"All of the issues with mobile that we identified a few years ago, it was all bad stuff, so we never made mobile a priority," Allaire tells Journalism.co.uk.
"What's clear now is that both the mobile web usage and mobile application usage, because of the iPhone, is growing rapidly from a media perspective."
The company is now 'actively working' on mobile video and is focusing on the iPhone in particular, having recently launched a basic 'sample' application for delivering Brightcove video to an iPhone or iPod Touch.
While viewing video on mobile currently accounts for a small percentage of overall consumption, the medium is 'really meaningful when you start to look at aggregate adoption', says Allaire.
There are also opportunities for Brightcove to help its news clients develop mobile as a newsgathering tool, he adds. An announcement about a new mobile video publishing feature involving some print titles is expected later this year, he says.
Video in a downturn
Speaking to Allaire, it is clear that he sees huge potential for growing online video consumption and Brightcove's user base and range of clients.
"Over the last year to year-and-a-half, we've seen a proliferation of non-media organisations starting to embrace video as a fundamental part of their marketing, communications or education agendas. A large amount of our new business is coming from these very diverse segments of society," explains Allaire.
"That's very interesting for us because it goes back to some of the original Brightcove ideals of video becoming as pervasive and ubiquitous as text on the web."
The firm is also expanding its news media customers: at the end of May the provider inked a deal with Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia. It already provides video players on Telegraph.co.uk, Guardian.co.uk, Johnston Press and Sky - but is the economic crisis affecting the news industry's commitment to multimedia?
Over the last six to nine months, Allaire says Brightcove's customers have been growing their video audiences and their video output.
It's a good time to be investing in online content to counter the decline of traditional mediums and audiences, in particular from an advertising perspective, he says.
"These are companies who obviously have an existing business that's under immense pressure. In many ways newspapers were among the first media businesses to get to the web. They've been able to establish pretty reasonably sized end user bases and audience - audiences that are larger than many of the broadcasters' website. As an online platform its a pretty strong position to be in," he explains
"As the web moved into the broadband arena there was clearly an opportunity for these organisations to reinvent the nature of the content that they were creating and that the online audience was going to be the future of their growth.
"If dollars are getting sucked out of the newspaper industry and television advertising and going online, news providers want to chase those dollars, and it turns out that the highest value currency is rich media advertising - video advertising - because that's the major brand advertisers are interested in spending."
A recent case study of Brightcove's US customers suggested that nearly 100 per cent of these clients were generating revenue from advertising around online video with pre-roll advertising as the dominant format.
"I'm not out here saying online video is going to save the newspapers - I just don't think that's remotely possible. I think that online a lot of those companies are going to have to restructure, shed assets and they're going to decrease their print circulation and increase their online. Online is going to be the part that grows," he says.
Changing production values
The need to drive down costs in response to the downturn and an increased understanding of how individuals use the web is, however, changing the way news organisations produce their video content, says Allaire.
"When you think about web video, it's very disposable, very transient and very short lived; it's not like an episodic drama, particularly for news," he says.
"End users have been conditioned to web video being gritty and less polished in some cases. There's definitely an economic imperative here as well, which is, if you try to produce Gossip Girl 100 per cent for the web and didn't produce it for broadcast or put it into international syndication it would fail. You could never afford to do that.
"If you're trying to build more content for the web the production values and costs have to be lower. That's going to lead to more creative formats."
As production values and costs for web video decrease, the ubiquity of video tools and technology such as Brightcove will spread further.
Despite this democratisation of the video-making and publishing process, Brightcove is not yet offering a package for individuals or smaller businesses, says Allaire.
Its Brightcove Basic option - the cheapest offering - is out of their price range. The firm did experiment with a version for smaller independent producers but the economics of building advertising into video content that generates long-tail rather than an immediate audience failed, he explains.
Yet since launching new platform Brightcove 3, 'a new ecosystem' of innovation is growing around the product, from dotSUB – a plugin transcription and translation service for videos - to new forms of advertising around video channels.
Making money
Brightcove teamed up the Telegraph with InSkin to create less intrusive, but rich media advertising features around the site's TV channels. The advert frames the video player and users can click through to see the advert in full - a feature which is more pleasing to the user, says Allaire.
But while Brightcove's US and UK clients are successfully monetising video content, there are issues for the advertising industry in adopting the still nascent medium, he says.
How can advertising firms represent their inventory in keeping with digital and social media and how can they differentiate it using these platforms?
"How do you audit that inventory? The measurement services that are out there for the web don't really measure this adequately," explains Allaire.
"While it's compelling and people are starting to do and will do more of it, the business issues have not been fully worked through."
However, as media and news organisations improve their understanding of how audiences use their websites, better practices for monetising video will emerge, he adds.
"The business imperative is really an economies of scale question. If I'm an online media provider I have got only a certain number of unique visitors users who come to me every month.
"If want my video business to be something that has more scale, the only way I'm going to be able to do that right now is to start syndicating that. It's both a business imperative and it maps to the realities of end user behaviour on the web today," he says.
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