New Support for Smooth Streaming (MSS) and Adobe's HTTP Dynamic Streaming (HDS)

Adaptive Bitrate HTTP media delivery offers an efficient, scalable and cost effective alternative to traditional RTMP streaming.  Encoding.com gives you the power to decide which of the competing  technologies are right for your audience and now prepares media compliant with all 3 of the dominant HTTP segmenting technologies backed by Apple, Adobe, and Microsoft.  We are pleased to announce support for both Smooth Streaming (MSS) and Adobe's HTTP Dynamic Streaming (HDS) to our existing portfolio of Wowza SMIL streaming protocol and Apple's HTTP Live Streaming (HLS).  

Smooth Streaming is a great choice for those targeting the Microsoft Silverlight desktop client, Xbox 360, or Windows 7 devices.  Most reports gauge Silverlight plugin penetration on the desktop at about 75-80%%. All new Windows 7 phones are bundled with Silverlight, and Microsoft is making a big push to use the Xbox as the center of its living room media strategy.  Choose the "Smooth Streaming" preset from the Encoding.com client interface, watch folder or API and we will generate the single or multi-bitrate video files (ismv) along with required client (ismc) and server (ism) streaming manifest files.  Read the Smooth Streaming KB article or API docs to get started now.

Adobe's HTTP Dynamic Streaming (HDS) utilizes Adobe's packaging technology to prepare files for delivery on their Flash Media Server (or recently renamed Adobe Media Server) or any Apache web server with the Adobe HTTP module installed.  While Flash Mobile has an unknown future, Flash desktop plugin (HDS requires Flash 10.1 of later - released June 2012) is over 90% browser penetration making HDS a solid choice for adaptive bitrate delivery to the desktop.  Choose the "HTTP Dynamic Streaming" preset from the Encoding.com client interface, watch folder or "hds" from the Encoding.com API and we will generate the streaming manifest(.f4m), fragmented video files (.f4v) and the individual bitrate index files (.f4x) Read the Adobe Dynamic HTTP Streaming KB article or API docs to get started now.

Complete Dolby Audio Support
The Dolby Media Generator (DMG) is now live and integrated into the Encoding.com platform providing and greatly enhanced audio experience. DMG offers both HE-AAC and HE-AACv2 which offer especially rich audio quality at low bitrates when compared with the faac engine.  HE-AAC really shines at low bitrates, as within the 64Kbps audio-only fallback required by Apple's HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) protocol, an Apple requirment for all video over a certain length within an iOS app.  Dolby Digital Plus (EAC3) is also now available which offer fantastic multi-channel audio to video files destined for set-top box destinations connected to a multi channel audio system.

Listen to the difference in dynamic ranges between FAAC and HE-AAC at various bitrates:

Old FAAC at 56Kbps (Tinseltown to the Boogiedown (Radio Edit)

New HE-ACC at 56Kbps (Tinseltown to the Boogiedown (Radio Edit)

New HE-ACCv2 at 48Kbps (Tinseltown to the Boogiedown (Radio Edit)

New HE-ACC at 120Kbps (Tinseltown to the Boogiedown (Radio Edit)

Dolby Digital Plus EC3 (320Kbps) (Tinseltown to the Boogiedown (Radio Edit)
(Download only as EC3 is decoded only by compatible multi channel audio systems)

Decoding Support for the Speex and wmalossless audio codec.
Many Flash(flv) and VOIP recording solutions like (Adobe Air, Red5, and RTMPLite) record using the Speex audio codec.  Speex has held the #2 on the Enocding.com user feature request system for months yet none of the open source and commercial encoding engines we operate could decode the Speex audio codec so we compiled a special version just for the job.

API Workflow Enhancements 

• Allow video "start from" or "duration" in sub-second intervals (not just second intervals)
• Added the ability to to stop or cancel a job in progress, previously you could only do this when the job was in completed status.  
• Added the ability to restart only and individual task or only tasks that finished with a error, previously you could only restart all jobs.  
• New API notification field <notify_encoding_errors> which will only notify when a job returns an error, great for error monitoring workflows

Encoding.com is happy to announce that The Aol On Network selected its cloud-based video platfrom as their video encoding solution.  After several months of testing, we're already processing tens of thousands of videos each day for Aol ensuring its videos are available immediately for Web and Mobile devices.  A key reason for their selection of Encoding.com is our ability to provide dynamic, elastic capacity to support Aol's varying and growing video volume requirements.  

