Brightcove has announced it will stop offering its Brightcove network service to publishers for free as of December 18 2008 and will revert to its original business model where users pay to use its services. The service had more than 40,000 publishers producing quality work for Brightcove which no doubt played a significant role to get the company where it is today. Brightcove supported this free service with online ads, though despite all of those people producing content and thousands and thousands of views, Brightcove says the ads produced less than 1% of total revenue. Brightcove is trying, however, to accommodate its users, it has developed a low cost Brightcove Basic platform for producers which includes various standard features including the ability to work with third party advertisers. Users will automatically get a risk free 7 day trial. The Brightcove Basic service cost has not yet been announced. Notably, Brightcove has experienced significant growth in terms of traffic (241.8% increase year over year) as shown by this Compete graph. I personally think the company should have continued to offer the service free of charge, or at least scale it, as a good gesture to their hard working users.