Brightcove Shuts the Door on Free Access
Brightcove will fully shut down its free service and force all its users to upgrade to its new Brightcove 3 platform by Dec. 17, the Cambridge, Mass.-based company said in an email to users tonight. Users who do not upgrade will see their content deleted.
Brightcove, which has a record of changing its strategy, had previously shut its paid video offering, closed its consumer site, and dropped internal ad sales.
Here’s the key portion of the email. What’s frustrating is Brightcove does not publicly disclose what even the very basic version of its service costs. But there’s an FAQ with other information.
Regretfully, we’ve decided to discontinue the Brightcove Network (the free version of our service). The discontinuation of the free Brightcove Network accounts will not affect Brightcove platform accounts that customers have paid to use.
On December 17, 2008, we will be shutting down Brightcove Network accounts that have not been upgraded to paid Brightcove platform accounts. At the same time, we will be shutting down the Brightcove.TV website (which is separate from the corporate Brightcove website).
Until December 17, 2008, your Brightcove Network account will remain fully functional; the players that you have published will continue to operate; and you can keep using the Brightcove Console as you have been using it to date. At the same time, we are giving you a free trial of Brightcove 3.
Brightcove has raised some $90 million in funding from investors including Accel Partners, General Catalyst Partners, AOL, Allen & Company, Maverick Capital, Brookside Capital, AllianceBernstein, The New York Times Company, Transcosmos, Dentsu, J-Stream, and Cyber Communications.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
Looks like their strategy is move to the top tier customer base. That’s where the money is ….
When they first began, Brightcove allowed people to present video like the pros. Now, there’s no lack of tools to do so. In fact, they took a long time to catch up in ergonomics and ease of use.
There’s always Fliqz. It’s plug-and-play and completely customizable. And there’s a range of pricing for businesses of all sizes, including the free basic player.
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.
Ooyala (www.ooyala.com) is a great alternative to Brightcove. They’ve got a beautiful platform — very easy to use — with all the bells and whistles of Brightcove, and the service doesn’t cost an arm and a leg. Why hasn’t anybody mentioned this yet?
What is Ooyala’s differentiation vs. Brightcove?
Leo,
I’m interested in hearing more about your situation. I work on Miro, the open source internet TV platform. As a mission based non-profit, we’re very interested in how decisions like this affect smaller and more independent producers. Feel free to hit me at: dean (a] pculture.org
Leo–is that right? $6,000? I assume per year?
On another note–do others here recommend Fliqz?
John,
We’d be happy to discuss our services and pricing with you. You’ll find that we are more than capable of replacing your Brightcove solution at a fraction of the cost:
http://www.fliqz.com/aspx/packages.aspx
Kris (Fliqz employee)
888-323-5479
The basic package is $6k/yr with only 1T of data transfer PER YEAR – insane. The pro package starts at $2k/mo.