Watching Jeremy Allaire demonstrate Brightcove’s value proposition in person, I immediately understood how powerful and fast it would be in enabling video content to be assembled, ads inserted, and delivered in Flash by a non-technical user.

This Boston Globe story tells the tale of Brightcove announcing later today that they’ve acquired Seattle-based MetaStories.

Why is this important? Because cool technology — and the reach of the global internet — is interesting, but without enabling tools *that manage and accelerate workflows* for mass, *non-technical-user* use, any new thing is less useful and thus slow to be adopted.

From what I’ve seen and what others have said, Brightcove was missing really robust, multiple-media assembly tools that took content and delivered a highly refined and finished product able to be delivered in Flash (running on 97% or so of the world’s web browsers). With the acquisition discussed in the Globe article, Jeremy Allaire ha’s vaulted Brightcove forward and will be in a better position to provide tools for rapid assembly and delivery on the internet.

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.

It will remain to be seen whether or not these tools are affordable. Yeah…it’s nice that Apple’s iMovie/Final Cut, Adobe Premiere and other non-linear editing tools exist, but it’s a stretch to go from creation to delivery published on the Web. If there are true enabling tools for the masses creating and delivering content on the Web already, this truly will manifest as an “internet video explosion.” If not, then it will be relegated to those with big budgets and making your own internet TV station (WYOU) isn’t going to happen.