Online video platform Brightcove has bought cloud-based video service Zencoder, alongside posting healthy second quarter revenues.

Brightcove, who are platinum sponsors for Apps World in October, will hope to utilise Zencoder’s Video.js, an open source HTML5 video player which has gained impressive market share in a short space of time compared to previous legacy systems running on Adobe Flash.

According to Zencoder, the cloud encoders will “continue to operate as an independent service, but…will do so as part of Brightcove”.

 “In summary, Brightcove is a complementary company in the video space who believes in our developer focus,” wrote Zencoder’s official blog, adding: “Now, thanks to Brightcove, we will have a global sales force equipped to sell our products, a big marketing group, and a 24/7 ops team.”

“Together we can do big things”, Zencoder promised.

Looking at this, the move seems to make sense, even though the sell was an “extremely hard decision”.

Evidently what Brightcove will hope for is that companies use Video.js as a jumping off point before upgrading to Brightcove’s Video Cloud platform.

Plus Zencoder is a start up in every sense of the word, with a minimal number of staff and is subsequently constrained by that.

Brightcove will as a result be investing a significant amount more into Video.js than Zencoder ever could, while keeping it as an open source HTML5 video player.

Zencoder is a Y Combinator alumnus, similar to Meteor who recently raised over £7m in an enterprise app drive.

And it’s expected that the San Francisco start up would hope to utilise Brightcove’s experience in the enterprise.

An important point to note relates to the fact that Zencoder is involved with powering some of Brightcove’s competitors in the Video Cloud sphere.

However, according to the Zencoder blog: “We plan to continue to offer our services to anyone who wants high performance encoding in the cloud. We also believe that as cloud services continue to grow and mature, this will become more and more common”.

“We believe the Zencoder acquisition will advance Brightcove’s position as a leading cloud platform provider that not only provides rich, end-to-end solutions, but also offers scalable standalone building blocks for developers to build custom systems,” said Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire.

Elsewhere, Brightcove’s second quarter results were up with revenue ending at $21.6 million (£13.8m), a 41% increase from their 2011 figures. Similarly, the number of customers using Brightcove’s services was up 43% on last year.

Brightcove announced the acquisition of Zencoder as part of their financial results. But do you think this is a good move for both parties?