Online Video Goes Mainstream, Sparking an Industry Land Grab (Dinosaur Media Extinction Alert)

Wall Street Journal ^ | Feb 21, 2006 | PETER GRANT

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Radio Abeokuta, a Web site dedicated to the promotion of the Yoruba language and culture in Nigeria, recently started carrying video news stories from Reuters Group PLC. It didn't conduct a word of negotiations with the British news giant. It simply filled out a form on the Reuters Web site. So did a news site in the Slovak Republic and an American political blog called Wizbang, among more than 120 others.

This simple transaction, which has big implications for the media business, was made courtesy of a small Cambridge, Mass., start-up business called Brightcove Inc. With backing from Time Warner Inc.'s America Online and Barry Diller, it is one of many companies vying to be a middleman profiting from the vast flood of video content now coursing through the Internet.

Brightcove's technology makes it easy for any producer -- from home-movie buffs to television networks -- to distribute their videos to multitudes of Web sites. All three parties -- the video's maker, the site that shows it and Brightcove -- often will share revenue from the resulting advertisements or sales.

"You become a little multimedia or cable company yourself," says Kevin Aylward, who runs Wizbangblog.com, a political Web log, or blog. On its homepage is a link to the "Wizbang News Channel" that activates a Brightcove player featuring a choice of 15 Reuters news stories.

Even in its early days, this business model represents a challenge to the media industry, and an opportunity for entrepreneurs. Once, producers of films, TV shows and video material relied on other big companies -- broadcast networks, cable systems -- to get shows in front of an audience. Now, these new forms of distribution could turn anyone into a producer with a nearly endless array of possible outlets.

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Networks, as we know them today, won't be around in less than 5 years. Here's the main point of the article:

"In the past, content owners had to rely on gatekeepers like cable companies to get to consumers," says Jeremy Allaire, Brightcove's founder, a 34-year-old serial entrepreneur who doubled the value of his baseball-card business when he was a teenager. "Now they don't have to do that.

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I guess Rush's "Dittocam" is on the cutting edge of societal evolution . . .