ipTve
At what level of production budget do you think it pays to use Brightcove? Do you have to be a fortune 1000 level company with a healthy development team to fully exploit the API's?

Peter
"Do you have to be a fortune 1000 company? Maybe not. And a healthy development team would definitely be something you may need at some point if you were to graduate to their packages that even give you access to their API. But before you even get that far, you've got to have a content roll-out plan. Whether you're producing the content from scratch or re-purposing an existing library, you have to know that you're going to be able to refresh your video library with new titles all the time. This is the format-agnostic reality of editorial. I don't care if you're talking about blog posts, articles, audio or video; if you can't keep churning out content, you won't grow your audience. Thus, how would you ever be able to expect you'd get to a point of being able to monetize your content?"

"Coinciding with that, you need a syndication model; if your plan is to just offer video up as an add-on to your existing web site, you sure-as-$hit better have substantial pre-existing traffic. Most small production entities, however, are not necessarily in the web business, so you're going to need to syndicate your stuff to multiple outlets across the web so you can leverage the eyeballs of other sites. And I don't mean simply making copy and paste, embeddable code for your players available: I mean actually having partnerships with other sites (with significant traffic), who don't want to get into the video business, but want video content. It also would be prudent to find said partners who have existing relationships with advertisers. They are out there, but it may take some good-old-fashioned pounding of the pavement to foster these kinds of relationships."

"Now, if someone has the patience and -- more importantly -- the capital to put their content online and grow their audience organically, then cheers: you're in a better position than most. But I just don't see this as being a business reality for most small content producers. Most will need help."

"In regards to the API's, that's the real value of Brightcove. But do smaller content producers need it? That's a question they have to ask themselves. And there are plenty of people out there who grew their traffic with free or open-source video platforms. They didn't require a lot of fancy integration or customization: they just needed to get their video out there. And where better to showcase video content than the multitude of free platforms (YouTube, Vimeo, Blip.TV, Viddler, etc.), where people are coming to the sites specifically to watch video content? Maybe eventually they can get to the point where they can "graduate" to one of the pricier platforms but I'm not seeing it right now."

ipTVe
Top tier publishers like WSJ.com are charging around $75 per CPM for pre-roll videos which are seeing a surge in sales, to the point of outstripping inventory - given that numbers gyrate widely down to as low as $10 per CPM can smaller outlets hope to generate enough revenue to offset bandwidth expenses?

Peter
"Even if they can control their overhead, I'm just not sure (starting out anyway), they want to commit to a service that, if they're fortunate enough to gain traction and they see video play numbers sky-rocketing, is going to hammer them with overage fees."

ipTVe
What was your experience at the last company specific to advertising and where there any lessons learned that you could impart on the smaller producer looking to dive into a platform like BrightCove?

Peter
This is related to the above...

"One company I was working with had a 2-year contract with Brightcove at about $1800 per month, maybe slightly higher. They finally started seeing some real traction after a couple of years of trying to make video work, and were on pace to do something like 390,000 unique title plays in one month (resulting in around 1.6 TB of bandwidth usage if I recall correctly). The result? They got hammered with overage fees that doubled their monthly fee to around $3600. And to compound the situation, even at almost 400,000 video plays, they couldn't get any advertisers interested in anything with a CPM of $12. Do the the math: if each of the 390,000 title plays generated a pre-roll ad at $12 bucks-per-thousand, that's $4680. After paying the hosting/bandwidth fees and overages with Brightcove, you're now left with around $1000 before you've paid for any of your own overhead in producing and managing these videos. Does $12,000 annually in pre-overhead net revenue sound like a sustainable business to you?"

"That's what would concern me about this latest product roll-out from Brightcove. It's enough to wet your appetite if you're an independent content producer, but if you're looking to actually make any kind of inroads in terms of revenue with it, it simply doesn't allow for enough bandwidth at $100 per month. Not even close."

"You might even make the argument that by setting the limit of bandwidth so low, this isn't actually a "Loss Leader," because Brightcove's not going to let your content run roughshod on their servers without making you pay for it. If you look at the PDF feature comparison chart for their services, look at how little they give you for $99 bucks per month. They're not losing squat on that."