We’re not sure exactly what value add that internet TV start up Brightcove really brings to the business of taking video to both major corporate web sites and in supporting .tv businesses, but it has landed a $59.5 million third round of funding, far bigger than previous deals, taking on-board money from customer New York Times company, as well as a Japanese digital marketing services firm, as well as traditional VC investors.
The reason we question it is that there seems to have been a trailing off in the rate at which smaller operations have embraced video over the internet of late, after a brash period of 100s of start up TV channels arriving on the internet.
Certainly video streaming over the internet hasn’t stopped growing, but the fact that activity has either drifted upwards towards larger companies that can afford to build their own streaming environments, while smaller operations have almost all begun using the Flash 8 video that emanates from Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire’s old company, Adobe.
Flash 8 makes doing video over the internet very easy for small operations, removing the need to build specialist RTP streaming servers.
Still new investors AllianceBernstein, Brookside Capital, Maverick Capital, along with the New York Times and Transcosmos plus past investors Accel Partners, Allen and Co, General Catalyst, The Hearst Corporation, and IAC/InterActive must have a ery good reason, because that’s a lot of money to be betting on one company that has yet to go international.
The Transcosmos part of the deal is about taking the Brightcove operation to Japan, which is apparently bristling with internet video opportunities, though again we would have thought that these were primarily Flash 8 opportunities.
Brightcove says the funds will allow it to accelerate international expansion, and add more tools to distribute and monetize video online. At Faultline we have always been suspicious that a start up, in Brightcove, without any radical new approach to video technology, such as that demonstrated by Joost (led by the Skype authors), would find itself as little more than a generalized service company, and if that was the case, the funding is dramatically too high. Let’s hope we’re wrong.
Brightcove launched an online-video marketplace in October, makes money by inserting advertising in professionally created videos made by partners, and by selling the videos themselves.