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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American Fork, Utah-based Move signed some impressive customers while flying under the radar: Fox Network, the CW, Televisa, and E! Online. You can check out examples on MySpace and the CW website As of the last month, Move works on Macs as well. So we can say from personal experience, the quality is most excellent. Really — web TV from the networks that’s actually watchable!

Move’s trick, as described to me today by Jim Ericson, VP of marketing, is to deliver video as a standard web object, cached in small bits. This borrows some aspects of peer-to-peer, but is friendlier to ISPs. Move doesn’t use special media servers, and adjusts the video quality based on available bandwidth. The streaming is made possible using a small applet that users must download to the browser.

Benefits to the viewer: no buffering, no stalling, and backwards and forwards navigation within a live stream, high-quality video. Benefits to the content owner: cheaper, detailed reporting, high-quality video.

Ericson said Move sees about 35 minutes average viewing time per user, making advertising and sponsorship revenue models more viable than on sites with shorter engagement. He said Move charges based on streams delivered rather than revenue-share, and supports subscription, purchase, and advertising models.

I asked Ericson whether Move would get involved in supporting user uploads and showing them on site players in addition to showing its customers’ libraries. He said that was something the company is “very interested in doing” but would not comment further, seemingly implying such deals are in the works.

Move was founded by Drew Major, best known for creating Novell’s flagship NetWare software. Most recently Major co-founded video networking startup Arroyo. It formally incorporated last summer during the fund-raising process — which amounted to $11.3 million from Steamboat Ventures and Hummer Winblad, closed in December. The company now has 35 employees.

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If nothing else, the terms of the deal — $350,000 and a half-million shares of Roo stock — shows what the market price is these days for online development teams like MVD’s five-person outfit. According to Roo CEO Rob Petty, MyVideoDaily will remain alive as a sort of testbed for new online video technology (like its current user-ranking feature), which may then be also rolled out to Roo’s customers, a list that currently includes Verizon and several News Corp. entities.

The New York-based MVD, which had been a customer of Roo’s video feeds (which include content from big-name providers like ABC, Fox, AP and Reuters), built a downloadable application they call a video “jukebox” that sits on a PC and provides categories of video data that users could pre-select. Roo’s Petty said MVD’s applications could help Roo increase its business model, which is simply to provide turnkey video-viewing services to big media sites, like newspapers, who may not have that kind of expertise in-house.

“The benefit to us [of buying MVD] is that we can roll those features out to the remainder of our network,” said Petty, whose Roo competes with other hosted-video network plays like Brightcove. (Roo, which trades on the NASDAQ OTC bulletin board, is currently worth $2.70 per share.) While MVD claims to have had 750,000 downloads of its app, MVD CEO Rob Price didn’t provide exact figures as to how many people use the service regularly, or how many videos MVD served up per day.

Roo’s Petty said that new features like ratings, sharing or creating saved video lists may help providers like Roo grow their businesses, and it doesn’t take much to add to the bottom line.

“Take someone like The Sun — if we can get their users to click on one more video a day, that’s potentially a few million more ad-supported [video] views,” Petty said. Could be worth the whole 350K, right there.

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While the dynamic streaming setup and the lack of an additional fee are impressing, “Watch Now” is mostly seeing skepticism. Netflix shares are trading at three times normal volume, but not doing anything terribly exciting. They jumped as high as 6 percent today, but are currently trading up $0.20 at $22.91, not even recovered from an analyst downgrade hit on Friday.

First up, the Hollywood Reporter has the most precise investment breakdown we’ve seen.

Netflix has been developing the service for about two years. It spent $5 million-$10 million last year and will spend up to $40 million this year as it rolls it out during a six-month period.

In addition to confirming that the system is Windows-only, The AP reports,

Netflix expects to introduce the instant viewing system to about 250,000 more subscribers each week through June to ensure its computers can cope with the increased demand.

And Netflix CEO Reed Hastings gives the New York Times his own assessment of the relative significance of the announcement:

“The market is microscopic,” Mr. Hastings said. “DVD is going to be a very big market for a very long time.”

If any Netflix subscribers out there want to do a guest post about their access to “Watch Now,” please drop us a line.

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Exactly what is digital signage, and how might it become a $2 billion market by 2010, as Cisco predicts? In Cisco’s mind, it’s networked servers, client-type boxes and software for creating and disseminating video and graphics in such places as retail stores, hotel lobbies or other places where analog paper posters might be replaced by sexy plasma screens.

There’s no deep thinking or analysis needed here: clearly, a networked display environment could easily offer simplicity and real-time updating, as well as the ability to incorporate video, graphics and other content-rich media.

“The idea is to create once, and display to a variety of endpoints,” says Thomas Wyatt, director and general manager of Cisco’s digital media management business unit. The product roadmap had been expected since Cisco CEO John Chambers gave digital signage a brief mention at the company’s analyst meetings in December; Cisco also acquired a small digital-signage company in December, citing the market’s “enormous potential.”

Cisco’s first offering in the space isn’t for Mom and Pop businesses, unless you’ve got about $150,000 for a 50-display starter kit. Incorporated into such a bundle would be previously announced products like media management and video portal software and a video encoder.

New to the mix is something Cisco calls the Digital Media Player, a small (7.5 x 5 x 1.5 inches) box that would act as the lightweight client (network computer, anyone?) for a nearby display. At $1,490 per player, one might wonder why you wouldn’t just use a cheap PC instead, but Cisco has answers for questions like that along the lines of security, manageability, low power consumption and upgradable firmware.

“Off-the-shelf PCs might not be powerful enough to do all the video and graphics,” Wyatt says. “It turns out the players are a little more cost-effective.” (Off-the-shelf PCs don’t carry the Cisco brand name, hence that explanation!)
Should you care deeply about such matters, Cisco will surely post soon its 24-slide PowerPoint presentation about Digital Signage, with all sorts of typically helpful network diagrams, product roadmaps, analyst projections and customer success stories. There’s even a partnership with NEC thrown in, since like batteries with toys, displays are not included in Cisco’s list price.

We’d giggle some, but who wants to bet against Cisco becoming the networked digital signage king before long? We learned our own lesson scoffing at that silly wireless stuff and that poor-quality Voice over IP thingy, two other markets where Cisco made early entries. Just call this the first step toward Minority Report-style advertising, and pay more attention when Cisco buys a retina-scanning startup.

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The service will be rental-only, with a certain number of hours of streamed content included with subscribers’ monthly fees. For instance, a $17.99 plan will be allotted 18 hours of viewing time. Rentals will not allow for transferring to other devices or burning to a CD, something competitors like CinemaNow already offer.

The launch will reportedly include just 1,000 titles, compared to 70,000 in Netflix’s physical library. The company does have most of the studios onboard: Paramount, Warner, MGM, New Line, and Lionsgate, as well as television programming from networks such as BBC Worldwide.

Netflix will possibly reward the studios based on how many times a film is streamed, says Variety.

The company’s stock doesn’t yet reflect the news, but we’ll check back tomorrow after the markets reopen following the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday today.

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We have some new screenshots below the jump.

At least now we can promise you no more posts on “the Venice Project” before it actually launches!

But…we did just get a new batch of beta invites, so what the heck, we’ll give them to the first five commenters.

 

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