Robert Mason

Chief Technology Officer, Brightcove

Can you talk a little about Bright Cove and the idea behind it?

I helped found this company with Jeremy Elair and was really founded on the premise of being an open, democratic platform that allows anyone in the world to be able to launch their own television channel. And what we recognize is sort of the power of the internet as a medium that allows us to have an equal platform for both large major broadcasters, that you may see on cable or satellite, television, all the way down to small, independent film producers.

What was your career path?

I actually wanted to be an Electrical Engineer, because I was also taking electronics courses in high school. But when I actually got into high school and realized how difficult it was to deal with the real world, so like real components and electronics, I realized I preferred to stay in the virtual world of programming computers. So I graduated from Wooster Polytechnic with a Computer Science degree, and during that time I really started getting into video and interactive media and multi media projects. I did a bunch of stuff at college and then I also worked for Microsoft, for a summer.

How did you connect with Jeremy Elair?

I had worked at this company at ATG starting out of college. After ten years I quit and I basically took the year off. But during that time I was introduced to Jeremy through some mutual friends. Coincidentally that year, we had both gone to Las Vegas to the consumer electronics show. We saw a lot of interesting new technology that was coming out related to hooking up video to computers and then hooking the computers up to televisions. And I think that’s what struck Jeremy and I the most.

What were some of the initial challenges in starting Brightcove?

When we started back in late 2004, Internet television and broadcasting your own channel through the Internet really wasn’t a concept that was out there at the time. I think the first initial challenge was to basically convince the world that this was a good time to start thinking about this. Because in the past, there was a lot of activity in the video space, but there were really slow videos, very poor quality. I think people got turned off on that for a little while, and you had to re-educate people and say, technology has changed, bandwidth is better now, and a bunch of other factors, and to really evangelize why this is the time to invest and seriously consider that.

How do you place yourselves as unique in your field?

Bright Cove started on the premise that we wanted to enable others to build media businesses verses you YouTube started off saying, our primary function is to make sure people can share videos with each other. What’s really important for us is making sure that the platform is open so anyone can utilize it. And so, when we think about, what does a smaller video producer need, or what does a new startup that’s trying to create a new vertical niche, television channel…not only do they need a technology platform, that helps them very easily launch a channel on their own website, but they also need help creating revenue – so they need a monetization strategy. That’s why we have the ability for people to use our advertising network and actually to make money off of using our platform.

So, how would a video producer go onto Bright Cove and create a channel?

For someone that is maybe a bigger organization or is already doing their own advertising sales you can use the Bright Cove platform and pay us usage fees, and you can manage everything on your own. For someone that is just getting started, you can use the exact same platform and service that you know Discovery uses for free, and in exchange, Bright Cove reserves the right to sell advertising against your content. And you can put them on your own websites, you can allow them to be shared virally, so your own viewers can put them on their own personal blogs, or myspace pages, or things of that nature.

How has the Internet changed on the road to this point?

You saw sites like Yahoo, come into being, which tried to organize the Web in a hierarchy and category, and eventually that became so unwieldy that Google became dominant. And everything was search oriented, because there were so many billions and billions of websites and web pages. And I think we’re really at the cusp of seeing the same thing with broadband media and video – over the Internet. Pretty soon the acceleration of the number of video channels that get launched and delivered over the internet – particularly if you think about the global nature of it will be awe inspiring.

And where does Brightcove go with that?

Brightcove hopes to be the dominant platform to enable all of that where both big broadcasts media companies but also smaller independent people really have the opportunity to build these businesses where they can tell good stories about what how life is or the world is and really allow people to connect over the shared experiences.

What do you look for when they’re hiring people?

Obviously, you want really smart people because you’re trying to solve difficult problems. But if you’re smart and you can’t work along with other people, then there’s no point. No one wants to work with a jerk. But you actually have to get stuff done, too. So there’s a lot of people that are really smart and really nice but just you know can’t focus really well or things of that nature. So those are the three principles that I look at.