Brightcove acquires MetaStories, joining two Internet start-ups
The Internet television start-up Brightcove of Cambridge is set to disclose today that it has acquired Seattle-based MetaStories, another start-up that provides tools for producing interactive online content.
The new partners, both privately held companies, declined to disclose the financial terms of their transaction.
Jeremy Allaire, Brightcove's founder and chief executive, said the acquisition would expand the ''rich media" Web-publishing capabilities that Brightcove is marketing to media companies and independent producers.
''It's a new complementary area that we can take advantage of," Allaire, who sold his previous Web-publishing software company to Macromedia, said in an interview. ''It's our intention to offer a version of the Brightcove service that includes the MetaStories technologies."
Brightcove's service integrates all of the electronic systems needed to stream video and other media over the Internet: systems for publishing content; delivering content to personal computers, televisions, and portable devices; handling advertising and retail transactions; and syndicating programs to other distribution channels.
The company's customers range from small production firms like Barrio 305 in Miami to niche-oriented cable networks such as Oxygen to diversified news companies such as The New York Times Co., corporate parent of The Boston Globe.
MetaStories markets tools that enable customers to capitalize on new broadband technologies by combining video with audio, photographs, interactive maps, and graphics.
One customer is Yahoo Inc., whose roving correspondent Kevin Sites uses the tools to produce audio-narrated photojournalism from the world's war zones.
Brian Monnin, the MetaStories cofounder and chief executive, who is a veteran of Microsoft Corp.'s MSN division, will remain in Seattle with his 10-person team and report to Allaire. Rather than move MetaStories to Brightcove's headquarters in Cambridge, home to most of its 50 employees, Allaire said that he decided to keep the Seattle operation as a base for recruiting multimedia employees from companies like Microsoft, Real Networks, and Amazon.com.
''Boston has some good technology talent, but there's not that many online media companies located here," Allaire said.
Brightcove's technology could help fuel ''an Internet video explosion," in which publishers large and small would be able to easily put video online, said Josh Bernoff, principal analyst for Forrester Research in Cambridge.
Bernoff suggested that some of the larger media companies may shy away from third-party providers, however, while independent publishers on foreign-language or niche topics such as undersea exploration may gravitate to Brightcove-type services.
''The most prominent sites on the Internet with video on them, such as CNN.com or ESPN.com, will be using their own systems," Bernoff said.
''If your big thing is filming Hollywood celebrities stumbling drunk out of restaurants in Los Angeles, or putting together training videos for therapists, this gives you a way to sell advertising for it."
Robert Weisman can be reached at weisman@globe.com. 
