Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire

Brightcove, ever since it released the latest version of its white-label video management platform last month, has been busy signing up new customers and adding features to its product set. And one of those features — a software development kit (SDK) that will enable customers to build native apps for Apple’s iPhone — was released last week.

In an interview with NewTeeVee in New York last Thursday, Allaire spoke on a wide range of topics, including his expectations for TV Everywhere, growing industry support for HTTP streaming, and what he predicts will be huge growth of video viewing on mobile devices.

Such a prediction is the motivation behind the iPhone SDK, which was announced in November and rolled out to customers last week. “The year-over-year growth for video on smartphones is going to be significant in 2010,” Allaire said, adding that it will be further boosted by an increase in the monetization of mobile video. As a result, Brightcove is looking to increase its support for native apps on additional smartphone platforms, such as Google’s Adroid and RIM’s Blackberry. Brightcove already allows delivery to mobile web through its unified delivery technology, although Allaire admits that mobile web is still a very small portion of its overall business.

With the launch of Brightcove 4, the company introduced a new self-service, pay-as-you-go pricing model, called Brightcove Express, that enables customers to use its platform for as little as $99 a month with no annual commitment. Allaire said the entry into the lower end of the market is already starting to pay off, as Brightcove has seen more signups since launch than in any other three-week period. It is also seeing higher levels of engagement from customers using new features of Brightcove 4, indicating that the platform is becoming more “sticky” to its existing customer base.

In addition to talking about Brightcove’s business in particular, Allaire had some thoughts about some more general industry trends:

• TV Everywhere — While everyone is abuzz about services like Comcast’s On Demand Online, Allaire doesn’t think that TV Everywhere will be all it’s cracked up to be in 2010. Instead, he sees 2010 as a year in which service providers and content companies will be testing out dozens of different proofs of concept, with some set of standards becoming solidified by 2011.
• HTTP streaming — Allaire expects that the movement towards HTTP streaming will continue, particularly as Akamai and Adobe have both announced support for Flash streaming using HTTP rather than Flash’s proprietary streaming protocol, RTMP. One reason is that HTTP is easier and less costly for CDNs to scale in order to meet growing demand for streaming video.
• Silverlight — While impressed with the technology that Microsoft’s Silverlight team released at launch, Allaire thinks that uptake of the Silverlight platform has been disappointing. Unlike some others, Allaire doesn’t think the problem rests in the Silverlight plugin’s install base — which he believes to be about 50 percent of consumer PCs — but rather in the lack of support from the development community. “It’s a labor market problem,” Allaire said. “You’ve got millions of Flash developers with an entrenched skill set” that don’t want to start over and learn another rich Internet application framework.

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The startup isn’t the only company offering this type of technology, of course; both Adobe and Microsoft have their own adaptive bitrate solutions. So what’s the advantage of using SPOTi, as opposed to the established players? For one thing, the startup says its adaptive bitrate technology is capable of working with the largest number of users.

On the Microsoft side, that’s because its Silverlight plugin still lacks wide-scale adoption. And while Adobe has had more success with the pervasiveness of its player plugin, the company is still rolling out updates for the latest version of its player software — Flash 10 — which supports adaptive bitrate streaming with Flash Media Server 3.5. SPOTi, on the other hand, works with Flash version 8 and up, meaning its technology can reach a much wider base.

SPOTi has two implementations of its product: a software-as-service solution for companies that don’t have their own distribution platform, and a hosted solution for companies that do have their own infrastructure for video asset management.

With its hosted solution, SPOTi targets small- and medium-sized businesses, and acts like any other white-label video management solution, offering transcoding and delivery to multiple destinations and devices, storage, monetization, and reporting and analytics tools. In the hosted model, SPOTi charges a per-GB fee for delivery of video only.

The company also offers on-site deployment of its software, for which the customer pays a license fee based on the number of concurrent streams it delivers. The on-site product is being pitched at major ISPs, enterprises and media companies that wish to use their existing infrastructure for delivery.

So far, SPOTi hasn’t named any customers, but says it’s mainly working with advertisers in the auto and film industries. (You can see one example of its video quality in action here.)

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While it might seem that Bebo is partnering with old media, the fact of the matter is that people like TV. So Bebo is giving them old TV — via a new distribution channel. Launch partners include CBS, MTV Networks, ESPN, the BBC, Channel Four, ITN, Yahoo! and BSkyB, as well as emerging media companies like Music Nation, Next New Networks, Crackle, Ustream, Last.fm and JibJab.

