Cloud-based encoding company Encoding.com has raised a $3.5 million Series B round led by video infrastructure provider Harmonic, with participation by existing investors. The new round brings to $8 million the total capital raised by the company.  

The investment follows a partnership announced last April between the companies in which Encoding.com integrated Harmonic's ProMedia Carbon transcoding solution. That deal allows content providers and distributors who already use Carbon on-premise to tap into Encoding.com's Carbon deployment to meet transcoding demand spikes.

Jeff Malkin, Encoding.com's president told me one of the big advantages is that Carbon customers can use the exact same preset encoding parameters whether using Carbon on-premise or cloud, so existing workflows are maintained. Encoding.com's Carbon deployment also gives content providers and distributors that don't have Carbon on-premise to access it exclusively in the cloud.

Jeff said that numerous leading video providers have adopted the cloud-based Carbon solution, and the new investment will lead to additional Harmonic solutions being offered via Encoding.com's cloud.

Encoding.com now offers 30 different "engines" in its cloud, including for closed captioning, DRM, watermarking, audio processing, image processing, etc. The explosion of devices, formats and network conditions has created huge challenges for video providers whose users want high-quality video experiences wherever/whenever they choose to watch.

All of this has created an ideal environment for Encoding.com to package and streamline various video processing technologies into cloud-based services. While many companies continue to favor on-premise solutions, Encoding.com is benefiting from the momentum around all things cloud-related. I don't foresee anything slowing these key trends in the near future.