Jeff Whatcott's Station

Checking in from Tokyo

This week I have been here in Japan helping with the launch of our new fully localized product. I li...

A Warm Welcome to Former Maven Customers

As has been widely reported, Yahoo! has finally announced their decision to discontinue the Maven product that they purchased last year for $160 million. This may be news to many, but it seemed pretty clear to most Maven customers that their video platform was in trouble long before Yahoo!'s formal announcement that they were shutting it down. At Brightcove, we've had a front row seat to the Maven customer migration over the past year. Since the announcement, there has been a parade of upstart online video platforms trying to make headlines with "Maven Rescue" price discount programs. One has to...

Looking forward to the IAB MIXX Awards 2009

If you are involved in interactive advertising, it's time to submit your best work to IAB annual MIXX Awards 2009. Details and the submission form can be found here. It will be fun to see this year's entrants duke it out in all the various categories, especially the Digital Interactive Out-of-Home Advertising and Branded Content categories added this year. One thing I really like about the competition is that it is not just a beauty contest. The evaluation criteria span multiple facets of each campaign, including strategy, creative development and execution, media placement and integration, effectiveness and ROI. This holistic...

Marketing with video at Intuit

Intuit is running a competition to award over $300,000 in grants to small businesses. Contestants submit videos of their ideas to the Intuit site. The whole thing is powered by Brightcove. This kind of campaign can be a great way to stimulate awareness and engagement with your brand. Intuit has tapped into the creativity and entrepreneurial nature of their small business customer and prospect base by offering a win/win proposition. I am hoping we can convince our friends at Intuit to share their key campaign metrics and lessons learned. Stay tuned.

What our prospects aren't getting from YouTube

I am often asked at cocktail parties whether YouTube is a competitor to Brightcove. My answer is usually something like "Not really. YouTube doesn't work well for putting video on business web sites, and that's what Brightcove is focused on." Most people accept that answer, and I'm happy to report that our market research backs it up. We recently ran a series of surveys with our prospect database. This database includes people who have registered with us and opted in for communication, but have not yet become sales leads. In the survey, we included an open ended question asking why...

Getting a handle on Fair Use for online video content

If you’re creating informational videos about your products and services, can you use copyrighted content for b-roll and graphics? Are you allowed to include photos from Google images, or screen shots of news stories in your video? Can you have copyrighted music playing in the background of your video? What if the music is directly incorporated in the context of the video? If you are publishing video online, you need to know the answers to these questions in order to stay out of court. Currently, the Associated Press and artist Shepard Fairey are involved in a lawsuit over his “Hope”...

Mr. Cable Guy: Tear Down this Wall

The Wall Street Journal is running an article this morning about the new cable company idea for creating walled online gardens of content available only to their subscribers. "The programming available on the proposed Web services would likely be in a streaming format with ads, accessible in and out of the home, and without any additional charge to cable-TV subscribers, the people familiar with the situation said." While its is encouraging to see quotes like "Online video is our friend, not our enemy" from the CEO of Comcast, I really hope this isn't the model for the future. It runs...