Read the full story on GigaOM.

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BitGravity, of Burlingame, Calif., is the latest to join the party and is focusing mostly on video. Since video files tend to be larger and need more hand-holding, it makes sense for BitGravity to take a focused approach. Move Networks is taking a similar tact, and has signed up some big names. Of course, Akamai has its own plans for HD video.

Regardless of the focus, the CDN business has become highly competitive and is getting to a point of commoditization, resulting in fierce price wars. The players in this space now include Akamai, Level 3 (LVLT), Limelight Networks (LLNW), Savvis, EdgeCast, and BitGravity.

I think the world of CDN is very quickly going to move into value-added services, including the layering of P2P on top of CDNs. The ongoing commoditization in the near term might impact Akamai (as reflected in its stock price), but ultimately it has enough resources to swat away the competition.

Meanwhile, companies like BitGravity can defy gravity.

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On Monday, the Los Angeles-based company plans to introduce a flexible bandwidth pricing model to the CDN business. Most CDN companies charge fixed bandwidth prices along with other services. These are annual contracts, and can cost many hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, and large media sites spend many, many millions, depending on the volume.

Segil says most CDNs today lump the cost of bandwidth with the cost of services. As a result, even though bandwidth prices decline at a steady rate, the CDN operators don’t pass the savings to the customers, and thus make higher profits.

In EdgeCast’s pricing model, the cost for bandwidth remains flexible, decreasing for customers as the bandwidth use increases. Customers save immediately when bandwidth costs drop. “We give the bandwidth to customers at cost and plan to make the profit on the services, such as reporting tools,” Segil says. “More important, we improve their performance, give them more features, offer dedicated edge space, and more – all while reducing their costs as much as 50 percent.”

Customers like IMAX Corp., one of a dozen businesses in entertainment and media, are not complaining and have signed up for EdgeCast to deliver streaming and downloadable video to their websites. Segil says he and partners pulled together enough private capital to launch the network globally, rather than regionally, “to compete better against Akamai and Limelight.”

The company has built out a network based on Cisco routers and Dell servers, and its caching sites are located in San Jose; Los Angeles; Ashburn, Va.; Chicago; Dallas; Atlanta; Seattle; London; Frankfurt; Hong Kong; Tokyo; and Sydney, near primary Internet exchange points that support the EdgeCast network.

The service leverages bandwidth from Level 3, Telia Senora, and others. Segil says positioning the servers near primary Internet exchange points eliminates the need to have thousands of small servers on the edge of the Internet.

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Brightcove, which has raised huge amounts of money is slowly becoming an infrastructure provider of choice for large content providers, mostly because the company has developed tools that integrate with their existing production tools.

It also raises the question: should Jeremy Allaire and his crew even bother going after the consumer/independent video creator market? Why not focus entirely on the large media companies?

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Vidmetrix does a great job of visualizing the traffic your videos are getting over time. The tool is best for videomakers who have content scattered across a variety of sites. Vidmetrix, like Vidmeter, watches fifty-one different video sites, recently adding big sites from the European (Kewego.com) and Asian (YouKu.com) markets. However, you can track any videos (not just your own) so it’s also useful to see how popular videos “go viral.”

I tested this by linking up my GreenTeaGirlie “research” videos. I could see the videos getting a few new videos each day. Features I find useful include a convenient bookmarklet that allows you to add videos from wherever you’re browsing to your tracking profile. Additionally, Vidmetrix makes it easy to load all of your old videos into your tracking profile with a nice batch upload function. And you can see not just links and views but also comments from the various sites.

Holt Labs has high aspirations for its nifty little piece of software. Not only aiming at the desk-chair video pundits, Vidmetrix offers a more powerful, and less free, “premium service” for marketers, giving advertising execs a more nuanced and customizable “buzz report” on the “virality” of their campaigns.

However, Vidmetrix is the not only management software in this emerging space. NewTeeVee previously tested TubeMogul, which tracks whole bodies of publishers’ work. TubeMogul has the added feature of allowing you to download your data as an Excel file and to graph publishers’ popularity as well as individual videos. However, TubeMogul has some serious limitations in that it only tracks across the seven most popular video sites and limits you to tracking six different publishers.

Many of these features I had hoped would come to YouTube itself when it was bought by Google, especially after Google’s recent revamping of its Analytics package. Alas, YouTube’s own interface for managing subscriptions, uploads, links, comments, and view histories is still as heinous as it ever was. Hopefully as more third-party apps move in, Google will move to make some upgrades or some purchases.

