IPTV guru touts online video ad service

IPTV specialist Brightcove is set to release new offerings that effectively make it easier for video producers and websites to insert ads into their internet videos, syndicate their content and sell clips.

Websites select the services they want - ad placement in videos, a virtual video store, etc - from a click menu on Brightcove's network. For example, a news site on extreme sports could get a feed on foreign surf competitions from an established news agency such as Reuters, resell or syndicate its own clips to online outdoor-clothing merchants, and put ads in the videos it produces.

The services are free but the company keeps 50 per cent of the ad revenue generated via videos broadcast through its network in most cases, and 30 per cent of product sales. Several advertisers have already lined up to place ads in the videos that web publishers will broadcast using Brightcove's tools.

The company is also setting up a video-sharing site, similar to YouTube, but the company's main focus is to get individuals to integrate video on their own sites instead. In the future, consumers will turn away from portals and begin to get their videos straight from the producers, according to Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire.

Allaire said: "People don't go to Google to get content. They go there to find websites. The vast majority of content is not consumed in the portals. It is consumed on the web."

Giving people a cut of the ad revenue is one of the techniques Brightcove hopes to exploit to compete against the might of video-sharing leader YouTube, which was recently snapped up by Google for $1.65bn. Currently if you put a video on YouTube, YouTube keeps all the ad revenue the video might generate.

Michael Kanellos writes for CNET News.com