Financial documents are not an easy read. They’re loaded with jargon and legalese, making them often indecipherable. But sometimes they can include just a single word that can unleash a whole wealth of new information.
Let’s take this paragraph from Brightcove’s financial result press release for the full year 2016, released last February. Brightcove is a provider of video cloud services; its headquarters are on Congress Street, right between the waterfront and the Rose Kennedy Greenway.
Here’s the paragraph that caught my attention: “New media customers and media customers who expanded their relationship during the quarter included: Barstool Sports, Comicbook.com, Dallas Mavericks, Discovery Networks - Asia, Forbes, National HotRod Association, Sony Pictures - India, and Snap Inc, among others.”
Did the word “Snap, Inc.” ring a bell?
Snap Inc., the public parent company of the popular photo-messaging app Snapchat, is among the new customers of Boston-based company Brightcove. Specifically, Brightcove provides a variety of services for Discover, the digital tool within Snapchat that allows users to explore video stories from different publishers.
“That’s the kind of things that we enable Snapchat to do,” Brightcove CEO David Mendels said in an exclusive interview with BostInno.
Mendels explained how it works. According to Mendels, publishers “ingest” the whole flow of content into a service that Brightcove runs. “It gets managed by us, it gets transcoded and delivered by us.”
Mendels pointed out that the playback engine for the videos inside the Snapchat app is also Brightcove’s.
“We’ve been working with [Snapchat] for a couple of years. When we first met with them, they didn’t know Discover would be successful,” Mendels added.
Snap introduced Discover at the beginning of 2015. Today, it has more than 40 content partners, including Buzzfeed and CNN, who are generally happy with the partnership, as CNBC reported. Many news organizations - Vox.com and The New York Times, for example, but the list could go on and on - have a specific editorial strategy for Snapchat’s Discover.
The deal with Snap is a bright spot in Brightcove history. The company has experienced a general decline in its stock price - with a couple of peaks in 2013 and 2016 - since its initial public offering in 2012. Recently, a board member resigned over the company's “disappointing” performance. Brightcove declined to disclose the value of its deal with Snap, Inc.
Asked about the challenges that Brightcove is facing, Mendels pointed out that the publishing space is facing economic challenges. Both print and digital publishers are struggling to maintain a solid stream of revenue from advertising.
“There’s a segment of our customers that are really struggling, and that means we’re struggling with them,” Mendels said. “If they can’t make money on videos, then they can’t afford to buy our services.”
