Tuesday, October 28, 2008

AOL picks Brightcove for all its online video

By Mass High Tech Staff

Brightcove Inc. has made its second major new-client announcement in a week. The Cambridge-based company’s Brightcove 3 product will support online video for AOL, according to the company.

“We’re actually replacing their existing in-house video publishing and distribution technology,” said Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire in an e-mail.

Last Friday, the New York Times Co. launched a redesigned video page based on the Brightcove 3 platform. As an Internet video portal, AOL, a majority-owned subsidiary of Time Warner Inc. (NYSE: TWX), is among the largest video publishers on the web. Brightcove 3 is scalable to meet the operational and infrastructure demands of any size online audience, Allaire said.

Both AOL and the New York Times Co. (NYSE: NYT) are minority stakeholders in Brightcove.

A key value proposition for AOL was Brightcove 3’s ability to facilitate user searches for videos throughout AOL’s network of portals, which include AOL Video, AOL Music, Moviefone, Asylum, Lemondrop and Engadget, according to AOL executive vice president Kevin Conroy.

Allaire said that as online use of video expands, he expects Brightcove to contribute a major part of the Internet’s infrastructure, in much the same way his former company Allaire Corp. did in the 1990s with its Cold Fusion technology.

“About three years ago when we launched the first beta of our online video platform, there were few media companies using online video in a serious way and our industry category didn’t even exist,” he said. Now, Brightcove’s platform serves 135 million unique users per month, he said.

“Now, you’re seeing online video expand its horizons well beyond the media industry and into nearly every corner of the professional web, as corporations, government agencies, non-profits and educational institutions look to use video as a cornerstone of how they communicate, market and inform on the web,” Allaire said. “Video has gone from a consumer-driven entertainment experience on the web to being a basic feature of any website.”