5on5: Brightcove’s Online Video Platform
“Brightcove is the leading online video platform.”
This marks our second week of the 5on5 Expert Blog Series on Video Distribution. Today’s interview is with Erik Koland from Brightcove.
Tell me about Brightcove and what do you do?
Brightcove is the leading online video platform. Our solution allows organizations across all industries with everything they need to publish and distribute video content on the Web and devices that support video, like mobile phones. To quickly clarify, Brightcove is not a content destination like YouTube, Facebook or Hulu. Our clients use Brightcove primarily to power their own video experience on sites they control. Though may clients syndicate their videos or players through Brightcove, the focus is on building and extending their own, branded video experiences. It’s a powerful and flexible tool. If you can think of an application for video, a Brightcove client is probably doing it.
Erik Koland, Brightcove
In my role as a Strategic Account Director, I work with Brightcove’s key clients, mainly in California, where I’m based. My goal is to help the clients I manage get the most out of the platform and achieve success with their online video initiatives. I’ve been with Brightcove since Aug ’09. Prior to that, I worked in business development and content licensing at two other digital video startups: Vuze and Akimbo. I’ve been in video distribution/audience building since early ’06.
Who should post their videos to Brightcove?
We have over 1,500 customers. The bulk of Brightcove’s customer base was originally comprised of large media companies, but as video becomes ubiquitous across the web, our customer base has expanded as well. Now nearly every sector of industry and society are using the Brightcove platform to drive marketing initiatives and to increase brand awareness, customer engagement and conversions. Brightcove is a great solution for organizations that want to deliver a high quality video experience. They can use our templates and get a great looking video player up in a matter of minutes, or build a custom experience using our APIs and BEML.
What tools do you use to market yourself so people know about Brightcove?
Though I am not heavily involved in Brightcove’s marketing strategy, I can say that like many organizations, we invest heavily in our external marketing efforts to maintain brand awareness and to increase our leadership position in the market. We’ve also been very successful at maintaining our thought leadership in the space, as our executive team is often sought out to comment on industry trends and the future of online video.
Do you offer a player? And how does that work?
Yes and it’s a highly customizable player that can deliver video optimized to the viewer’s internet connection or viewing device – HD down to mobile video. It’s a Flash Player, but we can also convert the player in a way that allows playback on devices that don’t allow Flash (iPad, iPhone). There are countless ways to change the look of the player or use the player in unique implementations – like shoppable video, or live streaming with chat.
I want to thank Erik for sharing about the power of Brightcove’s capabilities. Next week I interview Dina Kaplan, Co-Founder of Blip.tv.
