• MarketWatch, Wednesday, November 1, 2006 12:45 PM

With a great deal of fanfare, Brightcove launched a slew of new services this week that would help professional companies create broadband Web TV channels. One of these is Brightcove.com, a warehouse of aggregated content from its big and small media customers.

But the 2-year-old company is entering a heavily populated field where it will compete with other distributors of movies and television shows, like Google, YouTube, Apple Computer and Amazon. Brightcove, which is essentially a toolmaker, should consider the fate of ad-serving technology provider DoubleClick, once one of the Web's biggest ad networks until it sold its media business.

Brightcove isn't just going to sell video technology. "We're the next generation of 'television operators' or 'platform operators' as they're known, which includes the kind of role that cable and satellite operators have provided in the past," Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire says, adding that Brightcove's service would be radically different from past distribution models.

Brightcove wants to be both a video destination and a content distributor across the Web, reminiscent of what Google aims to achieve with Google Video, and its AdSense network.

To incentivize content producers, Brightcove will give them 50 percent of the ad revenue they gross--better than what sites like Revver offer content producers--but it may not be as sweet a deal as Metacafe's $5 CPM.

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