Time Warner’s AOL unit will adopt the Brightcove video-management platform for its online video properties, including AOL Video and every publisher in the Web portal’s network.
AOL is a Brightcove investor, having taken a minority stake in the startup in 2006.
Fred McIntyre, senior vice president at AOL in charge of video, said the change will allow the company to deliver content and video players more efficiently than it could using its internally developed tools.
“We do know what the pain is, having built and operated these [video management] systems for years,” he said. “There are frustrations in working with anything you own and operate.”
By outsourcing the video player and other functions to Brightcove, AOL can devote more resources to video search, which McIntyre said is “the cornerstone of our strategy.” AOL acquired video search engine Truveo in 2006, and its index now includes nearly 300 million video clips.
AOL has about 40,000 video assets in its library, which the company will begin to cut over to the Brightcove system in the first quarter of 2009. McIntyre said AOL plans to quickly introduce new players using Brightcove.
Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but AOL appears to be Brightcove’s biggest customer to date.
AOL's network was the fifth-biggest video destination online for U.S. Internet users in July 2008 in terms of unique visitors, according to comScore, with 23 million monthly unique visitors who watched 95 million videos clips.
Other media companies that use Brightcove include Discovery Communications, MTV Networks, Showtime Networks, Lifetime Networks, Cablevision Systems’ Rainbow Media and Comcast’s FearNet.com.
Brightcove, founded in 2004, recently introduced the third major iteration of its platform, with new features such as faster video player loading and customizable templates.
