Brightcove Turns On Broadcast-Quality Internet TV

"Brightcove has announced a new service for delivering broadcast-quality Internet TV.

Extending their widely adopted Internet TV platform, the new service, Brightcove Show, will give content publishers the ability to deliver instant-on, broadcast-quality streaming video to their viewers.

Brightcove Show takes advantage of new advances in the Adobe Flash Player technology, high-quality video encoding, and content delivery acceleration technology from BitTorrent, to enable full-screen video playback of broadcast-quality content streamed through the Internet.

Unlike other broadcast-quality Internet video services, Brightcove Show lets content publishers deliver high-quality, full-length video through their own websites without having to give up their direct relationship with their viewers or participate in an aggregated service or player.

Brightcove Show leverages the new BitTorrent Delivery Network Accelerator (DNA) content delivery service announced today by BitTorrent Inc. Brightcove will be using BitTorrent DNA in conjunction with the Limelight content delivery network to ensure a high-quality experience for consumers. According to the company they will be adding other new delivery technologies into the Brightcove Show service over time.

The new service promises to offer new monetization opportunities for content publishers with players that support new conventions for incorporating sponsorship messages, mid-roll video and interactive advertising into the long-form video and full-screen viewing experience.

Brightcove Show is available now through a pilot program to selected customers. The company said they plan to launch the product for general availability in 2008."

Source: BroadcastBuyer


"Brightcove Show brings together all of the pieces needed for content owners to deliver true broadcast-quality experiences online, including:

- Templates and APIs for delivering full-screen, immersive video browsing and watching experiences. Think "Joost in a Box" from a user experience perspective.

- Network acceleration and dynamic quality of service technology to enable seamless delivery of high-quality video (up to HD quality) in an on-demand streaming experience. This uses BitTorrent DNA as well as additional dynamic quality of service technology Brightcove is introducing with Brightcove Show.

- Content protection technology (not DRM) that ensures that the various bits of content that are brought down from servers and peers can't be easily copied and shared (if the content owner so chooses to protect content this way).

- A new suite of advertising products geared towards full-screen and mid-to-long form content, building on our existing innovation in overlays, takeovers and sponsorship units in the Brightcove Platform.

For those not familiar with "network acceleration" technology such as BitTorrent DNA, the basic idea is to take advantage of the full pipe that a consumer has on their broadband connection by using multiple sources on the Internet to build and deliver a streaming experience. This approach uses something called 'multi-source streaming', pulling bits from multiple servers and CDN locations, and where possible, pulling bits from peer computers that are viewing the same content. This peer-assistance becomes a critical component to ensuring a high-quality experience at a lower cost. By building on a client technology that is already widely adopted (150M BT clients downloaded), it will help drive adoption of these kinds of experiences more quickly (as compared to closed platforms like Joost who today have extremely limited adoption by comparison)."

Source: Brightcove Blog