After announcing a few months ago that they were shutting down Brightcove.TV, Brightcove has now announced that they will be discontinuing their ad-supported free version.

The upwards jump is scary..from $0/year, you’re now faced with $6000/year.

I remember a recent interview when Jeremy Allaire said: “We’ve made multiple bets, and the platform side won.”

• Obviously, some publishers lost. Especially given the current economic context.
• We shudder to think of the money that went into funding Brightcove.TV and all those free ad-supported accounts.
• Finally, Brightcove seems to think that several hundred dollars a month is a “low-cost” service. Pull up SaaS offerings today, and find me something that has a basic service running into several hundred dollars a month.

Hmph!

We’re trying to figure out what we can do to help. Obviously, this is a big opportunity for us, but we also want to see how we can help, beyond just offering an alternative.

Initial thoughts include:

• making it simple for Brightcove Basic customers to transition into the Marcellus platform
  • importing videos
  • importing metadata
  • anything else……?
• making it very cost-efficient to make the transition
  • we’re planning on waiving the SaaS fee for Brightcove customers
  • we’re planning on creating a special pricing model attuned to this new reality.

Two weeks is all we ask. Please stay tuned, and I promise to respond with a solution.