Encoding.com has relaunched to address the new cost, quality, and scalability encoding issues that have emerged with the explosion of internet and mobile video applications.
As a company that formerly hand coded and archived source video content, Encoding.com believes they can bring Internet and mobile video applications to the next level by providing a cost efficient, robust, and scalable encoding service that allows companies to focus on creating quality video content rather than investing heavily in encoding infrastructure. The end result is a dynamic encoding cloud made available as an on demand web service in an XML API. Customers send in their source content in any popular format, and receive encoded media at a location of their choice, in the format of their choice. The company hopes this technology will facilitate the development of higher quality video content on the web.
Encoding.com is part of a growing number of web services offering cloud computing options that promise to help businesses cut back on hardware infrastructure costs. Other services that offer cloud computing are Amazon’s EC2 and Parascale, who recently secured a large sum in first round funding. These services, however, are not dedicated to video conversion.
On-demand trans-coding is not a new biz model, the biggest problem here will be to ensure that the video encode quality is proper for the intended use/user in mind. This is not something that you can just point and click at. I have been doing video encoding since ‘94 and yes the technology today is much better, still I see lots of crappy videos on the web and the main reason is how they are produced. For the average company this may work just fine, but I am not sure who they are going after. I would partner with he CDN’s and offer a white label offering as well as integrate this with 3rd party SaaS and software vendors. MySpace and Facebook could use this to standardise not to mention that the YouTube video trans-coding is not taking a bit too much time for those 5 min clips.
Having managed the encoding platform of a growing user generated video site I know the time money and energy it takes to build let alone scale this from scratch. I think this really takes a huge burden off of video application developer. I would have integrated with their API in a second. Well done.
This looks quite slick. We tried writing a one-off encoder workflow once, but it turned out pretty crufty, couldn’t handle two of the formats we ended up needing, and six months later nobody remembered how it worked.
Cloud encoding is one of the best ideas out there. Like Jack, I struggle with my own encoding infrastructure…. where were these guys 2 years ago!