• by Shankar Gupta , March 19, 2007

Internet TV company Brightcove this week is expected to announce a partnership with Visible Measures, a start-up Web video analytics firm that just closed a $5 million round of venture funding from General Catalyst Partners.

Eric Elia, Brightcove's vice president of programming and design, said that one of the company's goals is to bring Web-style analytics to TV content.

"When we started this business, it was our belief that the Internet provided a whole lot of benefits to television and video producers that wasn't available in traditional media," he said. "One of the key pieces that's broken in traditional TV is the reporting and analytics."

Brian Shin, CEO of Visible Measures, said the analytics product allows publishers to track not only videos on their own site, but when their videos are embedded and streamed elsewhere.

"What we're trying to do is create an objective set of metrics that apply in terms of audience engagement, video virality, the distribution of video as it's embedded throughout the Web--if it's watched on a blog or on Facebook, we want to be able to track all of these things," he said.

Elia said that Visible Measures' technology, which monitors user engagement throughout the entire video stream, will help its publisher customers get a better idea of what parts of their videos work, and what parts don't.

"They're not just tracking how many people are watching, they're tracking the full engagement within a video experience," he said. "Visible Measures is going to help our partners better measure what their users are interacting with, and track that engagement over time."

Brightcove hopes that Visible Measures' analytics package will help raise the bar for video analytics. "Ten years ago we tracked hits with Web analytics--that's where we've been as far as online video experiences go," he said. "Visible Measures may help us enrich the tracking around video experiences just as we've seen traditional Web analytics grow over the past 10 years."

Visible Measures will be running a beta test of its analytics package with several of Brightcove's clients, Elia said. In addition to Brightcove, Visible Measures is also partnering with PermissionTV, and has received an endorsement from YouTube's chief marketing officer, Suzie Reider.