Encoding.com Launches Vid.ly Pro, "The Universal Video URL Platform" to Help Solve Video Publishing Pain Points

One of the biggest pain points for video publishers is how to deliver video to every user on any browser or mobile device. As the fractured video landscape continues to grow in complexity and scale with no standard across platforms, San Francisco-based cloud encoding start-up Encoding.com, has built its business creating innovative solutions to help ease that pain. One such product is Vid.ly, which Encoding.com released earlier this year as a beta version and now months later, after a successful launch and overwhelming market response, Vid.ly has been released as a Pro version primarily targeting the tens of thousands of media brands, agencies, and application developers.

Vid.ly is both a clever and unique service that allows publishers to upload videos and get back a universal video url that will play your video everywhere, on any desktop browser or mobile device. When the video is uploaded to Vid.ly, it converts it into a variety of different formats and bit rates and once the video is transcoded, Vid.ly provides a short url and embed code for publishing. The beauty of Vid.ly is that publishers don't have to worry about the pain of video encoding, transcoding, file formats, display resolutions or any of the headaches involved in preparing, storing and delivering video online or to mobile devices. Vid.ly takes care of it all and when viewers click on the url, Vid.ly detects the device or browser type and delivers the correctly formatted and optimized video.

Publishers can embed the HTML5 code provided by Vid.ly directly into their web pages or Flash players, or can share the provided short URL via SMS, Facebook, Twitter or other social media outlets.



According to Encoding.com's President Jeff Malkin, Vid.ly takes on the heavy lifting that is usually done by online video platforms (OVPs) by delivering important and basic functionality (transcoding, storage and delivery through partners) along with device and browser detection  all wrapped up in a single url, and he says, "The feedback we're getting is how simple it is, that's what's resonating."

Malkin says that the key features of Vid.ly Pro include, first and foremost, the API, which mobile app developers and video platforms can now all build Vid.ly directly into their content management systems, apps and workflow. Among the many new features in Vid.ly Pro, developers can now control the 25 output profiles, create unlimited source video file size, adaptive bitrate streaming for all Apple iOS devices and have a choice of CDN, either Akamai or AWS Cloudfront and more CDNs will be added throughout the year. Down the road Encoding.com plans to add analytics and a customizable HTML5 video player, and as Malkin says, "The whole goal is to maintain the simplicity of the platform."

One of the key verticals that's embraced Vid.ly, Malkin notes, are the ad agencies, which he says are signing up left and right. Mainly because they are all moving into video for their giant consumer packaged goods and branded customers, and they don't really have the video infrastructure to manage large campaigns.

"For them it's all about speed to market," he says, "so Vid.ly just removes all of that headache for them, and obviously does it for them in a very simple way."

The other key factor for agencies, says Malkin, is that up until now they've really had no choice but to use YouTube which has been what he calls "a necessary evil", but they'd rather not use YouTube. Brands want to build their own sites and not be branded as a YouTube video. "So with Vid.ly," Malkin says, "they can do that."

Another vertical that he says is very obvious, is the mobile app world, which is waiting to explode with video as the mobile photo app world already has done so. The mobile video apps world hasn't yet exploded because it also requires a massive video infrastructure, and only a few like SocialCam, Qik, Skype and Ustream each have its own massive video infrastructure. But Vid.ly takes that all off the table, says Malkin, and in fact Encoding.com is creating a wrapper for its Vid.ly API right now in Objective-C code for iOS devices that they will be releasing in about a month to make it "drop dead easy" to create video apps for the iPhone and iPad and from there move onto the other platforms.

Another use case that Malkin says they never imagined, but seems to be generating a lot of Vid.ly usage is the QR code vertical. It's gaining serious popularity with advertisers, retailers and big box stores to tie print to digital. While video is a perfect medium for QR code campaigns, it hasn't been well utilized because you never know what phone is scanning the QR code and therefore you don't know what video format to serve to that device. But storing a Vid.ly url in that QR code is simple, he says, and a prime example is a giant real estate platform that produces thousands of mailers of homes for sale and can embed a video walk through of an open house within the code. Another is big box retailers that use QR codes that can be scanned to bring up how to product videos.


