Website Review: Brightcove

Today marks the launch of a new front page for web television pioneer Brightcove as well as the addition of several new back-end features.

The new front page is clean, with a large featured video in the upper left (a horror movie promotion from AMC at time of writing), and a top videos type section called The Buzz below it. At time of writing, the number one video in The Buzz is a cartoon from the KIDZ BOP channel called Amelia's Day Dream, which makes me wonder what the target age is that's doing the buzzing. Most videos, both cartoon and live action, look better compressed than the videos on YouTube and are slightly larger. I like the way the features from the menu bar at the bottom of the picture box overlay on the screen in an animated but subtle way. This of course allows for easy embedding of the video on outside websites, since none of the menu features will ever stray outside the embedded box.

The righthand sidebar of the immediately visible part of the main page displays advertising: featured branded channels The N and IFC up top, links to commercials by Kohler and Buick below (at time of writing). That makes more than 3/4 of the immediately visible front page advertising, although technically you will get a short film if you click on the featured AMC box. Brightcove has an entire marketing team that sells ads within certain genre. If you agree to use their ads, you split the revenues. (Based on clicks or pageviews? I don't know.)

Brightcove's search feature will need some tuning to include channels in the results, but what I really like is that it doesn't only search Brightcove, but also Grouper, YouTube and AOL (and maybe more). I don't know if there is another Internet video website that has the guts to use a third party search engine that gives results with competitor videos. (It appears they are using AOL's SearchVideo, which explains why it skews toward AOL videos; it seems Brightcove has a deal with AOL.)

Notably missing compared to YouTube are community-based features like a star rating system and tagging. Brightcove seems much more publisher-oriented, allowing the manager of a 'channel' to control what videos receive prominence. So let's look at two channels...

Mortal enemies Fangoria and The Horror Channel both use the Brightcove service. (Disclosure: My friend Patrick has made short films for both, and has told me how much they hate each other.) In terms of embedding the Brightcove video, the Horror Channel has their video content behind a pay wall to I can't tell how well it is done, whereas with Fangoria it is fully integrated into their fangoria.tv page.

I recently spoke with Eric Elia, VP of Content and Online Services, about Brightcove's new front page and back-end features and what Brightcove offers indie filmmakers. A post on that is forthcoming; either Blogger or my hosting service has been spotty the last few days.

UPDATE: Here's the Brightcove interview.