October 14, 2009
Funding brings online video company's total funding to $99M. IPO possible in 2011.
Online video management company Brightcove just raised a $12 million Series E round of funding led by original Series A investors Accel Partners and General Catalyst partners. The company is a leader in a very crowded sector. Like competitors Ooyala, Kaltura and Delve Networks, Brightcove was founded in the good times of 2006-2007 when online advertising was thought to be an inexhaustible fountain of future revenues for Internet startups. That didn’t turn out so well. Recession hit, ad budgets fell, and video serving turned out to be very expensive. Now analysts expect a shakeout in online video in 2011.
But Brightcove made a smart move in targetting high-end video producers, and bucking ad-based and the freemium models embraced by many of its competitors. The company expects sales in the $50 million range this year.
It also managed to bring on board many of the premier online video publishers. Its long list of investors includes mainstream media players like Hearst, IAC/ Interactive Corp and the New York Times.
Brightcove hopes to go public as soon as next year, though the company is open to acquisition offers, according to the Wall Street Journal.
This new infusion could be intended to bulk up the valuation before an acquisition, ensure no competitors “catch” it before an IPO, or simply grow the sales and development team. The WSJ says that Accel’s Jim Breyer asked Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire if he would accept more money earlier this year and acknowledged it needed more funding to build out its infrastructure. We’ve asked the company how it plans to use the new funds and will update this post when we hear back.
Related Companies, Investors, and Entrepreneurs
Ooyala
Startup/Business
Joined Vator on
Ooyala is a video technology company that provides an integrated platform enabling the delivery, management, and monetization of high quality video content. Focused on innovation and scalability, Ooyala is committed to providing the most comprehensive video solutions to companies worldwide.Ooyala is headquartered in Mountain View, Ca with sales operations in New York, NY and London, UK.
"Ooyala" means cradle in Telugu, a Southern Indian language. We like the name because it demonstrates what we are doing -- cradling a new form of innovation.
Ooyala was founded in early 2007 by Sean Knapp, Belsasar Lepe and Bismarck Lepe - all former Google employees. While at Google, they worked on the development and launch of various monetization and content distribution products such as AdSense, AdWords and Google Web Search. After four years of engineering and product development at the biggest Internet company in the world, the three left Google to start Ooyala. Ooyala has raised over 10 million dollars in funding and has in excess of 5000 publishers using its syndication platform - Backlot. Ooyala's goal is to build a successful technology company that focuses on delivering the best video experience to video content providers, advertisers and most importantly consumers.
Brightcove
Startup/Business
Joined Vator on
Brightcove is an Internet TV platform.
We're dedicated to harnessing the inherent power of the Internet to transform the distribution and consumption of media.
Brightcove empowers content owners—from independent producers to major broadcast networks—to reach their audiences directly through the Internet. At the same time, we help web publishers enrich their sites with syndicated video programming, and we give marketers more ways to communicate and engage with their consumers.
Most importantly, we give people the freedom to easily find, watch and participate in a broad range of video content—when and where they choose.
Kaltura
Startup/Business
Joined Vator on
Kaltura – The 1st Open-Source Platform for Video Creation, Management, Interaction, and Collaboration
Kaltura's open source platform enables any site to seamlessly and cost–effectively integrate advanced interactive rich–media functionalities, including video searching, uploading, importing, editing, annotating, remixing, and sharing. Kaltura' goal is to bring interactive video to every site and to create the world's largest distributed video network.
Dubbed by many as "Wiki meets YouTube™", Kaltura's platform includes unique collaboration functionalities that allow groups of users to 'lean forward' while creating and consuming rich media together. This active collaboration increases user engagement by adding a social element to the online video experience, and creates enhanced monetization and advertising opportunities for authors and publishers.
The Kaltura Network transcends the boundaries of individual websites by aggregating content across its member sites into the largest repository of sharable and remixable rich-media content. The network provides publishers of all sizes new syndication opportunities, and enables them to gain access to third-party web services – such as DVD burning, professional video editing, and high-CPM advertising opportunities that are only attainable due to the network's economies-of-scale.
Kaltura recently partnered with the Wikimedia Foundation to provide collaborative video functionality to Wikipedia's 207 Million unique visitors. Other customers integrating the platform include media companies, social networks, UGC sites, video sharing sites, major brands, non-profits, bloggers, enterprises and more. Just about any site can boost its users' engagement and monetization using the Kaltura platform.
delve-networks
Startup/Business
Joined Vator on
Delve Networks is leading the next generation of development for Video Platform, allowing them to engage users through our "Search Inside" technology, where they can pin point content "inside the video".
Our unique business model also allows companies to reduce operational costs or recognize savings over thier existing service.
We offer a Free Trial and here is a look at the Obama Inauguration usring our technology.
http://blog.delvenetworks.com/2009/01/20/search-inside-obama%E2%80%99s-inaugural-speech/
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