Malkin says that they are getting some amazing data on where video views are coming from by platform, based on approximately 5 million views from the past 3 months of Vid.ly operations. iPhones lead the pack with 62.52%, Android 23.98%, Blackberry 11.12% and followed by iPad 2.38%. Browser views were: Firefox 51.3%, Chrome 22.2%, Internet Explorer 20.6%, Safari = 3.3% and Other 2.6%. This information will be updated quarterly on the Vid.ly homepage at http://m.vid.ly/

In April of this year, the company announced a $2 million funding round from current investors, that was used to expand the scale of Encoding.com’s operations and customer acquisition efforts. Revenue growth has been steady month over month, but Malkin says, that Vid.ly Pro will likely be the tipping point to move its revenue to the upward trajectory. While the company has received several acquisition offers, it has turned them down and it continues to focus on enhancing its products and customer experience.

"For us, our sweet spot seems to be the tens of thousands of video content publishers, agencies and app developers that live between YouTube or Vimeo and the big OVPs." says Malkin. "With Vimeo on one end of the spectrum and the heavy OVPs on the other end of the spectrum who simply need a solution that's going to have their video work regardless of where the end user in trying to view that video. That's the huge gap that Vid.ly's filling."

About Encoding.com
Encoding.com, the world’s largest video encoding service and provider of Vid.ly, the universal video platform, powers over 2,000 companies, including leading brands across media and entertainment, eLearning, retail, telecommunications, lifestyle, and advertising. Blending a flexible SaaS model using cloud-computing platforms, Encoding.com enables publishers and developers to instantly scale, while eliminating expensive video infrastructure investments, and supports all popular web and mobile formats. Gartner recognized Encoding.com as a “Cool Vendor 2011.” For ongoing company updates, please see http://blog.encoding.com, http://blog.vid.ly or follow @encodingdotcom, @vidlyURL on Twitter.

Related:

• Encoding.com Announces Vid.ly Pro - Universal Video Playback Solves Biggest Pain Point... -- SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 17, 2011 /PRNewswire/ --
• Vid.ly Grows Up, Goes Pro - The Universal Video URL Slam Dunk
• Vid.ly Pro is Unveiled, Fits Between YouTube/Vimeo and OVPs
• Encoding.com launches pro version of video URL shortening service Vid.ly - FierceOnlineVideo
• Encoding.com’s Vid.ly ready to go pro — Online Video News
• Encoding.com Announces Commercial Availability of Vid.ly Pro - Streaming Media Magazine

Encoding.com Sees the Future of Video Encoding in the Cloud

At Streaming Media East 2010, I spoke with Jeff Malkin, President of Encoding.com, to hear about how his company's cloud-based encoding business model works, and how the company and customer base has shaped up over the last year and half. According to Malkin, Encoding.com is the world's largest encoding service, which he says both seriously and facetiously – and described his company as the dominant player in the encoding SaaS (Software as a Service) space, which he admits is a new and emerging space.

Since its launch in September 2008, San Francisco-based Encoding.com has delivered over 6 million encoded videos, and encodes an average of 30,000 videos per day for its growing customer base. With more than 700 customers, Encoding.com powers the encoding and transcoding services of many leading video publishers and platforms including Cisco Eos, MTV Networks, WebMD, CarDomain, MySpace, Nokia, Kaltura, Vzaar and Giant Realm. While their roster of customers are impressive, Malkin admits that he's most excited by the various use cases of how their customers are applying the service, for media and publishing, user generated content, online education, news and information – just to name a few.

Before Encoding.com came along, Malkin says that most companies invested a lot capital expense into infrastructure and teams to manage in-house encoding requirements. Encoding.com helps solve the "build vs. buy" conundrum by offering a SaaS model that leverages cloud infrastructure through an XML API.  The company is the only video encoding SaaS provider integrated with both EC2 and Cloud Servers, with storage choices with Rackspace and Amazon.

He maintains that Encoding.com makes it easy at a very high level:

"You tell us where the source file is located – that can be at a CDN, cloud storage, secure FTP –  the one or many ways you want each file to be transcoded, and where do you want us to deliver it to. Which is 9 out of 10 times to your CDN for serving." 

