Brightcove launches new service to bring broadcast-quality internet TV closer

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Internet video business Brightcove has launched a new service aimed at delivering broadcast-quality online TV shows.

The service, Brightcove Show, will give its network of web video publishers the ability to stream broadcast-quality, full-screen videos on their sites.

The service is using a piece of technology from BitTorrent - its Delivery Network Accelerator (DNA) - which can share the burden of file downloads across a network, speeding up the process.

BitTorrent is widely known for developing peer-to-peer network technology that has been used by millions to share, illegally in some cases, TV programmes and music collections.

The new Brightcove service has been launched as a pilot program to selected customers. The company plans to launch the full product in 2008.

In the UK, the Guardian, Sky, Emap, and IPC Media are amongst those currently using some Brightcove technology.

The Show service could offer these publishers, and others, the possibility of producing and carrying longer format programming on their websites, without dropping quality.

According to Brightcove's VP of marketing and strategy, the technology does not mean that short form and viral video clips that complement text stories on news websites will disappear to be replaced by longer programmes.

"We think the next wave will be this long form broadcast quality to the PC and the wave that will follow will be to take the same technology and bring it over to the TV set, but these all build on each other," Adam Berrey, VP marketing and strategy of Brightcove told Journalism.co.uk.

"It's not that the clips are going away, it's that the clips are always going to be there to help you find the [longer] shows…you'll still watch some of the stuff on your PC but [eventually] also some stuff on the TV."

However, the leap of the mainstream to watching internet on their TVs, he added, was some years off.

"There isn't really a consumer device that has come onto the market yet that has really hit us. You have Apple TV, which is one approach," he added.

"Microsoft just launched the second generation of its media centre edition extenders. That so far this is the most interesting technology that I have seen, but it hasn't hit the mainstream yet, by any stretch, household penetration is very low in this area.

"Our expectation is that in the next year or two someone is going to get that device right, maybe it will be the extender, maybe something else.

"We're introducing the capabilities the publishers and consumers are ready for now, but we are just a little bit ahead of where they [the technology providers] are going to go."