Conde Nast and Brightcove have announced a partnership which will bring the Brightcove video player and technology to several of the Conde Nast websites. The company says the first websites to launch with Brightcove are Wired.com, Portfolio.com, Glamour.com, Parade.com, and Self.com. In the next few months, Conde Nast plans to launch the Brightcove player on 16 more websites.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Last month AOL went with Brightcove for their online video. Here’s an example of the Brightcove integration on Portfolio:

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Last week the NY Video 2.0 meetup was held. Unfortunately I was unable to make it but Andy Robson from 3rdRail Inc captured all of the presentations and the video is below. The presenting companies included: Animoto, Brightcove, Innovid, Gigya and Ooyala.

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Google, Yahoo, MSN and FriendFeed have special logos (who else?). Microsoft needs a little more inspiration in my opinion:

And Twitter went one step further, allowing users to add special Halloween themed Tweets using special character combinations. Just try >osee what happens.
Source:TechCrunch
Brightcove’s Syndication Marketplace may need some rethinking.

This lovely lady is doing a full-nude striptease (we’ve altered the image), along with an Office Depot advertisement promising “Free Delivery.” Which on second thought may be a brilliant idea.

If you’d like to see the evidence for yourself, the not-safe-for-work video is here, or just do a search for “new test” in the marketplace.

Source:TechCrunch

On the heels of announcing an expanded relationship with the New York Times website last week, Brightcove is adding all of AOL to its video-distribution client list. Like the New York Times, AOL is an investor in Brightcove.

But the deal is a coup for Brightcove 3, the latest version of its online video platform. Brightcove 3 will power all the video on AOL, which is one of the top ten destinations on the Web for video.

The New York Times is hurting financially these days, and its online business doesn’t seem to be helping much, but at least it keeps pushing forward. One area where the NYTimes.com has put a lot of effort is in video, and it has just redesigned its video page around the new Brightcove 3 player. Previously, the NYTimes was using the FeedRoom as its main video platform. (This swap doesn’t come out of the blue. The New York Times is an investor in Brightcove).

Today marks the announcement and release of Brightcove’s Platform 3, the latest release of their online video distribution service. They’ve rebuilt the service completely and comes with the promise to “empower website producers to be successful in the era of pervasive video.”

They do look like they’ve got a bunch of interesting and usful new features. We’ll focus on that to start.

One of the most problematic parts of the Brightcove player in the past has been the slowness to load, something I’ve been particularly sensitive to personally since I don’t have the absolute fastest broadband connection in the world.  Those like me will notice their new “dynamic delivery” updates, that automatically adjust the bit rate of the video streams so that the viewer will get the highest quality video stream their connection will allow.

For producers who use the system, they’ll notice a number of new updates that will hopefully work towards streamlining the production and distribution phases. As I’ve talked about before, the Brightcove system has always been one of the more advanced online publishing systems, with some of the most detailed media management tools.

The only problem that is systemic to any online publishing system like this is that the media management can sometimes get labor intensive and tedious when it comes to classifying and tagging every icon and clip in the system. Platform 3 includes new media management and publishing tools that hope to aide in this.

Additionally, they’ve made more extensible their media API, so that the player and content can be more seamlessly integrated with the producers text content and rest of the website.

These tools have appealed to a wide variety of producers, mostly those in the mainstream sector who don’t have the in-house technical teams to put together a custom solution or utilize some of the more common pro-sumer platforms out there, many of which have just as much customization options that Brightcove currently has even in this new release, and are quickly catching up on the production side as well.

When Brightcove first announced that they were coming out with their new platform, I wondered whether or not it would live up to the hype. Brightcove has lost a little bit of the magic for me over the years.  They’ve been de-emphasizing a lot of their tertiary initial promises and slowly focusing more on tailoring the player for long form content. They’ve cut back on sales efforts almost entirely at this point, and have long since closed down their user generated content portal.

In their interest to tailor their service for mainstream outfits that seek to find a distribution method outside the established portals like Hulu, YouTube, iTunes and Joost, Brightcove has completely ignored a large component to online video distribution - media RSS. Granted, due to licensing and DRM concerns of current clients like Showtime, Time, Lifetime, and video on demand service FearNet, this isn’t probably a feature in high demand.

For veteran Internet content producers, though, podcast feeds are key to monetization and brand management. Distribution is key, and without the ability to lead folks into a central place to lock in viewers, all the viewers their branding and online marketing accrues will be transient at best. 

In the end, Brightcove ends up being a great solution for mainstream outfits looking to have the look and feel of systems like Hulu while maintaining their own branding on the player. Those looking for a more robust solution that provides similar player customization might be interested in offerings from CastFire and Episodic.

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I had a phone call late last week with a semantic startup called Siri that was spun out of SRI International (the birthplace of the computer mouse and the LCD screen, among many other important technologies). Most startups are willing to talk about their products “off the record” but this one wouldn’t divulge much beyond the fact that they’ve raised $8.5 million in Series A funding from Menlo Ventures and Morganthaler.

What we do know is that the company was incorporated in December 2007 with the goal of commercializing aspects of the CALO cognitive learning system, which receives heavy funding ($200 million plus) from the PAL arm of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a supporter of research in a broad range of technologies that could potentially benefit the Department of Defense. Source:TechCrunch

A couple days ago, we posted some leaked screenshots of Brightcove 3, the completely gutted and rebuilt Web video platform from Brightcove that is launching on Tuesday. I was able to catch up with Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire, who gave me an update on the company and took me through all the changes in the service.

Brightcove is a Web video publishing platform that has raised $91 million and boasts hundreds of major media brands as its customers, including Dow Jones, Showtime, Time magazine, and the New York Times. TV networks, magazines, newspapers, and music companies all use Brightcove to distribute and manage video on their sites and across the Web. Increasingly, so do big corporations like Sun Microsystems, universities like NYU, and political organizations like the Obama campaign.

Allaire says that, collectively, his customers are distributing Web video at the rate of “several hundred million streams per month,” which would make Brightcove one of the top ten video networks. It would still be well below No. 1 YouTube, which is streaming five billion videos a month, but perhaps within spitting distance of No. 2 Fox Interactive/MySpace (446 million streams) or No. 3 Microsoft (286 million streams).

Brightcove, the Web video distribution platform used by media companies including Dow Jones, Warner Music, and the New York Times, is getting a massive makeover. Most people won’t see it, but its customers will. A new version of the Web-based software that they use to upload, manage, and distribute their videos is rolling out soon. It will be called Brightcove 3.

We received the leaked screenshots below, and paired them with the corresponding current sections of the Web software. As far as we know, they’ve never been seen before. Judging by the screenshots, Brightcove 3 is much more visual, intuitive, and offers Web video publishers a ton more options than before. Click on each screenshot for a larger image.