Metue.com

More and more well funded startups seem to be aimed at creating portals for internet video.  Brightcove, one of the best capitalized of video centric startups, is going the other way and distancing themselves.   While the company has been running their own video site for the past year, today it was reported they are shifting internal resources to instead focus on greater development of their technology platform and distribution services.  Their video portal, which has been up for a year,  will remain at Brightcove.TV as “something that runs itself” said Brightcove VP of marketing Adam Berrey but the company is “not trying to become the next YouTube.”   The companies priorities are elsewhere.

Brightcove.com, the company’s corporate site, will stay focused on business to business services.  As noted on the corporate blog: “[The company] made the domain shift so [it] could separate the consumer video guide from [the] publishing partner marketing and communication.”

To date, Brightcove has raised more than $80 in funding, a good chunk of it from major corporate partners.  The company had been spending that in three directions: the platform for video publishing, ad sales and their own video site.  All along, the platform, which counts Washington Post, Fox and Dow Jones as customers, had been the core segment. The others were tangents.  In May, the advertising sales focus for small and medium sized customers was outsourced to Tremor Media and Brightroll (though the company does still work with advertisers on video technology). 

Now, with the last of the fat seemingly being trimmed, the company will focusing almost solely on what it believes is the more lucrative, central part of their operation:  white-label on-demand platform technology.  They are positioning themselves as ideal partner for corporate video infrastructure and syndication. Reminiscent of the first Internet rush, the spin is: they’re emphasizing B2B, not B2C.