they really helped us make our offering and web presence more viable and impressive. Prior to Brightcove we made almost no money from trying to link advertising revenue to video content so we removed it and focused on maintaining a strong visual presence for our site. Since we've done that we've gone from looking at feeble ad revenue cheques each month of between sixty to a hundred dollars to actually earning proper money from commissions to produce content. I remain convinced that small producers like ourselves need services like Brightcove to survive, and that the way forward is not focusing on ad generated revenue but credibility generated revenue. i.e. The credibility of what we do (thanks largely to the Brightcove service has allowed us) to make twenty times the revenue we could have made from advertising simply by us getting commissioned to make films for clients.

It's a no-brainer. Brightcove is great, and in this sad old world where everything is either a cheesy rip-off or trashy (the video quality on you tube or google video is much worse), its great to be able to find and use something that is pure quality throughout. Also Brightcove doesn't apply 100mb restrictions - you can upload programmes of decent length. Stage 6 and Divx are great too, but Brightcove wins on merit of flash video playing automatically on nearly 99% of the world's browsers, so currently unless anyone can show us a better service, we're sticking with it.

Comment from Amy Proctor on 2007-12-12

2007-12-12T23:10:42Z

I was thrilled with Brightcove and am pretty upset over this development. I'm a blogger with a good sized audience/readership and have about 400 videos on Brightcove. They are superior to You Tube in every way. You Tube videos are fuzzy, the template unattractive, but I have to use them now.

Brightcove has been unhelpful in trying to simply answer me about upgrading the current format to a paid account. I have invested almost a year in uploading videos to Brightcove and You Tube only to have to abandon Brightcove, which was my favorite. It was asthetically pleasing