Brightcove Powering Broadband Video for Virgin Media Television's Living TV, Sky Deutschland

In a posting on its corporate blog, Wednesday, broadband video publishing solutions provider, Brightcove, announced that it is powering Liv, a recently launched online TV channel from Virgin Media Television's Living TV brand which offers free, exclusive, original short-form content that is refreshed on a daily basis. The ad-supported channel is available on http://livingtv.co.uk; and is also distributed to a range of third-party Web sites and social media platforms, including Facebook, via Brightcove's distribution and syndication technologies. The channel offers content in four categories: Celebs, Style, "Bite Me" and Popular, and its programming offerings include "Celebs Off Duty" and "Liv Famous, Dress Famous."

Brightcove also revealed some online video growth trends that it says it has observed through its work in the UK, where its customers include ITV, Channel 4, Five, BSkyB, UKTV and STV: in 2007, the company says, its UK broadcast customers uploaded an average of approximately 250 videos per month into the Brightcove service, whereas today the number is closer to 550 videos per month--representing 80% year-on-year growth; in addition, it says, the average length of video segments published online by the UK broadcast sector has grown from 1.96 minutes in 2007 to almost 3.5 minutes in 2009; and stream volume for the sector is growing at 12% quarter-over-quarter. Brightcove opened its European headquarters in London a little over two years ago.

As [itvt] was going to press Wednesday night, Brightcove also announced that Sky Deutschland has rolled out the Brightcove platform across its Sky.de Web properties in order to support its broadband video initiatives. According to the company, Sky Deutschland--which is 40%-owned by News Corp.--is using the platform to deliver exclusive video content and programming from Germany's top professional sports leagues, including the Bundesliga, the UEFA Champions League and Formula 1 Motorsports. Brightcove claims that its platform's video publishing and scheduling feature set allows Sky Deutschland to provide exclusive access to paying subscribers, via an authenticated log-in, to highlights from the Bundesliga each weekend, as well as to non-subscribers (on the following Monday). It also says that its content protection features, which are delivered via its support for Adobe Flash Media Server 3.5, enable Sky Deutschland to prevent abuse and video playback within unauthorized players. "Sky Deutschland's innovative pay-TV model has enabled it to reach more than 95% of TV viewers in Germany, which has translated into a substantial online audience for Sky.de," Brightcove chairman and CEO, Jeremy Allaire, said in a prepared statement. "We are proud to support Sky Deutschland's expanded online video efforts to help deepen its engagement with its growing online audience by providing high-quality, user-friendly, secure video content through the Brightcove platform."

In other broadband video news: TV Everywhere--not the US cable industry's online programming distribution initiative, but the new company of Narrowstep founder and former CEO, Iolo Jones--announced Tuesday that it has released the latest version of its broadband video management system, VidZapper (note: among other services, the company claims to power Moviebeat TV, a channel devoted to movie trailers; a channel for the University of Wales; and a channel for sailing's World Match Racing Tour; it also says that Spanish retailer, El Corte Ingles, and Spanish energy company, Endesa, have each selected it to power a raft of new channels).

According to the company--which says that the initial version of the system "already enables third-party, user-generated and professionally produced content to be mediated and combined," and "can be used
with any cloud or content delivery network, including cloud networks such as Amazon or Azure, and CDN's such as Velocix, Limelight and Akamai"--Vidzapper Version Two offers:

• Detailed and queriable statistics both online and as an Excel download.
• Improved support for third-party video ad tags and video ad tracking for DART, Accipiter, 24/7, etc.
• New content flags to force the whole of a video to be viewed and to make a content item play but not appear in the playlist. These, the company says, have largely been introduced to support pre-roll, post-roll and in-stream advertising.
• The ability to specify playlists as near-time (plays from the beginning of the video) or real-time schedules.
• The ability to distribute content to third-party video serving services for promotion or for commercial reasons.
• HTML support: extended entries are now possible for HTML and other formats within the metadata text field, as is support for special characters, the company says.
• A more powerful and flexible API that includes the ability to address stats and playlists.
• A plug-in architecture that will enable third parties to develop applications for the platform.
• StreamZapper, a remote file management application that can be used to manage uploads and provide direct URL's to streams and downloads.

"We're seeing more and more live events featured on the platform," Iolo Jones said in a prepared statement. "And many more varied channels, showing that having an Internet TV channel is rapidly becoming as mainstream as having a Web site. The latest version of the platform has a very powerful API and we hope that it will therefore be ideal for Web development and design companies and TV and video production companies who want to develop channels for their clients. We're also opening up a plug-in platform so that VidZapper users can develop and share applications on top of the platform."