It’s time to circle back and discuss Brightcove. I’ve written a few posts on Brightcove, and the OVP market. In April 2014, a NY graduate student working on a school project regarding Brightcove, asked me for my input on why Brightcove was struggling, and what they could do to improve their situation. In response, I wrote a two-part post dated April 30th titled “Why Brightcove is Struggling“. In summary, I stated that Brightcove is the largest OVP player operating in a small, and fiercely competitive B2C video market.
What’s changed since my April post “Why is Brightcove Struggling”
- July – Brightcove loses Rovio as a customer. Rovio represents 3.8% of Brightcove’s revenue, and 15% of all streams in the first half of 2014
- July – Brightcove shares drop 37% and CFO resigns
- July – Brightcove’s $49M acquisition of Unicorn Media hasn’t materialized. In my book, this was the worst acquisition ever, in the history of CDN
- Aug – Ooyala is acquired by Telstra
Based on the data above, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure why the OVP market is a tough business. Brightcove has two choices: acquire or get acquired.
- Get acquired by IBM: IBM’s goal is to become a major cloud compute behemoth, however, it doesn’t have a video story. Amazon is leaps and bounds ahead of IBM in offering video solutions. Aspera does not really count, as they are only a file transfer service
- Get acquired by Google: the same that applies to IBM, applies to Google. Youtube doesn’t count, as that’s more of a consumer based product
- Acquire Signiant: Acquisition will help Brightcove transform from a B2C video ecosystem, to a B2C and B2B video service provider, catering to big studios and broadcasters
- Acquire MediaSilo: Awesome start-up. Will give Brightcove a B2B video play, and open up a new market for them: big studios and broadcasters
- Acquire Aframe: competitor to MediaSilo, and will have same benefit as the MediaSilo acquisition
- Build a mini-CDN, and save a ton
Did my prediction come true on Brightcove? Yes sir.