“Farm Aid joins a fast-growing list of organizations taking advantage of Brightcove’s live streaming capabilities, including the US State Department, Sundance Film Festival, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints – an organization that delivered more than 2 million live video streams on the Brightcove Video Cloud platform during the two days of their annual general conference last April,” a Brightcove representative tells WebProNews.

We’re really seeing online video providers hook us up with some major concert events in realtime. It’s a pretty good era to be a music fan. Just last weekend, YouTube streamed Lollapalooza. A while back, they did Coachella.

Of course Farm Aid is about more than just music – hence its name. The organization/event has raised over $39 million to help family farms since 1985.

“We are proud to support Farm Aid’s mission and to be a part of this powerful benefit concert,” said Brightcove President and COO David Mendels. “The live streaming capabilities in our Video Cloud online video platform will enable Farm Aid to deliver a high quality user experience and reach viewers around the world to help raise awareness for this great cause.”

Carolyn Mugar, director of Farm Aid said, “From the artists’ gift of their performance to Brightcove’s generous sponsorship, to the donations from thousands, family farmers everywhere are offered hope and opportunity through the work of Farm Aid.”

Here’s the schedule via the Farm Aid site:

Between 1pm and 3
Willie Nelson welcomes everyone to Farm Aid!
Blackwood Quartet
John Trudell
Hearts of Darkness
Rebecca Pidgeon
Ray Price

Between 3 and 4
Robert Francis
Billy Joe Shaver

Between 4 and 6
Will Dailey & the Rivals
Lukas Nelson & Promise of the Real
Jakob Dylan

Between 6 and 7:15
Jamey Johnson
Jason Mraz

Between 7:15 and 11-ish
Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds
John Mellencamp
Neil Young
Willie Nelson

The big draw as far as I’m concerned, is John Cougar. Mellencamp will no doubt draw from his impressive catalog of Cougar-era hits, and probably some later stuff. As you can see from the following Farm Aid performances from over the years, he still likes to please the fans. I actually had the pleasure of seeing him at Farm Aid in ’95, and he didn’t disappoint.

"Connected TVs are continuing to grow in popularity, with some analysts estimating over 100 million units will be shipped by 2012," she adds. "Additionally, because of LG’s extensive distribution, this is a huge opportunity for growth not only in the US market, but around the world."

"The partnership between LG and Brightcove opens up a new, global distribution channel to the living room for professional media," said Eric Elia, Brightcove’s VP of TV solutions. "Brightcove customers of all sizes can take advantage of this growing opportunity and expand the reach of some of the world’s most highly sought after online video content to millions of LG devices."

"This partnership brings together two market-leading innovators and is the next natural step in providing consumers with instant access to the online content they crave," said Young-jae Seo, Vp of LG Electronics’ LCD TV Smart TV Team. "We expect to expand our online video distribution capabilities and offer more compelling options to consumers worldwide with Brightcove’s unmatched scale and impressive global customer base. The partnership will definitely make LG Smart TVs the go-to devices for video programming."

Later this year, Brighcove says it will introduce a series of tools and resources for organizations to take advantage of LG’s Smart TC platform, with a "functionally complete reference application" to use as a starting point.

With Brightcove, Sundance has expanded its online video offerings this year to include live  coverage of major events and screenings at the Festival, as well as a number of new on-demand content featuring interviews with artists and filmmakers, daily video highlights, and roundtable discussions. Brightcove has been the official online video provider for the Festival since 2008.

“The mission of Sundance Institute is to discover and foster independent artists and to connect those artists with audiences, and online video continues to play an important role in helping drive awareness and interest in the Festival each year,” said Joseph Beyer, Director, Digital Initiatives at the Institute.

“Working with Brightcove has enabled us to continually introduce innovative new video offerings that fans can access throughout the world. We are looking forward to taking advantage of Brightcove’s live streaming capabilities this year as well as expanding the reach of our video content to new platforms and devices.”

To be clear: the difference wasn’t large, and Google’s still in the lead by a huge margin.  Bing and Twitter aren’t entirely out of the running, either.

But a post on the TubeMogul Blog stated, "Facebook now refers more video streams than Yahoo! for the aggregate media sample.  This marks the first time the social platform has surpassed the search engine and content portal.  Facebook accounted for 9.6% of all referrals, making it second only to Google."

What’s more, Facebook referrals seem to be worth more in terms of keeping an audience’s attention.  Brightcove and TubeMogul’s quarterly research report explained, "Facebook was the most engaging referral source for entertainment categories, including broadcasters (1:57 minutes) and magazines (1:34 minutes)."

These stats may help Facebook attract more advertisers and therefore pull in more revenue.  They could also cause marketers to become more active on the site (which could be either good or bad depending on one’s point of view).

"At a high level, improvements include advanced distribution methods with more social sharing to help brands get the most mileage, drastically expanded support of mobile platforms, expanded analytics to gauge how online video campaigns are performing, and other backend improvements to video quality," a spokesperson for Brightcove tells WebProNews.

The Apple-friendliness in particular has caught the eye of the tech community. Integrated Apple HTTP streaming support enables multi-bitrate video delivery for Apple iOS devices, including high quality, long-form video experiences viewable over 3G or Wi-Fi connections.

"Consumers today are surrounded by an increasingly fragmented landscape of devices and destinations, which present publishers with exciting new opportunities, as well as challenges," says CEO Jeremy Allaire. "Brightcove 5 helps remove the complexity of online video publishing and distribution across multiple devices and touch points, accelerating productivity and unlocking additional value."

