Many news organizations expressed interest in Apple's new gadget, the iPad.  From The Wall Street Journal to The New York Times, Apple demoed the device to executives from top publications across the country.  Many felt that there was potential for specially crafted sites to be delivered to the devices.  With the news that Apple was supporting HTML5 in the device, the final piece of the puzzle -- advertising -- fell into place.

Brightcove, a Cambridge, MA company who first became famous for providing video, audio, and image publishing services for TiVo in 2006, jumped at that opportunity and now is offering publications a HTML5 packing platform that allows site designs and ports with minimal effort.

The new platform, dubbed BrightCove Experience for HTML5, is available for free to companies that enter partnership contracts with BrightCove.  BrightCove currently has 1,000+ customers; among those who adopted the new platform to provide content for the iPad include The New York Times and TIME Inc.  The platform also offers support for the iPod Touch and the iPhone.

Jeremy Allaire, Brightcove chairman and chief executive officer, describes the platform, stating, "Our customers want to be able to deliver their video content to every screen without sacrificing the quality, interactivity and monetization capabilities they have come to expect from the Brightcove platform.  The Brightcove Experience for HTML5 fills the gap between the current playback capabilities of the emerging standard and what our customers need to operate successful online video businesses."

The platform currently lacks many of the tools of other BrightCove web development platforms, such as "full support for customization and branding of the player environment, advertising, analytics, [and] social sharing."  It currently primarily serves as a way to support H.264 codec HTML5 video and compose iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch ready websites.  The missing capabilities are in the works and should be coming later this year.

BrightCove offers a separate version of its Experience product based on Adobe's Flash Player 10.1.  That platform is available for the Google Android, Symbian S60, Palm webOS, Windows Mobile, and Research in Motion BlackBerry smartphone platforms.

BrightCove obviously isn't picking sides in the HTML5 versus Flash battle -- it's supporting both formats.