Jeremy Allaire

April 2008

Brightcove is positioning itself as the go-to guide for media companies navigating the complexities of making content available online. The Internet TV platform was founded in 2004 by Jeremy Allaire, who played a key role in the development of Flash as a video platform during his tenure as the chief technology officer at Macromedia. Having signed up a string of media heavyweights in the U.S. as clients, among them CBS Corporation, Discovery Communications and A&E Television Networks, Brightcove has set its sights on the international market. Allaire, the CEO of Brightcove, who will be delivering one of the keynote talks at MIPTV, tells World Screen about the plans ahead.

WS: What led you to set up Brightcove?

ALLAIRE: The big picture background is that for the last 15 years, my own trajectory has been very focused on how to enable the use of the Internet as an open media and communications platform. With the explosion of broadband on a global basis and online advertising becoming a really significant and viable industry, the timing felt right to build a new kind of distribution platform for television. What we built is this system that put together all the different pieces of running an online-video business, from the programming and managing of media content, to the advertising technology needed to monetize video, to the end-user experience, to actual distribution—through your own sites, through social networks and across the web.

WS: How are you working with advertisers?

ALLAIRE: There are two types of publishers that we work with. On the one hand you have media companies that produce content and have brands and who are building online-video businesses around that content and those brands: television networks, newspapers, magazines, music companies, pure-play online companies. We have a platform they use to operate their online-video business and they have advertising sales as a core part of what they do. What we provide them as part of our platform is the advertising technology. The advertisers are creating rich-media ads and video ads and they’re pushing those into Brightcove through our publishers.

We’re finding that major brand marketers, in addition to buying advertising, are creating a lot of their own original content or vehicles for consumers to create user-generated marketing content. We have an increasing number of brand marketers who are launching their own content, and they’re putting that out onto their own sites and they’re syndicating it out to other sites.

The third way we’ll work with the advertising community is through ad networks. There are a lot of publishers that haven’t yet built up the ability to sell online-video advertising. Or there are established publishers that haven’t sold all of their advertising inventory. In those cases, Brightcove works with a wide variety of ad networks, and they aggregate inventory from lots of publishers and then sell that to advertisers.

WS: What are some of the major trends in the online-video market today?

ALLAIRE: One key trend is the fragmentation of television programming and who can be a programmer. We’re seeing an evolution in the kind of TV product that people are making available online. The last two years were about clips, short-form content that people could snack on through the web. Media companies are now making the “full meal” available instead of a snack. We’re working on products that support that, to allow people to more easily offer mid-form and long-form programming in a very high-quality way, up to HD quality, on the web.

We’re seeing an evolution in the kinds of [advertising] formats that people are embracing. For the last couple of years, it’s been short preroll commercials; you’re now starting to see more and more publishers introduce different forms of sponsorship into that video: ads that overlay the video, ads that take over the environment with an interactive marketing experience.

WS: What are your plans for international expansion?

ALLAIRE: A little over a year ago, we secured a $60-million round of financing and a key part of that was the worldwide expansion we wanted to undertake. The first priority for us was to launch our platform in Europe. Starting last spring, we built up our U.K. headquarters and focused on the identical model and the identical types of companies we had in the U.S. We’ve made huge amounts of progress there in less than a year. We have Sky, ITV and Channel 4, Guardian News & Media, Telegraph Media Group, Emap, and also cable channels like UKTV and BET. Our next priority has been to launch across Europe. The first focus was Germany. We launched a broad corporate-wide deal with Gruner + Jahr, Europe’s largest magazine publisher.

We are going to be launching and operating a business in Asia, and the first major priority is the Japanese market. That’s something we’re working on now, and we’ll have a lot more to say later this year.

WS: Beyond building your international business, what are some of your goals for the company this year?

ALLAIRE: We have hundreds of major brands in the service and we reach 135 million monthly unique users. We’ve taken that first generation of Internet TV and learned a lot, and now we’re focused on building a next generation of our platform that addresses many of the trends and themes we’re seeing emerge as opportunities in this space.