The HTML5 analytics are also noteworthy. "Developed in partnership with TubeMogul, Brightcove 5 introduces new advanced analytics for HTML5 video experiences that make it possible to aggregate analytics for both HTML5 and Flash video experiences across browsers and mobile devices," the company says. "These new uniform analytics eliminate one of the most painful compromises associated with deployment of HTML5 video, delivering comprehensive insight into online video performance for the first time."

The new version also introduces over a dozen other new analytics reports, such as player level metrics, top referring search terms, top domains where content is embedded, global viewer attention span, city-level geo info, browser/OS info, etc. 

Video consumption on newspaper sites grew the most over this period, surging to 65 percent more views than the previous quarter due to the coverage focused on the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Referral traffic for online video from Facebook and Twitter is growing faster than from traditional search engines. At current growth rates, Facebook will surpass Yahoo within the year to be the second only to Google for video referral traffic.

While Facebook and Twitter are attracting more viewers, they are also leading to the highest levels of engagement for video on television network and music entertainment websites.

Consumers watched more minutes per view on official media websites versus online destinations with syndicated video content.

Other highlights from the report include:

*Nearly 60 percent of brand managers plan to invest more in online video in the next 12 months.

*More than 65 percent of brand managers indicate that the primary focus of their online video initiatives is awareness, followed by lead generation (21 percent) and e-commerce (12 percent).

*70 percent of respondents said they plan to add mobile video to their marketing mix in the next 12 months.

*Consumers who find marketing and e-commerce video via Facebook and Twitter have the longest viewing times (1:24 minutes and 1:18 minutes respectively), while traffic originating from Yahoo! search (0:52 minutes) and display ads (0:52 minutes) tied for shortest.
 

A rep from Brightcove tells WebProNews, "WebM will be supported on HTML5 and Flash, and Brightcove’s ability to support the new codec is another example of how the company is removing the complexity from the increasingly fragmented video landscape, and giving publishers the chance to publish video in a variety of formats."

"One Brightcove customer who will be testing WebM in the future is The New York Times, he says. "The NYT has worked with Brightcove in the past to pioneer delivery across new formats and devices, and this is another example of innovation between the two companies."

Brightcove will provide H.264 and WebM as standard encoding options for Flash and HTML5 video experiences to its customer base of more than 1,500 media publishers worldwide.

Brightcove is an online video platform with over 200 partners.  The companies it has ties to include powerful ones like Adobe, AOL, comScore, Nielsen, and OgilvyInteractive.  Plus Google.

Anyway, Mark Glaser, the executive editor of PBS’s MediaShift, was the one to break the acquisition attempt news.  On Twitter, he wrote, "Source with knowledge of deal tells me video service Brightcove in talks with Google about buyout in $500m to $700m range."

In a follow-up tweet, Glaser then noted, "Brightcove deal for Google would give YouTube entree into paid video service with many traditional media co. clients."  And considering that Google paid $1.65 billion for YouTube about three years ago and still can’t turn squeeze a profit from it, the idea of it spending a little more now isn’t hard to believe.

We’ll be sure to report any additional information about the situation as it becomes available.  It should be interesting to see if Google snatches at any more stuff over the next few days, too.

Strobe

First off, Adobe has announced a new software framework for building media players, which extends the capabilities of Flash. It’s called Strobe. Adobe says it will help establish an open industry standard for media players.

"With Strobe, we’re delivering an open framework that enables media companies to focus on their core competency, creating great content that people want to see, instead of developing their own video players from scratch," says Adobe’s Jim Guerard. More on that here.

Partnering with Brightcove

Adobe and Brightcove announced a partnership in which the two companies will work together on technology and services to "enhance the quality of online video experiences." This will presumably cover things like DRM. The collaboration between Adobe and Brightcove will foucs on:

- Long form media delivery
- Content protection for video viewed via the Flash platform
- Integration  with Adobe Creative Suite 4 Production Premium
- Strobe

Brightcove and Adobe will announce further initiatives later in the year. More on the partnership here.

"This may sound like it will give Brightcove an unfair advantage in the online video platform market and it could very well do so," says Christophor Rick at ReelSEO. "However it could also force others to make new partnerships that offer a stronger competitor as well…Either way, it’s certainly going to lead to better online video for us."

Flash on TV

Adobe’s working on a new version of Flash to work with set-top boxes and other Internet-enabled devices for the living room. They have partnered with big brands like Broadcom, Comcast, Intel, Netflix, The New York Times Company, and Disney.

"Adobe Flash Platform for the Digital Home will dramatically change the way we view content on televisions," said David Wadhwani, general manager and vice president, Platform Business Unit at Adobe. "Consumers are looking to access their favorite Flash technology-based videos, applications, services and other rich Web content across screens. We are looking forward to working with partners to create these new experiences and deliver content consistently across devices whether consumers view it on their desktop, mobile phone or television."

Look out for devices from Adobe’s partners before the year’s over. Recent reports suggest that Google’s Android might also be making its way to the living room this year. 

Under the terms of the deal any IAC business can use Brightcove to publish video content to their Web sites, manage syndication, and integrate advertising.

"Brightcove is in tune with the new content consumers want and has been able to recognize the need for effective video distribution in a world where computer screens are replacing television screens," said Barry Diller, Chairman and CEO of IAC.

"By making this platform available across IAC we can continue to deepen engagement with our online audiences, expand the reach of our brands, and open powerful new revenue streams through online video advertising across our sites."

Ticketmaster, Citysearch and 23/6 will be the first IAC brands to use the service, the companies said. IAC has had a minority stake in Brightcove since December 2006. Other backers of the privately held company include Hearst Corp and AllianceBernstein