Brightcove.com has notified thousand of users its decision of turning off access to free Brightcove Network account as of December 17.
Now if you want to continue this service you must pay at least $6,000 a year. For that money, they give you a basic account that includes 120,000 annual streams (clips of content encoded at 500 kbps and averaging 2 minutes in length) that would take about 1 TB of bandwidth to deliver. Then, if you need additional bandwidth, the price per GB is $1.50.
An entry point Pro account generally costs on the order of $2,500 - $3,000 / month and typically includes 600,000 views for a year and between 4 and 8 TB of bandwidth. The Enterprise package is for largest clients and costs well into the 5 figures / month.
Brightcove.tv shuts down
In addition, the Brightcove video showcase, or Brigthcove.tv, has been shut down. All feeds, widgets and Brightcove takeout have stop working. Brightcove has not given any explanation about the shutting down. In its blog there is no any explanation either.
Brightcove Network, when it was launched in 2006, thought to sell advertising and provide content syndication services to users to uploaded videos to Brightcove, but the company failed to gain traction in ad-sales.
Once Brightcove has pulled pug on its consumer product, YouTube stays as the main outlet for amateur videographers looking to generate ad revenue from online videos.
Joost’s failure now is official: they cancel their P2P software
Another failure. Joost.com has informed its users via email that it has discontinued the support of its desktop client and instead completely it will concentrate on its new webs site.
This is the email text we received:
“In October, we introduced our new website – Joost.com. With our new website, you're able to watch all of our videos – TV shows, music videos, and films – right in your web browser.
At this point, we have decided to discontinue our original Joost software application. As of Friday, Dec. 19th, you will no longer be able to watch videos in the Joost software application – but you will be able to find all of our videos, and more, on Joost.com.”
This is a big step for a company that once aimed to revolutionize online video with P2P technology. Is this the death of P2P video streaming too?
JumpCut does not accept more video uploads
A third victim. JumpCut, the online video editing service acquired by Yahoo in 2006, is no longer accepting video uploads to its service.
“We will be keeping the Jumpcut site up and running for the foreseeable future so you‘ll still be able to play, remix and share your existing movies – you just won’t be able to upload anything new.
If you’re looking for a place to upload and share your video, we recommend that you head over to Flickr: http://flickr.com/explore/video”
People prefer streaming over downloading
New data from Ipsos MediaCT shows that people are more interested in streaming longer-form content like movies and TV shows than downloading it. (Good news for Hulu and Netfilx).
Users mention concerns over storage and high prices. The ability to own downloaded content and move it between devices seems to be less important.
“YouTube for business” sector is getting crowded
Video for Business sector is getting crowded. Wistia.com is one the latest entry start-up. They provide secure video hosting and sharing services that allow other companies to communicate and work together via web video.
Wistia sees its biggest opportunities in training, marketing and collaboration. Cost for the service varies but can go as low as hundreds of dollars per month. They have 25 customers including Cushman & Wakefield, Nestle Nutrition and Sonus Networks.
In the same “YouTube for business” space, there are players like Veodia and IVTWeb.com that offer webcasting, and has built up a roster of clients including Cisco, IBM and Ernst & Young.
The biggest player in the video sharing for businesses is Google. Google Apps customers pay $50 per user per year for Gmail, Google Talk, Google Docs, and also an internal corporate video sharing service. Paid users can upload videos of up to 300 MB, for a total of 3GB per account and unlimited video views.
Google isn’t including for now live broadcasting or video conferencing –the most obvious and best-used video tools at most enterprises. It is only offering on-demand streaming and downloads of clips.
Users can upload videos to what looks like the Google Video player, and team members can tag, star and comment on them. There are also new features designed for long-form video, such as thumbnails of key parts of a video so viewers can skip around. Each video will also be available as an embed, part of a Google gadget and as an MPEG-4 download.
Google thinks there’s an opportunity for easy video sharing between team members for applications such as ad hoc training, product demos, and team building, with access restricted to specific employees.
Finally other existing enterprise video delivery vendors mainly focused on top-down communication and training, are Kontiki, Cisco (with its Enterprise TV solution) and Thomson.
