Brightcove adds some new leadership talent
This morning Brightcove made an announcement that they're adding a few new faces. A couple of those faces will be familiar to anyone who has been involved in the RIA world for the past couple of years. Jeff Whatcott, who was vice president of marketing at Adobe, is joining as senior vice president of marketing for Brightcove. The biggest news in my mind was that David Mendels, who was senior vice president at Adobe, is joining the board of directors. I was devastated when David left Adobe because he was a great outward presence on blogs, email, and every other form of communication. As an SVP it was always impressive to see him leave a comment on someone's blog and I can remember thinking how cool it was when he would leave a comment on my blog when I was still a community member.
Brightcove has a ton of old Allaire/Macromedia/Adobe people, so it isn't surprising that they would draw from that pool again, and both David and Jeff were based in the Newton office. There may be some more old Adobe faces popping up at Brightcove down the road. In part because they seem to be doing so well. As Jeremy's letter said, they released Brightcove 3 which included a chance in direction away from individuals uploading content to more polished and branded work. It seems to have been received very well.
They've also don a ton of work on the developer side to make it easy to use and integrate the Brightcove platform. They've got an XML-based BEML langauge which lets you create and customize Flash-based video players. They've got a Media API which lets you use REST-based web services to get actual content and metadata out of your Brightcove account. They've also got a number of custom components and hooks for you to build your own, so that you can add basically anything you want to your video player like stock quotes, news tickers, or anything that might enhance the experience around your content.
Brightcove continues to do a good job. As I think we've seen with Hulu, content is king. Brightcove has a ton of content and they're making that accessible in a number of different ways and letting people get in and customize it to make the experience their own. The addition of Jeff and David is yet another step in the right direction.