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Brightcove refreshes with brand new service and new focus

Today Brightcove, one of the first RIA companies and one of the first to use Flex, announced that they've overhauled their service and dubbed it Brightcove 3. The primary goal of the new Brightcove is to provide better support for "long-form video", or full length shows instead of smaller clips that we're used to seeing.
Written by Ryan Stewart, Contributor
Brightcove refreshes with brand new service and new focus
Today Brightcove, one of the first RIA companies and one of the first to use Flex, announced that they've overhauled their service and dubbed it Brightcove 3. The primary goal of the new Brightcove is to provide better support for "long-form video", or full length shows instead of smaller clips that we're used to seeing. Brightcove has done a really good job of incorporating brand, usability, and distribution with their current Flash video player, so it makes sense for them to continue that momentum and focus on the more interesting and more lucrative long content. As NewTeeVee noted, this move (bad pun intended) is aimed directly at Move networks. Move has gained a ton of traction with companies like ABC and Fox and Brightcove wants a piece of that market. Brightcove said there will be some cost savings over Move and that they'll be using the mostly-already-installed Flash plugin versus Move, which has it's own plugin.

Another big piece is a new publishing model which finally includes a Brightcove API that helps content creators insert video meta data into their pages making it easier to search and more meaningful for the semantic web side of video. The new publishing model also gives the content creators a lot of control over how to access video. They can now choose URLs, display descriptions, and decide when and how to highlight related videos. It should make it easy for users to jump from video to video all in the Brightcove player.

The final piece of the new rollout is a brand new user interface which is built all in Flex and according to TechCrunch has an iTunes-looking control panel and the ability to do drag and drop editing capabilities.

According to CrunchBase, Brightcove has $91.1 million dollars in funding putting it pretty close to the top of the video startup space and just a tad shy of Move networks $91.3 million.

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