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.
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.
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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I've always preferred Fliqz anyway. More customizable and really easy to use.
Posted by: Rick | November 4, 2008 10:53 AM
Anyone looking for a low cost alternative to the Brightcove offer might like to have a look at VidZapper - www.vidzapper.com.
Posted by: Iolo Jones | November 4, 2008 12:04 PM
Delve Networks (www.delvenetworks.com) is offering a special promotion to those Brightcove customers who have been left out in the cold.
Posted by: Dawn | November 4, 2008 2:03 PM
It's pretty short notice for many publishers out there who bought into Brightcove's deep integration spiel, it's pretty much vendor lock bait & switch again.
If you have a considerable back catalogue, especially with lots of players embedded in lots of blog posts it's a tough month ahead with lots of uploading to new services and tinkering with embeds.
The worst bit about this new, Brightcove are really quiet on their pricing for Brightcove3 and seem geared for endless sales call's to up sell plans and cherry pick. If it was a case of "there's the price, here's how you pay, sorry we couldn't make the pure ad-funded model work for you guys" I bets most small publishers would happily switch if the price was reasonable.
Myself, I may just dig my flash coding skilz out and spend the next week moving everything over to Amazon S3.
Posted by: Yoostin | November 4, 2008 3:31 PM
They did not adopt Silverlight, now they are paying for it!
Posted by: steveballmer | November 4, 2008 5:33 PM
Im so upset with brightcove I have a daily podcast uploaded everyday and I have over 100, Its gona suck to migrate. On another note I called brightcove and they told me if I wanted to upgrade to their basic service it would be 6,000 USD. I was like no thank you.
Posted by: leo | November 4, 2008 7:13 PM
@ leo - $6000?!?! Are they crazy? Or they have investors to answer to? I am taking a good look at this company techcrunch rated highly: www.marcellus.tv... $10 versus $6000? easy call..
Posted by: Joe the plumber | November 5, 2008 9:55 AM
We're a happy Brightcove user and are really bummed at this (and the relatively short notice). I spoke with BC bizdev and they mentioned the $6K pricetag as the lowest cost of entry, but it's for 10 million annual streams (or 25K per day). That's a pretty aggressive level for many small to midsize web publishers. If they had a service at $100/mo, I'd probably sign up because I like their asset management and the level of control I have over encoding, players, etc. Alas, gotta find something else.
Posted by: Garbanzo | November 6, 2008 4:52 PM
I too am very upset to this move at such short notice. Why cut off entirely? I think 6 grand is way too much, unless we get someone to sponsor it for us.
I looked at Ooyala, but the quality is iffy at best, and their navigation is almost impossible to understand next to Brightcove (despite me using BC for 2 years).
I now have to look at alternatives to distributing my videos....shame Brightcove...SHAME!
Posted by: Tyler | November 11, 2008 6:17 PM
I was also a free customer & am having a hellish time researching video players that have similar functions, site that will allow me to track video views, etc. This is taking DAYS to research. I am really angry that Brightcove only gave us 5 weeks notice.
And when I find an answer, I'll have over 550 videos to migrate. Argh!
Naomi
Posted by: Naomi | November 12, 2008 9:37 AM