Brightcove was once considered to be a formidable challenger for YouTube. However, just about a year ago, it became clear that the company had given up on this dream when it announced that it would no longer accept direct consumer uploads to its service. Since then, Brightcove only featured content from its roughly 40,000 publishing partners on the Brightcove Network, though its main business has been its white-label video platform. Today, Brightcove announced that it will also close the free Brightcove Network and completely focus on its premium services.]]>
Not Enough Revenue
According to a blog post by Adam Berrey, Brightcove's Senior VP of Marketing and Strategy, the advertising financed Brightcove Network only drove about 1% of Brightcove's revenue, so from a purely financial perspective, it must have been an easy decision for Brightcove to shutter the free version of its service.
Given the current economic climate and the cost of running a video service, shutting down the Network and the Brightcove.TV site that showcased those videos probably made good economic sense for the company. While Brightcove has been very successful in attracting big partners for its white-label service, including the New York Times, Showtime, and National Geographic, it was never able to compete with YouTube.
Videos Will Stop Playing
Brightcove will delete every account that has not been upgraded to Brightcove's new, low-cost Brightcove Basic plan by December 17, 2008, and all the videos published by users who do not upgrade their plans will stop playing at that point as well. Also, if you embedded a Brightcove video on your blog or social network page and the publisher doesn't upgrade to the paid account, those videos will stop playing as well.
This seems like a rather drastic measure, so it will be interesting to see how the publishers on the Brightcove Network will react to this.
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