Online video continues its break-neck growth rate with video views hitting 119% Year over Year growth in 2009 according to comScore. While January 2010 fell a small percentage from the final month of 2009, we still saw massive adoption as B2C behemoth YouTube continued its dominance over the space owning a whopping 39.5% of all US video views of over 32 billion served.
YouTube’s B2B equivalent in online video hosting services is Brightcove. The Cambridge, MA based OVP has seen similar growth in recent months. While not at the same scale, Brightcove continues to dominate the professional Online Video Platform space signing new customers to their video hosting service both domestically and Internationally. In fact, since launching it’s Express product just a few months back, opening offices in Japan, and launching localized versions of their web site in Japanese, French, and Spanish, Brightcove has closed more deals in the past two quarters than in all of 2008.
In Spanish speaking countries Brighcove has signed deals with Tuenti, Grupo Vocento, Sony Music Spain, Condé Nast Digital Spain, Grupo V, GEC, GX Magazine and TQMadrid. In Japan we’ve seen deals done with heavy-hitters such as Nikkei, one of Japan’s largest media corporations and publisher of the country’s top business daily newspaper, as well as Rakuten, Tokyo Metropolitan Television (Tokyo MX), Television Osaka, Shizuoka Asahi Television, Tokyo Broadcasting System (TBS), CHubu-Nippon Broadcasting, PRESENTCAST, Asahi Breweries, Sony Music Networks Japan, Shueisha webUOMO, and orangepage.net.
Other enterprise focused OVPs such as Ooyala, the younger upstart to Brightcove, has also seen tremendous growth Internationally. While Bismarck Lepe, Ooyala’s co-founder and President of products denies that they’re specifically targeting Brightcove customers, they too have experienced massive growth in Japan with it’s localized online video platform, signing companies such as NTT SMARTCONNECT, and Brosta TV as well as in Europe signing Telegraph Media Group, the UK’s leading newspaper chain.
With the growth and International expansion of these US-based OVPs, I wonder how foreign video platforms such as vzaar, Stream UK, Flumotion, Ipercast, and Kewego (to name a few) feel about their turf being trampled upon. I personally have spoken to a few of these International OVPs and at this stage of the game there are no hard feelings. It’s just too early and there are far too many companies out there needing video hosting services to concern themselves with the competition at this point. In fact, I see a lot of camaraderie within the space with OVPs referring prospective customers onto others whom better fit the needs of a customer and OVPs cheering each other on as they grow into new and exciting spaces.
Exciting times are upon us in OV.
Stream UK has seen significant competition from the likes of Brightcove over the last three years, but their efforts and the resulting uptake in innovate video use has only helped us.
Currently we have around 150 clients, of which around 100 are located in the UK and 40 in Europe (mostly Spain from our Spanish office). We expect and need our European customers to inform our development, which means products that develop in response to UK and European markets. Of the customers we have lost to Brightcove, more than half have returned to us on the basis that the offering has not tracked their evolving needs. Interesting they have always returned with more sophisticated and expensive demands than when they left.
The offering-requirement gap can be something as simple as encoding profiles which suit 25fps PAL (European standard) rather than 29.97 frames per second NTSC (American standard) or more subtle such as integration with European content management systems. Generally it is ‘off ratecard’ development.
The top-level pricing from the larger US-based providers is competitive (and often hard to match), but as soon as something bespoke is required things becomes a expensive. We’ve just signed a large British broadcaster that is in the business of transcoding and translating (the metadata from) its main feed for distribution to partners like YouTube, MSN and other third parties located in Europe. The incumbent provider (a US-funded VC-backed video platform) needed to charge £12,000 to integrate with new partners. Stream UK was able to (profitably) guarantee a cap of £3,000 for new integrations, which both won the contract and made these new integrations financially viable. Essentially we’d done most of these integrations already and those we hadn’t were valuable to us for other clients.
When you are educating you can be prescriptive, but when you are integrating you have to be able to adapt. To do this at a reasonable price, you need communality within your client base and we’ve found a large component of this communality to be regional.
Duncan Burbidge
CEO
Stream UK
http://www.streamuk.com
Duncan Burbidge´s last blog ..March Newsletter