Brightcove, who has raised $80M, is going to be using Tremor Media Networks as ad sales partner. You’d think that $80M would buy you an in-house sales team and position you to develop your own network, right?
Brightcove Network content sold by Tremor Media will be incorporated into Tremor’s network channels and sold on a category, targeted, or custom channel basis, and not as individual publishers. Brightcove will continue to sell strategic offerings to brand advertisers and agencies directly.
Don’t get me wrong, these are arguably best of breed sites, but something is odd about the state of video advertising and content. Brightcove is a myriad of services and features, mainly the Brightcove Platform and the Brightcove Network. The former is for larger publishers and the latter is for smaller sites, blogs etc. I’d guesstimate that this deal with Tremor is mainly for the Brightcove Network, but this is really just making the pie smaller for content producers, who now have to divvy up ad revenue with Tremor and Brightcove.
In fact, Tremor can basically hit up video content producers itself, or in fact, smaller producers can sign up to Tremor. By now going through Brightcove, we’re just cutting the pie in more pieces and not really working on the real issues. What are the real issues?
Separately, Tremor and Brightcove have announced plans to begin addressing issues facing the digital video advertising industry–including measurement, standards and best practices. As a first step toward this goal, all ads sold under the new agreement will be 15 seconds or less in duration. Other areas of focus will include frequency and rotation management of ad creative.
This is key. In fact, the more pressing issue I find is standardization, or a lack thereof, of anything from file formats, to size, encoding specs etc. And that’s just the content, let alone the ads. Video on the Web would be far greater in terms of content and advertising if there were more streamlined standards.
At WatchMojo.com, we’re growing our core flagship destination and signing many syndication deals, I’d guesstimate that as an online-only video producer, we have one of the largest reaches online, when you tally how many places our content is on and how many views these get… but we’d be doing many more deals and bringing more high-quality, “torso” content to sites needing and looking for content if the standards for the content itself were common, and they’re not.
That’s what we need to look at, before looking at the ads… but that’s just me.
Subscribe: