A few weeks ago, I expressed on this site the concern that Brightcove — the promising new video publishing platform for the web — would price itself out of the market…choosing to focus on big media companies at the expense of a vast market of smaller companies and organizations, independent producers, and individual self-publishers.  After all, a rate card had been circulating with an entry price tag of $15,000 a year…which made every small content provider on Brightcove’s free commercial preview hold its breath.

Now, though, the cat is out of the bag on Brightcove pricing…and the bottom line is that they have not disappointed.  Brightcove’s pricing plan offers something for everyone, and it’s certain to shake up the fledgling arena of internet TV.

Basically, the company is rolling out three pricing plans to address three entirely different markets:

• the Brightcove Network, which dives into the crowded waters of free video hosting services like YouTube and MySpace Video, but with a twist — content providers can actually make money from advertising and video download sales;
• the Brightcove Platform (Standard Edition), which is aimed at corporate and institutional markets who want to take advantage of Brightcove’s attractive publishing, syndication, and content management capabilities without necessarily selling advertising against those videos; and
• the Brightcove Platform (Premium Edition), which is aimed at higher-volume media companies and content providers who want a full range of options, including selling their own advertising, syndication, and more sophisticated pay-per-view capabilities.

For the audience of this Video AdVisory blog, the middle option is probably the most interesting, for it gives genuine big-media presentation, hosting capabilities, and content managemnent tools to relatively small players.  And it does so at relatively short money, starting at $49 per month for relatively modest volumes (about 12,000 minutes of viewing per month) to less than half-a-cent per minute on the margin at higher volumes.

This is very good news, for it establishes a very reasonable way for companies and organizations to establish their own video channel even if they don’t want to include advertising or charge per view of their content.  Ultimately, it means that everybody will be able to afford their own video channel through one of these pricing plans (and look for associations and other intermediaries to aggregate demand that will make the non-ad-based Brightcove Platform options accessible to really small players at smaller volumes, too.)

This is, too, just the first volley.  Other players are lining up behind Brightcove with their own plans, though generally they are each addressing just one of the three market tiers Brightcove is tackling (PermissionTV, for example, is concentrating on the high end, and its focus is bearing fruit with big media companies).  2006 will, indeed, be long remembered as the Year of Web Video.