OVP Company, Brightcove, Says It Has Doubled Size of its Customer Base to 1,800+ in First Half of 2010

Online video platform provider, Brightcove, said Wednesday that it has doubled the size of its global customer base in the first half of 2010 to over 1,800 media publishers in 48 countries. New customers that have signed up for its platform since the beginning of the year include American Standard, Audi France, D-Link Systems, Electronic Arts, EMI Group, Federated Media Publishing, the Financial Times, Macy's, Nikkei, Turner Broadcasting, the University of South Carolina, Virgin Media and Werner Publishing Corporation. The company claims that its growth has been fueled by the launch of a number of enhancements to its platform over the course of the first half, including:

• "A comprehensive solution for media publishers to extend online video initiatives to the mobile Web and native applications on leading mobile devices." According to the company, the solution includes "multiple rendition H.264 encoding, automatic device detection, HTML5 and Adobe Flash Player 10.1 mobile player templates, as well as Software Development Kits (SDK's) for Google Android OS and Apple iOS."
• New monetization features, such as support for online video advertising standards VAST 2.0 and VPAID." The company also says that it worked with FreeWheel and Videoplaza to develop "the first HTML5 video advertising solutions in the market to enable media organizations to distribute advertising-supported video content on devices such as the Apple iPad."
• The enhancement of its cloud-based video encoding engine with standard two-pass encoding, anamorphic pixel correction, source frame rate detection, rotation correction for mobile video capture and "fine-grained" controls for rendition settings. In addition, the company says, infrastructure enhancements have accelerated transcoding speed tenfold and provide geo-optimized uploads for faster video ingestion.
• New Custom Player Themes which the company says "give non-technical producers the ability to design, architect, save and share every player component without having to use ActionScript to alter the video player experience."
• New distribution capabilities which it says "enable broadcasters to operate rich, branded and authenticated TV Everywhere experiences and extend distribution to Internet-connected television sets powered by the Yahoo! Widget Engine." In addition, the company says, it announced "support for Facebook's Open Graph to support new social plug-ins and expanded distribution through Facebook walls, news feeds, and fan pages."

Brightcove also credits its international expansion strategy for its rapid growth this year. In the course of the first half, it opened new country headquarters in Spain and France (it also maintains European offices in the UK and Germany), and launched a localized online video platform for the Japanese market, where it operates a subsidiary called Brightcove KK. On Wednesday it announced a number of new customer wins with Japanese brand marketers and ecommerce and media companies, including RESTIR, PhaseOne, Dr. Ci: Labo, Girls Professional Baseball League, Tokai Tokyo Securities, SKY Perfect JSAT Corporation, WOWOW and For it. More information on Brightcove's new Japanese customers can be found here.

Brightcove also announced Wednesday that it has hired Dennis Rose as VP for the Asia-Pacific region, in which role he will be charged with leading the company's "investment and expansion across key APAC markets." Rose joins the company from Citrix: more information on his resume can be found here. Finally, it announced that Elizabeth (Betsey) Nelson has joined its board of directors. Nelson was previously EVP, CFO and a member of the board at Macromedia.