Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Brightcove, which has been in idea stages for the past two years (I mentioned it back in May last year as a fascinating startup), launched as a video marketplace for content distributors today.
The idea behind Brightcove, like Metacafe and Revver’s recent offerings, is in the end for content distributors to get paid. Websites and existing companies can partner with Brightcove and launch a ‘channel’ — the ideas behind one being limitless. A channel can broadcast videos for free and be monetized by ads provided by Brightcove, in which case they get to keep a 50% revenue share, or sell videos, where they keep 70%.
In contrast to YouTube, which is a free and open-for-all video sharing site, Brightcove simply provides the technology and seeks to be a distribution method for specific video sharing sites and ideas. While they host the content, they don’t own it (or any part of it), and all they really plan to be is the middleman through providing advertising and bandwidth.
When it comes to what we’ve seen in the past, Brightcove’s offering is seemingly interesting and to an extent a bit complicated — there’s no way an average user will be able to launch a channel and sell videos — it really is aimed at people with an idea behind the economics who know how to do things.
I think it will be interesting to see which way this goes, but I’m not nearly as excited about it as I was for Metacafe’s Producer Rewards program which launched yesterday. It’s much simpler, and given one fact about it (“The owner of the most popular video on YouTube could have walked away with $160,000 for his video using the service…”) it has the potential to attract many.
[tags]BrightCove, Online Video, Advertising[/tags]
