Jeremy Allaire, an architect of Macromedia’s Flash technology, has founded a new company that will allow television producers to market their programming directly to viewers over the Internet, according to the New York Times.
Called Brightcove, Allaire said he plans to shake up the television industry by allowing all types of video producers — from media giants to anyone who has a camcorder — to put their work on the Internet and make money if anyone watches it.
Based in an office building at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA, Brightcove will offer three interrelated online services. It has tools that let television producers load their video onto its servers, arrange them into programs and display them to Internet users. It will help producers charge fees for their video, if they choose, or sell advertising on their behalf to insert into the programs. And it will broker deals between video creators and Web sites that want to display the video, arranging for the profits from such arrangements to be split any number of ways.
Three-dozen production companies are testing the production tools now, and a few have started publishing videos using the tools, the Times said. By early next year, Brightcove said he would have the ad sales and fee systems built and will open its distribution network to nearly any video producer through a Web site.
Brightcove’s business model does not charge video producers anything to upload their video or to create special Web pages. Instead, it plans to make money by taking a cut of the advertising revenue and fees the videos generate. If a producer wants to distribute video with neither ads nor fees, Brightcove will charge them in proportion to how much video users watch.
