I had a chance to review my web server logs last night (what else are you going to do when it’s snowing another foot in New Hampshire?), and to my surprise two of the top six search terms that were used to discover the “Web Video Expert” blog were “brightcove cost” and “brightcove pricing”.  There is obviously a lot of interest around this subject — enough so that literally hundreds of people a month are coming to us, trying to find the answer to the question: What does Brightcove cost?

For those of you who don’t know what Brightcove is, it’s an amazingly powerful and flexible platform for publishing Internet TV Channels on the web.  It has revolutionized the way we think about video on the internet, and has had a dramatic and positive impact on the effectiveness of web video for dozens of DigiNovations’ clients.

Yes, there’s a free version of Brightcove available if you’re willing to put up with ads on your videos and channels, placed by Brightcove.  But we’re talking here about the full-blown, fully-featured premium Brightcove publishing platform — the same internet TV channel used by everyone from the National Geographic Channel to the Barack Obama for President campaign…not to mention clients of ours like Sacred Heart University.

The problem with trying to answer the question, though, is two things:

• It depends; and
• It’s a secret that Brightcove is trying its best to protect.

It depends, of course, on the scale of the application — the number of video streams served per month, the size of each of those streams, and the amount of customization you want to apply.  So there’s no easy price list to look up — you’ve got to fill out a contact form and have a sales representative call you to size you up and assess your needs.

But beyond that, Brightcove has clamped down a veil of confidentiality about its price list by contractually obliging its customers (that would be us) to keep their pricing confidential.

Suffice to say, though, that despite its initial efforts to offer a “Brightcove Standard” product that would be affordable for every business, department, school, and not-for-profit organization, Brightcove has now reversed itself and is content with cream-skimming with the big media companies (take a look at their selected customer list) and has abandoned for now the strategy of empowering everyone with inexpensive, ad-free internet TV channels.

Brightcove quietly pulled its small-customer offering (priced under $100 a month) off the market within a couple of months of launching it, and now customers who want to buy the full Brightcove platform from Brightcove pay tens of thousands of dollars a year to do so.

On the one hand, this isn’t terribly surprising.  Despite its big, bold look, Brightcove is a relatively small organization with modest venture funding…and word has it that the support burdens of trying to get thousands of small companies up on Brightcove were a nightmare.

But it is a disappointment, and leaves plenty of room for a competitor to sweep into the middle market.  After all, I still believe that internet TV channels will be a common part of every company and organization’s website within the next five years, and right now Brightcove is simply not affordable for anyone except big customers — at least when bought directly from Brightcove.

All of that said, there is another approach to getting the benefits of Brightcove for smaller applications.  Web video production companies like DigiNovations are set up to design, implement, and manage great internet TV channels on the Brightcove platform for smaller customers.  And until Brightcove figures out a lower-priced middle-market offering, that will be the only way the vast majority of companies and organizations can take advantage of this powerful new web video tool.