Wheat from the Chaff
Back in the mid Nineties, at one of the largest financial firms on the street our team was charged with rolling out Streaming Media worldwide to the firm. It was the Go, Go Nineties and among other Internet deals, the company did the Broadcast.com IPO, whose founder Mark Cuban netted about 1.5Bil when Yahoo! later bought the company, so don’t complain about the YouTube deal Mark! Of course the roof fell in which must have come as quite a shock to the Queen of the Internet (not Pamela Anderson, if you did a Google search) as well as the rest of us, it was a wild time with equally wild stories.
It brings to mind the expression about history repeating itself which I was reminded of when I read Tony Perkins recent article where he warned of the potential crash for companies, like Brightcove.
From the outside, Brightcove has been successful in creating alliances and opportunities for large media outlets. The deal announced on February 12th with Time/TV Guide indicates these companies see the value in leveraging an existing platform to syndicate their originally produced media content across many sites. According to Time’s press release
“Brightcove will make it far easier to get video up on our sites and allow us to concentrate on what’s most important: creating the great video you’d expect from some of the best brands, journalists and editors in the areas of celebrity, entertainment, sports, news, business, style, food and home.”
Having used the Brightcove platform, I can speak to the following, it is easy to use, is generally reliable and their tech support people have been very helpful. I do not think it makes economic sense for this site however, since we do not want third-party pre-rolls, nor is the monthly cost without spots comparable with other solutions.
On the technical side, I have concerns since they have bet the farm on Flash, which currently has limited DRM capabilities. On the business side, one producer expressed concerns about their high CPM.
“We like Brightcove, but being a member of the platform as opposed to the network has made monetizing this a lot more difficult, simply because of what we feel are Brightcove's relatively high CPM's (by our calculations, about $9 dollars)”.
If I were speaking with Tony, I would ask him to elaborate about his concerns and to address mine. What is it about Brightcove that despite many corporate wins, healthy funding and well-known board members makes it a likely for major layoffs or a down investment round?
Looking back at my experience at the financial firm, there were companies I wish I’d bought into and other’s I’m glad I did not. Net, net it was at times easy to be caught up in the irrational exuberance sweeping around, but more difficult to see the road ahead.
