Limelight And Brightcove Continue To Pull Closer Together

This morning, Brightcove announced that they are now supporting Flash Media Server 3.5 functionality via Limelight Networks. While on the surface this may look like a basic release, you need to read between the lines on this one. For quite some time now Limelight and Brightcove have been working closely to sell into Akamai accounts as a team, and to date, have done a very good job pitching their combined solution.

While Brightcove is a neutral platform provider and will work with any CDN that the content owners uses, clearly Brightcove's preference is to use Limelight. The two companies have been working closely together for a few years now and this is the first time we've seen Brightcove go on record to announce how many customers they have running on Limelight's network (more than 700). The two companies are also working on some new functionality that has yet to be announced that will only further integrate the Brightcove platform with Limelight's delivery network. (will have more details on that later in the week)

Today's announcement gives Brightcove customers some new functionality within FMS 3.5 including RTMPE support which prevents playback in unauthorized players, DVR like controls and multibitrate support. For customers who want to take advantage of multibitrate support, they can do so immediately and in most cases, don't need to re-encode their content. When Brightcove 3 launched last year, Brightcove introduced their own dynamic delivery capability and gave their customers the ability to encode multiple renditions; four was the default, but customers could add more if they wanted. Their platform already provided an algorithm for bandwidth detection and switching between renditions to optimize the video quality. Brightcove has now introduced a new default in their encoding system that creates six renditions and customers can configure the encoding settings to add more than six renditions if they like.

With the new FMS 3.5 roll out, Brightcove customers will be able to take advantage of the enhanced rendition switching algorithm, which will work with customers' existing four renditions or new six renditions. In a conversation with Brightcove on Friday, they mentioned that they see more content owners shifting to H.264 encoding over VP6 and that trend is "definitely on the rise". We also had a discussion about the different video platforms on the market and when asked, Brightcove said that right now, they have no plans to add Microsoft's Silverlight platform anytime soon. Brightcove said that until customers start asking for the Silverlight platform, they don't have any plans to support it.

Related:

– Brightcove CEO Says Company Profitable and Cash Flow Positive