Brightcove Shuts Down Consumer Services

Brightcove, which clarified its product lines this fall by spinning off its consumer services into a separate site, has now announced, via an email to users, that it will be phasing out those consumer services. The Cambridge, Mass.-based company is instead emphasizing its lucrative premium video management and distribution tools for paying customers like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

Brightcove.tv is currently a consumer portal like so many would-be YouTubes, offering free uploads and hosting. The company said it will disable new Brightcove.tv uploads on Dec. 17. It will continue to host existing uploads. Brightcove.tv will shift to showcasing media and business partner clients.

Brightcove had never really fully thought out its consumer services — we tested “Brightcove Personal” (which came to be Brightcove.tv, which will soon be kaput) when it came out in February of this year, and found it to be finicky and buggy.

If you really want to publish using Brightcove and you don’t want to pay the big bucks, you still can. However, earlier this year Brightcove also phased out its mid-level “standard” tier of pricing, so your choices are either to share revenue with Brightcove when it attaches to your content, or spend tens of thousands of dollars on a custom premium edition.

If you choose rev-share, Brightcove offers free “network accounts” that are “ideal for independent content creators and producers.” These accounts are structured a little differently than the consumer portal, but still don’t require a formal deal to set up. Brightcove takes about 50 percent of ad revenue and 30 percent of download fees for these videos.

Brightcove Video Addict, the blog for the company’s consumer portal that showcased interesting uploads on a daily basis, hasn’t been updated since Nov. 1. Too bad, we’d enjoyed reading it.

Update: In an explanation of the today’s move, Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire writes on the company blog that the Brightcove platform has “over 4,000 commercial media publishers using Brightcove to distribute and monetize their broadband video properties. These publishers are doing hundreds of millions of streams per month through the Brightcove platform. Rolled up, these publishers deliver over 120 million uniques visitors per month across thousands of websites.”