MWC: Brightcove brings Flash video to smartphones

Desktop online video management platform Brightcove is extending its video-playback capabilities to any smartphone running the newly released Flash Player 10.1. The company unveiled the Brightcove Mobile Experience for Adobe Flash Player 10.1 at Mobile World Congress this week, promising optimized video viewing on Google Android, Symbian S60, Palm webOS, Windows Mobile and Research in Motion BlackBerry.

Brightcove’s mobile platform is a single video player that is adaptable on-demand to the playback environment of the particular device. The software includes device auto detection, mobile-ready transcoding to provide multiple video renditions for desktop and mobile Flash player templates, as well as advertising integration and analytics.Click here to view a video of the new mobile player in action.

Brightcove’s business has traditionally been limited to the desktop since Flash was not widely supported on mobile phones until recently. Companies with a lot of Flash content on their Web pages, which was most, would have to launch two sites – one with and one without Flash, said Jeff Whatcott, Brightcove’s senior vice president of marketing. Now these companies can build just one site, but adapt it to mobile with features like social sharing, calls to action and quality-of-service management.

“If you look at the amount of page views on the Web consumed by smartphone devices, just two years ago it was almost nothing,” Whatcott said. “The browsing experience was so poor, the screens were poor, browsers were rudimentary and processors were slow. Now, networks are faster, devices smarter, screens larger. It is really starting to rocket, even in the last couple of months. We expect projections to grow 56-fold over the next few years.”

Brightcove has been an Adobe customer since April of last year. Extending its cloud-based online video platform to mobile means that its media and business customers can adapt their content to mobile and expect the same fidelity as their desktop content. The Brightcove Mobile Experience is already in use by AOL, Atlantics Records, National Geographic, The New York Times and several others.

Brightcove’s mobile platform also includes 120 media player plug-ins and

extensions from its alliance partners. According to Whatcott, adaptations for mobile include interface controls, gestures for multi-touch screens and adaptations for the handset’s accelerometers. It also reduced the system resources needed to preserve battery life.

“The detection we offer is the ability to switch intelligently between the standard desktop environment and mobile-optimized environment,” Whatcott said. “We can deploy one Web site with video embedded into it, and it will be optimized regardless of the device. The encoding makes sure video is formatted for the bandwidth and screen size. We set the encoding for the best possible experience given the constraints of these devices.”

Brightcove, which optimizes video for both Flash and HTML5, works with more than 1,000 media companies and Web marketers looking to use video to sell products or monetize through advertising. The company also has an iPhone SDK for customized iPhone apps with video built-in. The Mobile Experience for Adobe Flash Player 10.1 is available in an invitation-only beta release and will be generally available later this year, free-of-charge to Brightcove’s customers.