Brightcove Ah-ha -- I took a look at Barrio 305, which is a Latino urban music site, showcasing Latin-American celebrities, musical artists, and models. It seems set up in the vein of MTV.com's "Overdrive", though the embedded media player and video thumb catalogue are part of the homepage and not extra features, which I think is a great idea. Makes it easy, and that's what people go there to see. I think the authoring of the page is a response to a much more i-savvy audience, and it presents the site as more of a video resource than an "information" resource, which is necessary if it's competing with TV. It also provides video codecs for distribution across myspace accounts, which seems like the new business card.

The next was the Indy Food Channel site, which showcases trendy hot spots, clubs, restaurants, and foods. Its set up very similar to Barrio, with an embedded media player serving as the mainstay of the homepage along with a thumbnail catalogue of other videos. Indy Food doesn't play content automatically, which to me, somewhat defeats the purpose of offering video so prominently on the homepage. But I like the simple use of Flash animation in the video inventory, and the video navigation is pretty straightforward. There's not much else to the site other than videos on-demand, which I suspect is the way that most major corporate websites are heading...