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Internet TV Site Shuts Down Aftering Blowing US$80M
By Daya Baran at November 27, 2007 3 CommentsBrightcove, the much touted internet TV company headed by Jeremy Allaire is shutting down. Users were informed via email that Brightcove.TV will no longer be accepting direct consumer uploads after December 17, 2007. The company had BIG dreams of becoming the next YouTube and competing with YouTube. The company had raised US$80 million.
Here are some important pointers for entrepreneurs, partners, and investors alike:
1) Web start-ups should embrace openness. Successful web companies disrupt and bring efficiency to a market. To do so you have to become immune to the rules and limitations of the old market being disrupted. Brightcove was busy trying to compete with YouTube while working with old timers like Viacom. Therein lies the problem. Viacoms’ business model comprises of a) restricting broadcast b) litigation (they have a big legal department including the CEO). For this to work you have to impose rules and restrictions and then litigate those breaking the rules and restrictions. So how could Brightcove disrupt a market, when every move they made was violating a rule set by a partner they were working with eg. Viacom.
2) Web 2.0 is demonstrating that nimble, smart entrepreneurs succeed time after time. Brightcove raised US$80 million! Where did it go? They certainly have a full management team, that is probably drawing super fat salaries, yet they have no product. At least a product that the marketplace wants. Smart investors fund agile teams that are disrupting a market using little capital.
3) Understand the web ecosystem - there are lots of people who don’t understand the web including investors like Mayfield and Redpoint. Jeremy Allaire (co-founder of Allaire/ Macromedia) is not the first so called top gun that investors poured money on due to prior success and ended up losing it all. Terry Semel is a classic example of someone that never understood the web. To succeed on the web you have to have a narrow focus. Take money only from people who understand the web. Bring people on that understand the space. Just because someone was successful in the something else does not mean they can help you prevail on the web.
Labels: internet, web strategy, websites, Youtube
3 Comments
$80,000,000 is real money, and I think VCs will take notice of this failure. More failures to come in this video space, where nobody is figuring out how to do a good job of monetizing the content.
Did you even understand the news? Brightcove the company isn’t shutting down, instead they’re just shutting down user-generated submissions to their Brightcove.tv property.
There are a lot of new internet TV sites out there. most of them offer a free trial or preview and then they make you pay to sign up, or are cluttered with ads. I think that is ridiculous… so ive done my research and have found a couple of really decent sites. The first one Id like to draw your attention to is (http://www.viewmy.tv) This site has almost 1300 channels from around the globe and counting. it is free to register and they dont ask for stupid details, just your username and email address. It actually streams live channels so you dont have to download any and they have a pretty easy way of finding the channel you want. You can search through genre, country, region or name of the channel. oh and there are no ads either. Check this one out. With over 1300 channels from hundreds of countries, loads of features like channel rating, user recommendations, live chat, profile pages and much much more.