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By putting down solid roots in Madison Ave. and Tinseltown, the Portland, Ore.-based Ensequence is showing (or betting) that it is ready to start doing bigger and better deals for its On-Q software, which enables interactivity (a.k.a. user feedback or control) in traditional cable or satellite offerings, or on web platforms like baseball’s MLB.TV site. In another announcement Ensequence and MLB said that this year their partnership will let MLB.TV customers watch up to six games simultaneously, just part of a whole bunch of new features that should keep baseball junkies from productive use of their computer until October.

Aslam Khader, vice president of marketing and strategy for Ensequence, said the funding and the MLB.TV news are just part of the company’s overall plans to offer the best interactive-video enabling platform it can, regardless of transport platform.

“Our focus is, from a software perspective, to offer the most robust interactivity tools to the creative community,” said Khader in a phone interview Tuesday. Ensequence, now 7 years old, has a proven track record in designing interactive platforms for cable and satellite providers, mainly in the U.K. with major brands like the BBC and MTV UK.

Its TV experience, Khader said, serves Ensequence well in a move to the Internet, since some things — like six simultaneous live broadcast screens — just can’t be done with simple Web pages or Flash. Yet the Internet offers perhaps more attractive options to an interactivity-tools player, since broadband connections can support better feedback than the often limited upstream capabilities of cable and satellite TV.

“We’re going to marry our toolset and experience to the breadth of interactivity [on the web],” Khader said. With the new financing — from a single investment house that Khader said prefers to remain unnamed — Ensequence can now staff up sales offices in the major media markets, and perhaps spend less time on planes from Portland to do all the pitching. More time for online baseball, anyway!

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Whether or not most enterprises have the online distribution demands of the NBA — one of the early customers of the technology — is probably a remains-to-be-seen question. But there is little doubt that as production and dissemination costs continue to plummet for digital content assets, more will be created — so invariably enterprise IT managers will want to find some way to wrap their hands around what gets distributed, and where it happens. The Akamai Stream OS is the first branded Akamai product to come out of Akamai’s acquisition of streaming-video expert house Nine Systems late last year.

The Stream OS is a hosted application, so any enterprises who want to use it will also have to become customers of Akamai’s Content Distribution Network, since the two are tightly linked. Akamai product marketing manager Suzanne Johnson would not divulge any pricing for the Stream OS application, but said it is clearly targeted at the media and entertainment industries, as well as larger enterprises who might have a lot of audio and video content (podcasts, training films, etc.) that could benefit from an organized distribution scheme.

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Democracy is an open source, multi-platform podcast client with integrated video player, program guide and Bittorrent support. Wired magazine called the client “the future of net video” back in May 2006. The present of net video still seems to be closely tied to YouTube and iTunes though, leaving little attention for an outsider like Democracy. So how does one compete with the likes of YouTube?

With Flash support, for one thing. The new version of Democracy supports the download and playback of Flash videos right off of YouTube. Users can search the site from within their client. Even subscribing to a channel is possible, effectively turning YouTube into a giant repository of Flash-based video podcasts, with new episodes getting downloaded onto your hard disk as they become available.

Reville doesn’t see YouTube as a main competitor to Democracy though: “We’re really offering a much different type of experience that is better suited to longer-format video and high quality videos.” Think episodic video podcasts – a space that has so far been dominated by iTunes. “I don’t think Apple has done a great job with video,” says Reville. (However, that hasn’t stopped people from downloading lots of it from iTunes already.)

So far this hasn’t really translated into market share, but interest seems to be growing. Reville says Democracy has seen almost 1 million downloads over the last 12 months, with numbers peaking this week at 20,000 daily downloads with the release of version 0.95.

He sees content discovery as one of the main priorities for the build up to version 1.0, which is scheduled to come out in about three months. The newly released version 0.95 already features improved support for third-party aggregation platforms. Users can submit videos to Del.icio.us, Digg and Reddit from within the client.

The team is also working on a major revamp of the internal Democracy program guide, with beta testing for the new guide beginning this week. Says Reville: “We need to do a better job helping people find the best channels.”

All of this is part of a bigger plan to literally democratize television, one video podcast at a time. Reville and his coworkers set up a nonprofit structured after the model of the Mozilla foundation to be free from the pressure a startup in this space has to deal with and focus on their long-term strategy. Time will tell if their plan is gonna work out. “It’s definitely a challenge to get people to download a new type of application,” admits Reville. “We’ll see how we do in the mainstream audience once we hit 1.0.”

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