• Brightcove Q2 '12 Revenues Climb 41%; Zencoder Acquired For Move Into Cloud Services

    Brightcove reported a solid Q2 '12, its second quarter as a publicly-traded company, with revenues rising 41% year-over-year to $21.6 million and its loss from operations narrowing to $3.9 million vs. $5.1 million in Q2 '11. Brightcove said it now has 4,697 customers of its Video Cloud and App Cloud platforms. For video specifically, during the quarter, Brightcove added 365 "Express" customers (which are $499/month and below) and 78 "Premium" customers, which run into the thousands of dollars/month.

    Brightcove also announced its acquisition of Zencoder, a cloud video encoding service that counts 1,000 paying customers, for approximately $30 million. Brightcove views Zencoder as a product augment for its Video Cloud platform and also sees the company's Video.js free HTML video player as a lead generation driver for its Express services.

    Brightcove said the Zencoder deal "signals our expansion into standalone cloud services that developers can use as building blocks for custom systems." That could suggest Brightcove will launch a third platform with a suite of cloud services, particularly for small-to-mid-sized organizations looking to gain scale efficiencies and savings that large companies are already deriving from the cloud. More information on this as I have it.

    Brightcove is bullish going forward, providing full year revenue guidance of $85.3 million to $86 million, which compares to 2011 revenue of $63.5 million.

    UPDATE:

    I spoke to Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire about the idea of Brightcove introducing a third leg to its business, in addition to Video Cloud and App Cloud, that would be based on the Zencoder acquisition. Jeremy doesn't see that happening, though he was quick to add that Zencoder is a new line of business for the company, as well as a promotional on-ramp for Video Cloud.

    Zencoder's Video.js player fits with Jeremy's vision to provide developers a starting point of free building block services and then try to migrate them to additional paid services. An example of this on the app side is Brightcove's recently released App Cloud Core, an open source HTML5 mobile app development SDK.