Google to acquire Brightcove and has just snapped up ReCaptcha (Updated)

**Update: Reports of Google Acquiring Brightcove reportedly untrue. More details here.**

Google is reportedly in talks to buy online video tool Brightcove for $500 million to $700 million, reports BusinessInsider.

Brightcove is a web video publishing platform aimed at professional publishers thatstreams several hundred million videos a month. Its clients include large media brands like Showtime, Lifetime, HBO, the New York Times and AMC (you can watch Mad Men through their player on the AMC website). Brightcove is a paid service with prices starting at a few thousand dollars a year.

If the acquisition is made, it would see Google become without question the most dominant force in online video by some margin.

Google has also officially announced the acquisition of ReCaptcha, one of the companies behind the various distorted text boxes at the bottom of many Web site sign-in pages.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Google plans to use ReCaptcha’s technology both as a security measure within certain Google sites and to make its massive book-scanning project a little smarter, the company said in a blog post.

ReCaptcha is a spinoff of a Carnegie Mellon University project, and its value lies in it’s unique methods in preventing spam bots from accessing websites.