• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, March 20, 2006

Web TV upstart Brightcove today is slated to announce the acquisition of MetaStories, a small firm that provides rich-media publishing tools for a variety of companies including Yahoo, MSN, and National Geographic, among others. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

MetaStories' chief product, StoryMaker, is a publishing tool for creating interactive Flash content. It is available as an on-demand service, and is used by interactive producers to quickly assemble video, graphics, text, and audio into custom multimedia packages.

Perhaps the best example of how a company might employ MetaStories' tools to produce rich-media, video, and interactive content is journalist Kevin Sites' war correspondence for Yahoo News' "Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone" section.

Brightcove will now market MetaStories' tools to potential and existing publisher clients, which include The New York Times Co.

"What MetaStories has done is create tools for non-technical people to create professional multimedia experiences," said Jeremy Allaire, founder and CEO of Brightcove.

"We're seeing a convergence between the needs of traditional print publishers and video programmers as they both move into the Internet TV space," Brian Monnin, co-founder and CEO of MetaStories, said in a statement.

Founded by Internet pioneer Jeremy Allaire in 2004, the Cambridge, Mass.-based Brightcove has aggressively recruited a management team of experienced media executives, including hires from Allaire, Macromedia, ATG, Comcast, Lycos, and News Corp. In November, the company announced that it hired Adam Gerber, who formerly headed up the new media strategy for MediaVest and big-brand clients like Coca-Cola Co. and Procter & Gamble.