This week video technology firm Brightcove, which already supplies players for the website of Channel 4 and Telegraph.co.uk, launched a new service aimed squarely at individuals and smaller video news organisations.
Brightcove Express will cost $99 a month for 50 videos a month, 40 GB and one user having access to the technology behind the player.
To coincide with this launch the firm has also released an update version of its player, Brightcove 4.
Journalism.co.uk spoke with Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire prior to the release, who said the new offering and improved player showed a change in people’s attitude to video online.
““The first few years of online video discussion has been around news video and user-generated content. Video is becoming a core content type. For many people doing it really well and really quickly is very hard. There are already a lot of concepts that you have to figure out (…) [Using] video-sharing sites is only part of a strategy [for organisations],” he said.
Brightcove’s players, which are used across 2,500 different web properties, generate more than 135 million unique users a month. It was feedback from users that sparked the changes to the existing video player technology, says Allaire.
Firstly there’s the ‘cloud encoding’ feature: this allows the video publisher to create up to seven different versions for different users, devices and network connections.
The players can also now detect bandwidth and internet connection speed and alter the bitrate, speed and quality of video of the video.
But perhaps more significantly for news publishers and journalists the new version of the Brightcove player comes with a software development kit for the iPhone, allowing the publisher to develop video for mobile and smartphone devices.
These players will enable people to quickly share video through social sites from their mobiles, says Allaire – and social networking integration is the next big thing for the technology. Using Facebook’s connect technology, publishers can now enable live chats around videos being played. Users comments will appear in their Facebook profiles and videos can also be directly embedded into their news feeds.
The firm already had a deal with five social networking sites to give its publishing clients the opportunity to syndicate their video through Brightcove players on the sites, but these new sharing and commenting features let the users in.
By creating a cheaper entry point and hooking up the player with sites such as Facebook, Allaire says Brightcove is providing a wider distribution for video content, news or otherwise.
And the firm itself is on target to grow revenue by 50 per cent in 2009 and increase its staff in 2010, according to Allaire.