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This is my largest Brightcove News post so far, as I've been a little busy lately. Now that life is return to a new sleep-deprived normal, I'll share the news I've been gathering.

Brightcove 4: The launch of Brightcove 4 should have its own blog post, but I'll write what I can here. Some of these features I've written about on this blog before, like live video, VAST support, and Facebook integration. Here's a list of features I haven't mentioned, some of which I'll talk about more below: a new Express edition, iPhone SDK, new analytics module, transcoding movies with more renditions and higher quality, ability to switch between progressive and streaming for any video in your account, live streaming with full ad support, and more ad integrations (including OpenX and Freewheel).

$99-A-Month Edition: The Brightcove Express version can now be bought online for $99 a month (with some other plans costing more). I remember talking to someone awhile ago (ahem, on a podcast) and being told Brightcove was much too expensive for them to use. This is a price that many more people can afford, and I'm very excited to see more people try out Brightcove. If you've read this blog for awhile and are just curious to try things out (and/or you want to see the nice-looking Flex apps that are used for video management) you can also use the link above to quickly create a trial account.

iPhone SDK: The iPhone SDK is a pretty big project at Brightcove, and it's grabbed a lot of attention in the launch. I've only seen the demos of it, and it does looks snazzy. The switching between progressive and streaming videos in an account makes the retrieval of videos from Brightcove a lot easier for this project and for all other mobile devices. Often companies want to have their videos streamed on the Web, for bandwidth savings and making it harder to steal, but mobile devices require progressive videos. We now have a simple switch in the media APIs (one parameter that needs to be added to calls) to force the retrieval of progressive videos.

The Mad Men Keep Going: The OpenX ad integration is interesting as a free solution for advertising. OpenX is an open source ad server you can install yourself. Also interesting on the ad front is the release of the ad rules SDK. This SDK, when used with the ad translation and ad display SWF SDKs, allows for complete control of the ad system in the player. Companies like Freewheel need this in order to allow their own complex ad rules to behave in the player, and the ad SDKs are allowing very involved integrations to be done without Brightcove's direct help.

Palm OS Example: The non-iPhone world, we haven't completely forgotten about you. There's a new article on developing for Palm.

Brightcove 3.4: This release didn't have as much in it previous dot releases, as we were gearing up for Brightcove 4, but it did include media sharing in the media module and ad support in the media controls.

New Media SDKs: Two new media SDKs are being worked on: one from Al Manning for ActionScript and one for Java.

Remembering ColdFusion: I worked on the ColdFusion team for six months, so I won't forget about it (and the CFers can thank me for the super keyword for CFCs in 6.1 as well as many of the performance improvements). But to bring it back for those who haven't thought about it for awhile, here's an example of posting videos to Brightcove in CF and a creator's interview with Jeremy Allaire