Today, Brightcove has acknowledged their product lacks the ease-of-use and advanced capabilities publishers require to be successful. Or, as TechCrunch so aptly puts it, “Brightcove Gutted and Rebuilt.” After reading the various articles and blog posts, I came to the conclusion that there wasn’t much substance to this release and even less forward innovation available for publishers.

Here is a summary of their new functionality:

• Making the user interface less tedious and complicated.
  We’ve heard from many Brightcove’s customers that the user interface
  was productivity killer, and Brightcove’s poor user experience is a key
  reason they are evaluating Delve.

• Making it a easier to move out of the “video ghetto.”
  With Brightcove, a publisher’s high quality video is forced to live in
  the “video ghetto.” This is relegating video to one small corner of a
  website. Delve’s ability to extract meaning from video gives publishers
  more powerful tools to contextually integrate video content throughout
  their website.

• Improving poor video quality and delivery. This
  is another concern we’ve heard from Brightcove’s customers. At Delve,
  we are fortunate enough to have a team of developers with deep
  experience building “Internet Scale” services at places like
  Amazon.com, Amazon Web Services, Yahoo Search, Inktomi, Expedia, MSN,
  etc. This is a core part of our DNA, which is different than that of
  Brightcove’s where most of the senior technical leadership came from a
  legacy software background.

Publishers must ask – “Which online video platform will help me succeed?”

In the online video market innovation occurs at a blistering pace. Publishers need a partner capable of keeping up with, and most importantly staying ahead of, the industry trends. By the time Brightcove’s new release reaches the market, they will have spent 18+ months on it. However, if you look at their website, they haven’t delivered much additional value to existing customers since since April 2006 – an incredibly long 30 months in a fast moving market like video.

While the market demands innovative features like search, video SEO, enhanced video management, higher quality video, enhanced advertising, increased user engagement, Brightcove has been playing catch-up with basic features like providing a user interface that meets the basic usability needs of users and copying innovations introduced by their competition. This puts their customers at a disadvantage in the marketplace.

I was also very surprised to see Brightcove attempt a complete rewrite – they are basically throwing out their entire publishing system and starting from scratch. If there is one thing I’ve learned is that there is a tremendous amount of risk associated with complete rewrites. One doesn’t need to look much farther than Microsoft’s challenges with Windows Vista for evidence of this.

Ironically, the complete rewrite approach results in the evaporation of Brightcove’s main selling point to customers – “we’re market tested.” Since Brightcove’s new release can no longer claim to be “market tested”, publishers have to really evaluate video platform providers on the basis of who is innovating, who is bringing them additional value more quickly and on a regular basis, and who will ultimately help them succeed in this space.

I firmly believe that Delve Networks provides the most advanced, intelligent, and comprehensive video platform. We don’t just give publishers basic features like transcoding and a video library, but instead provide a whole host of more advanced capabilities (e.g. search inside) derived from our core technology and ability to look within the video content itself.

Alex Castro
CEO
Delve Networks