Even in the recession, online video is a booming market. Its advertisement revenues are promising, everybody loves to watch it, and it is easier to produce than ever. No wonder that Jeremy Allaire, the CEO of the company that provides video for media publishers including The New York Times, Channel 4 and the Guardian, is reaching out to new customers introducing a starter package called Brightcove Express.
"In the past few years, we have seen video becoming so important that it is not just media companies caring about it any more,", says Allaire. "Everybody can produce professional looking video content now. The desktop publishing revolution has reached video. The computer, the software and the digital camera is like a perfect storm coming together."
In search of a share of these new customers, the company now offers Brightcove Express. Its smallest package comes as a teaser with low barriers starting at $99 a month with no annual contract. That includes a library of 50 videos at any one time with a 40GB a month bandwidth limit. If the new customer bites, he may move up the price ladder to $199 or $499: feature elasticity equals price elasticity.
Allaire decided to focus on this new market, after receiving requests for support from more and more govermental institutions and universities. Brightcove, which he founded 2004, is already quite successful – it has grown with the emerging technology of online video on a 50% year-to-year basis. But up till now, he has targeted mainly large and medium-sized media companies, a market where his company can be considered dominant. Here in the UK he started the operations in 2006, with BSkyB as his first customer.
The online video service company has also announced Brightcove 4, a new release of its online video platform which focuses on its three-screen strategies for PC, TV and mobile and gives professional publishers the option of generating additional value from online video through new distribution and better monetisation opportunities with advertising. As video becomes more and more important for users, the new version of Brightcove is also designed to enable the flow of video through social media platforms like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter and it comes with a development kit for the iPhone.
