Thursday, October 06, 2005

Is Brightcove a video version of Flickr?

"As with his earlier ventures, Jeremy Allaire intends to shake up an industry - this time, the world of television - by allowing all types of video producers, from media giants to anyone who has a camcorder, put their work on the Internet and make money if anyone watches it.

Set in an office building at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Brightcove will offer three interrelated online services. It has tools that let television producers load their video onto its servers, arrange them into programs and display them to Internet users. It will help producers charge fees for their video, if they choose, or sell advertising on their behalf to insert into the programs. And it will broker deals between video creators and Web sites that want to display the video, arranging for the profits from such arrangements to be split any number of ways.

Allaire, [the original developer of Cold Fusion, a product eventually purchased by Macromedia], became Macromedia's chief technical officer and helped oversee the development of Flash, which originally was to add animation to Web sites. His work with Flash video persuaded him to start a company devoted to Net video. So Brightcove's business model does not charge video producers anything to upload their video or to create special Web pages. Instead, he hopes to make money mainly by taking a cut of the advertising revenue and fees the videos generate. (If a producer wants to distribute video with neither ads nor fees, Brightcove will charge them in proportion to how much video users watch.)"

This service sounds similar to the still image sharing service Flickr, recently purchased by Yahoo. If Allaire adds similar features to the service, such as producing clips of various sizes automatically, keyword tagging, grouping, and automatic copyright management through Creative Commons, it could have excellent potential as a source of subject searchable learning objects.

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