Posts for 'Encoding'

Brightcove has announced the beta availability of a new transcoding approach it calls Context Aware Encoding, which aims to save customers money through reduced storage and delivery bandwidth, while still optimizing visual quality.

Context Aware Encoding optimizes a video’s parameters including resolution and frame rate, plus codec parameters including bitrate, codec profile and level in order to create a set of specific adaptive bitrates. All of this is done by analyzing the video using machine learning to optimize it for devices and bandwidth.

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Multi-screen video processing provider Elemental Technologies has raised a Series D round of $14.5 million, led by Telstra, with participation by Sky and existing investors. With the round, Elemental has raised $44 million to date. Funds will be used for product development and to support global growth.

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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.

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Encoding.com and Harmonic have announced a partnership to offer unlimited cloud-based transcoding to content and service providers to convert broadcast-quality content into numerous other media formats for multi-screen delivery.

Jeff Malkin, president of Encoding.com told me that there are 2 principal benefits of the partnership: 1) existing Harmonic ProMedia Carbon customers can use their presets/profiles to easily augment their own on-premise encoding infrastructure when workloads increase by utilizing Encoding.com cloud capacity, and 2) for new customers who want to tap use cloud transcoding instead of building their own infrastructure, they can use Encoding.com. In both situations transcoding costs and time to market are reduced.

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I'm pleased to present the 196th edition of the VideoNuze podcast with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia. Colin was at the big IBC event in Amsterdam last week and today we discuss 3 of his key themes: how Amazon Web Services (AWS) has become deeply immersed in the online video industry, the rollout of HEVC (high efficiency video coding) plus 4K TV, and the prevalence of multi-screen video solutions.  

Colin explains how AWS has succeeded in online video, particularly with cloud-based transcoding that leverage its elastic computing resources. This is a theme I hear repeatedly as well and wrote about recently with T3Media's integration with AWS.

Colin then discusses how HEVC is rolling out, but notes continued industry reservations about 4K TV. Last, Colin observes that multi-screen video solutions were on display everywhere at IBC. With the rise of mobile phones, tablets and connected TV devices, multi-screen has become mainstream. One thing Colin notes was nowhere to be found at IBC was 3D, which he views as now dead on arrival.

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I'm pleased to present the 186th edition of the VideoNuze weekly podcast with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia. Colin attended a CDN conference earlier this week first shares observations on the potential long-term rollout of 4K TV and HEVC, along with the deployment of Netflix's Open Connect CDN based on conversations with Netflix and Time Warner Cable.

Next we turn to data from NPD earlier this week indicating that for watching TV shows, DVR usage is more than twice as popular as SVOD services like Netflix, Hulu Plus, Amazon, which I wrote about earlier this week. Colin caveats the data, noting that in SVOD-specific homes he believes the usage is stronger than NPD suggests.

Lastly we touch on news that Samsung will be selling curved TVs, for $13K apiece. Colin and I are skeptics, to say the least.

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I'm pleased to present the 175th edition of the VideoNuze podcast with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia. This week Colin and I attended NABShow 2013 in Las Vegas, where we had a booth and recorded 20+ video interviews with industry executives, which we'll post over the next couple of weeks.

Through the interviews and other on-site discussion, we came away with a number of observations, which we share today. We focus specifically on the trend toward live event / live linear streaming, what's coming up with HEVC encoding and whether 4K TV will fly. All of these were omnipresent topics/questions at NABShow.

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If you've been watching streaming video for as many years as I have, then no doubt you agree that one of the most remarkable changes has been the quality of video delivered. It wasn't that long ago when postage stamp sized windows with audio and video out of synch were the norm, whereas today, we can watch on big screen TVs, with buffering a random occurrence.

But the quality bar is getting even higher as this morning eyeIO ("I-I-O"), an early stage video processing technology company, is announcing it has been awarded THX certification for digital cinema HD video quality, a first for an online video encoder. The certification program objectively tests picture quality using 46 data points in 6 categories that were developed by the major Hollywood studios. A score over 90, on a scale of 100, is viewed as "THX Excellent Quality." eyeIO achieved a score of 95.528 for its H.264 first-generation encoder, when streaming at a rate of 5.8 mbps.

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upLynk is debuting its HD Adaptive Streaming Platform this morning, a next-gen spin on encoding and playback which reduces content providers' capex and opex for delivering high-quality video to multiple devices. As validation of its approach, upLynk is also announcing that Disney is using upLynk for its ABC Player, ABC Family and Watch Disney TV Everywhere apps.

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A recurring theme in the video industry this year has been the proliferation of video-enabled devices and fragmentation of viewing. This has resulted in vastly increased complexity for content providers to prepare and deliver the properly formatted video efficiently and cost-effectively to all these devices. Recognizing this escalating challenge, online video platform provider thePlatform is announcing new "Smart Workflow" features in its mpx video publishing system this morning, to accelerate the formatting and delivery of video to multiple devices.

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Brightcove is announcing a clever new cloud-based transcoding service this morning that allows users to begin playing back a video even before its entire file has been transcoded. Dubbed "Zencoder Instant Play" (for the transcoding company Brightcove recently acquired), the service gives content providers with time-sensitive video the key benefit of a faster publishing cycle. In areas like news and sports, this could mean establishing an early lead in viewership and monetization for breaking stories.

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Yesterday, Encoding.com announced that Revision3 (which was recently acquired by Discovery) is replacing its in-house encoding infrastructure with Encoding.com. The win is a validation of Encoding.com's vision for its cloud-based, encoding-on-demand service model as more scaleable and cost-effective vs. the traditional approach of media companies operating their own encoding systems.

Jeff Malkin, Encoding.com's president and I caught up at the recent NABShow. Jeff discusses why over 3,000 companies across multiple industries have elected to work with the company for their encoding needs. Encoding.com is also moving into TV Everywhere, to support longer-form video encoding for multiple device delivery. Watch the video below (5 minutes, 58 seconds)

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Elemental Technologies, which has developed an innovative GPU-based video processing technology, has raised a $13 million Series C round led by Norwest Venture Partners, to fund international and product expansion. Total financing raised to date is $29.6 million. Elemental's CEO and co-founder Sam Blackman told me yesterday that the company racked up "8-digits" in revenues last year, up from "7-digits" in the two prior years, and has been close to being cash flow positive for the last couple of quarters.

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An interesting new company named Brevity came out of stealth mode here at the NABShow this week. Its V3 technology transcodes large video files during highly accelerated transport from one location to another without any degradation of quality. The company is aiming to disrupt traditional production workflows which it considers expensive and inefficient.

Given the push to higher resolution and longer-form video, along with multi-screen delivery, Brevity's time savings and simplification is an exciting prospect for content creators. V3 will be available at the end of Q2.

Brevity's COO, Timothy O'Brien explains Brevity's approach in detail in the following video.

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Some start-ups go to great lengths for visibility before ever launching a product or landing a customer, whereas others stay completely below the radar until they have big concrete news to share. Squarely in the latter category is eyeIO (never mind the awkward name) an "ultra-low-bandwidth" encoding technology provider that has a bare bones web site, but does have a very high-profile first customer in Netflix. Yesterday, Rodolfo Vargas, eyeIO's CEO and co-founder and Charles Steinberg, another co-founder updated me, though they are still playing things pretty close to the vest.

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