I’ve posted several articles expressing my excitement about the emerging video channel management tools like Brightcove.  These tools are truly elegant — even in their beta releases — and portend a very exciting future for owners and publishers of video content.

The good news is that Brightcove and others have allowed us to see the potential of their platforms by offering their services free of charge during 2006.  The pricing model, they say, is evolving…while holding their cards close to the vest.

Now, though, rumors have started quietly making the rounds about the fees that Brightcove might be planning to charge for non-advertising accounts, once the free trial is over at the end of this year. I certainly hope that what I’m hearing is not true.

The numbers I’ve seen suggest that the price of entry for a Brightcove account will be set very high — like five figures high per year…and that’s before you start talking about per-stream and per-gigabyte charges on top of the account maintenance fees.

I’m going to hope that these are just rumors or trial balloons being floated by the company, but I’ll use the occasion to state my hope that Brightcove will not price itself out of the market for anything but the big media companies and other high-volume content creators.

Many, many of my clients are interested in building Brightcove (or Brightcove-like) channels, but for relatively low-volume applications (measured in tens hundreds of viewings per day, not tens of thousands). But these are organizations — like medium-sized companies, colleges and independent schools, museums, and not-for-profit institutions — that will simply not be able to step up to annual hosting fees of $15,000 and up.

I understand that the gravy train of free service cannot go on forever. And I admire the strategy of getting hundreds upon hundreds of content providers invested in and hooked on Brightcove’s attractive channel design and reasonably easy content management infrastructure.

But I was hoping that Brightcove would fulfill its stated promise of “giving video content owners — from major studios and broadcasters…to WEB PUBLISHERS TO SMALL INDEPENDENT PRODUCERS” [emphasis mine] by keeping the entry barriers (in the form of the fixed-price monthly charges) fairly low.

There is a huge market out there of lower-volume content creators who are looking to have an attractive, efficient way of managing and presenting content. Brightcove must decide whether it will forego that market in favor of the business that comes in bigger chunks.

If the answer is that they only want to “fish for whales”, then that’s perfectly fine, strategically. But I think it’s important that they start telling the great majority of their trial clients NOW, before they get too invested.

Meanwhile, I’m putting the brakes on my recommendation that my clients start building Brightcove channels during the free trial period, until the pricing becomes more clear. There is no sense getting content creators hooked if they can’t afford to support the habit.  And in the meantime, I’m looking for alternatives to Brightcove, just in case.  Surely there will be someone who will emerge to fill the void between the big-media mentality of Brightcove and the wild-west, throw-copyrights-to-the-wind mentality of YouTube.