Good read. About that time too was Bright Cove. I was an early video journalist / vlogger in the mid 1990s.

Bright Cove was a free platform until one day they changed their business proposition. The early 2000s Dotcom 1 was a heady period and frankly 8mbit rates that could mimic TV was still a distant dream.

Macromedia's Flash provided a solution. Vimeo and YouTube's arrival posed a problem for companies. That was the era when outbound links were discouraged. All media, at the nascent stage of the web, was to be kept on your server.

Also the aesthetic of YouTube on a high end site just didn't work. That all soon disappeared for a more pragmatic approach to the new high end bit rate of several players e.g. Daily Motion.

Like a few Soho workers we got caught up in the whole Flash Video vibe and in 2004 launched one of the first video magazines. We did it for the love of it and being disruptive. Hey Ho http://www.j-lab.org/projects/knight-batten-awards-for-innovations-in-journalism/knight-batten-2005/