Some thousands of users received a really, really bad message last week: brightcove is closing down its free services which forces all (free) users to get themselves an offer for the new brightcove 3.

But actually you can save your breath, because – like me – you probably can’t effort to pay that much money or better to say you can save a lot of Euros, Dollars or whatever by choosing another partner for your video activities.

Why? Well, let’s start from the beginning.
brightcove is gernerally great. I started to use use it some 3 years ago when the Mitteldeutsche Basketballclub (MBC) became client of my company, mint media. Before using the brightcove service I was struggeling to provide our customers (in this case audience as well as the client) an adequate video solution. YouTube is popular, but the quality is awful. On the other hand you have some providers seeking for better resolutions like Sevenload, but you still don’t have the comfort of an complete area where you can do everything from creating thumbnails, previews, bumpers, pre-roll ads, customized players to detailed reports.

So finally I got to use brightcove. I don’t even remember anymore who’s recommendation it was, but it was really satisfying anyway.
Over several years we were able to upload tons of Gigabytes of video material, brightcove would store anything and present it in no time with a great quality. When we came to the point to offer advertising solutions we had great integration models on the one hand side and could provide detailed information to our advertisers on the other which brought some Euros into the mint media cash box.

But anyway we asked ourselves all the time how brightcove could effort to provide such a service? And now we got the answer: they can’t. Why should they close it down now if for another reason?

Well, actually it’s not like brightcove would just say „Guys, pay for it or leave it“. What they did is more like pretending to do some renewals, calling it „brightcove 3″. I think that are just some slight changes, such as the integration of Google AdSense, – the main modernization is the design.
However this isn’t worth an increase of 4800 Euros! Yep, that’s what brightcove wants to charge for one year. (Tech specs in this case are something around 10.000 viewers, medium resolution and not more than 1GB per month.)

Way too much money after my opinion. For that amount I’d rather employ a web designer to build up a similar flash-based interface.
Or switch to Vimeo. Dan Frommer (Silicon Alley Insider) gave me that idea. I wasn’t quite sure if that’s an appropriate solution, so I wrote the following comment:

I’m afraid you can’t really compare Brightcove to something like Vimeo, because the NYT-supported company gives you some great browser-applications to analyse and present your videos, whereas Vimeo is just a (way) better YouTube.
Did I miss something or is there another option to keep a brightcove-like video service?

As it turns out there are really some other services. (I collected them for you at the bottom of this article.) But there are either as expansive as brightcove is now or they’re not as good as Vimeo can be.

Vimeo seems to be a proper solution if you want to save a lot of money and still want to get a good result. They got some great features and a good-looking player whereas you have 2GB storage a week and (real) HD Videos. You can customize your player in almost every detail you want – you can even put text or graphic at the end of your video (which is good for ads, too).
At a price of 59,99 $ (~ 49 €) a year that seems pretty fair. Consider also that you can test Vimeo at first totally free as long as you want to (but with banner ads and slow uploads and all that shit).

But even so you should always think a lot about the targeted usage of the project. Viral campaigns are almost only good on YouTube (because they got the name and a huge community) and detailed reports or special functions like costumized navigation or ad network integration are available with brightcove – not Vimeo.