Malkin described Encoding.com's value through cost-savings, quality, and a scalable solution:

"By approaching the market this way, we solve some critical pain points for our customers. Number one is this instant notion of infinite scalability. No longer do you need to worry about making these large investments up front or being able to predict your video encoding requirements. There's this notion of having to manage this in-house – as many of us know in the video encoding space, video encoding is somewhat of a black art, there's lots of errors that occur, it's not really a science yet – and by outsourcing it to an automated platform such as Encoding.com, it's our job to manage that effort for you, and as you know, stay on top of the latest and greatest of the technologies that continue to evolve."

Encoding.com supports all the major and emerging web and mobile media formats, including Apple's HTTP streaming and Google's new open source WebM format. In a guest post for VideoNuze, Malkin offered some insight and advise on how to navigate the video format wars.  With confusion in the online video marketplace with HTML5/H.264 vs. Flash vs. Silverlight vs. WebM, he says it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better.

According to Malkin:

"While both H.264 and VP8 are good quality codecs, only VP8 is currently royalty-free and therefore, has a great opportunity to emerge as the new leader within the next year or two. However, for web distribution today, we recommend encoding your videos using the H.264 video codec in an .mp4 container. This is a high-quality output format already supported by Flash, and the leading HTML5 browsers including Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Internet Explorer v9."

Malkin says that the mastermind behind Encoding.com is his partner, Greggory Heil, Encoding.com's Founder and CEO, and for him it was born out of necessity. Heil was running a software company focused on building and managing user-generated video sites, and wanted to streamline the incompatibility issues he kept running into with encoding and ingesting of video content. He found only expensive hardware solutions on the market and saw an opportunity to fill a gap in the market using his background in product development and application hosting services. Heil relaunched Encoding.com as a SaaS video encoding platform in September 2008, moving into the cloud and away from the company's roots of the mid-1990s where they hand coded and archived source video content from videotape formats. Encoding.com was named one of seven finalists in Amazon Web Services' 2008 $100,000 Startup Challenge.

Encoding.com also received praise from Streaming Media EVP Dan Rayburn earlier in the year, in a post: Encoding.com Would Be On My List Of Top Companies To Watch In 2010 | The Business Of Online Video.

Rayburn said:

"One of the things I really like about Encoding.com is that they are small, focused and want to be the best at only one thing. Their executives know the market, have spent a great deal of time and effort to create a very good platform and frankly, I think they are really smart. They know what they want to be, where their service fits into the market and what problem they need to solve. In just about every piece of the video ecosystem, be it content delivery or video management, there tends to be many players, but one clear leader. While Encoding.com is not the only SaaS based transcoding service on the market, they are already by far the leader in the space and I expect them to further dominate this segment of the market this year."

In addition, Streaming Media magazine selected Encoding.com as an, “Editors’ Picks 2010 – The Best of the Best”, as one of the top ten hottest companies in the world of online video.

Last week, the company released a new API that allows customers to offer Encoding.com as a white-label solution within their own platforms. In December 2009, Encoding.com closed a $1.25 Million Series A funding from VC and angel investors. Malkin says the company will use the funds to fuel aggressive sales, marketing, and brand awareness initiatives. Encoding.com plans to stay hyper focused on their core business and customers. 

Malkin also spoke at Streaming Media East panel session: B203: Automation and Workflow Solutions for Transcoding Your Video Content and you can view the archive of that session here: Conference Videos - StreamingMedia.com


About Encoding.com
Encoding.com, the world's largest video encoding service, makes video transcoding into all popular formats easy, cost-effective and instantly scalable for global enterprises and SMBs including video sites, agencies, and website development platforms. As the first and only encoding service offering service level agreements, Encoding.com removes the necessity for its customers and partners to make heavy investments in expensive hardware/software solutions and overhead required to manage high-volume video transcoding needs and backs it with a wait-time service level guarantee. Encoding.com received Series A funding in 2010 from Metamorphic Ventures and angel investors: Patrick Condon, Fred Hamilton, Zelkova Ventures, Dave Morgan and Allen Morgan. It was selected as an Editors’ Pick for 2010 by StreamingMedia. This Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business is based in Denver, Colorado and San Francisco, California. For more information about Encoding.com, visit http://www.Encoding.com.