Encoding.com collaborates with The Aol On Network for scalable, cloud-based encoding of massive volumes of video.  

The newly launched Aol On Network offers a super-slick interface and a collection of very high-quality videos across News, Entertainment, Sports, Video Games and other categories.  It's a very inviting viewing experience.  

We love Revision3! If you are not one of the 23 Million monthly viewers, then you need to check out some of the best original web video programming on the Internets.  Here are 3 popular shows from over 30, high-quality HD shows that we like:

Revision3's goal is to "put video on anything with a screen" and Encoding.com's highly scalable cloud-based platform helps them achieve this.

“Working with Encoding.com has enabled our Production team to focus its energies on generating superb quality output while eliminating the overhead of managing encoding infrastructure in-house,” said Rob DeMillo, CTO of Revision3. “The Encoding.com team has been very responsive to our needs and continues to build out new features to meet our evolving requirements.”

Revision3 realized that the in-house encoding of its massive amounts of content, into all the formats needed, had become a scaling bottleneck as well as a resource drain.  Revision3 migrated from it’s own transcoding servers to Encoding.com’s powerful, cloud-based parallel processing for its video encoding, allowing for a cost effective, scalable, and flexible solution. In addition to the benefits offered by the cloud, Revision3 also relies on Encoding.com’s domain expertise and attention to rapid technology evolution in video, to manage the technical details that ensure successful viewing on new formats and devices in the market.

Working with the Revision3 technical team has been awesome.  Looking forward to their continued success.

A new era in home and mobile entertainment has arrived!  

Encoding.com is thrilled to announce our partnership with the great folks over at Dolby Labratories, Inc. (NYSE: DLB).  Together, Encoding.com and Dolby are bringing true theater experiences to mobile devices, web browsers, STBs and connected TVs. 

So, what does this announcement mean for you? 

Using Dolby technologies via the Encoding.com platform, you will be able to do the following via the API and UI:

1. Utilize HE AAC and HE AAC+ audio codecs for superior audio quality… even at low bitrates.  You'll be blown away with the improvements on mobile and laptop devices.
2. Utilize the Dolby Digital Plus EAC3 audio codec for multi-channel audio which is great for speakers connected to computers or STBs connected to home theater systems.
3. Detect and repair audio features… even poor sounding source content can be improved.
4. Utilize Audio Normalization features to control loudness and to maximize audio levels for specific mobile devices.

Encoding.com is the first cloud-based encoding provider to enable Dolby audio for all video content providers.  Customers can utilize Dolby Digital Plus to deliver a studio-quality HD audio experience to a huge array of mobile devices, STBs, game consoles, Blu-ray players and connected TVs.  There are more than 640 million devices which support Dolby Digital.

"Dolby Digital Plus is a key part of high-definition entertainment and delivers a cinematic sound experience to consumers across a wide range of devices," said Jean-Christophe Morizur, Senior Director, Professional Solutions at Dolby Laboratories. "Encoding.com is a leader in Cloud encoding services and our collaboration enables service providers to deliver high-quality, multi-channel audio entertainment for services, devices and applications."

I'd like to thank the great folks who run ad:tech for inviting Encoding.com to participate in the Startup Spotlight series and competition.  It was awesome sharing the Innovation Alley with many other interesting and soon-to-be successful startups.

We're also excited and honored to announce that Encoding.com won the coveted Innovation Award for Video.  We showcased some of our work powering video campaigns for amazing agencies such as Tribal DDB's "Bud Light High-Five League" user-generated video (UGV) competition for Anheuser Busch; Firstborn's "Try a New Look" branded video mashup app for iPhones and iPads for Pepsi's SoBe brand; and Creative Asylum's "GLEE Give a Note" campaign supporting music education programs for high schools around the country.  You can view the presentation below.

Special shout out to DOTSTUDIOZ, Addroid and SeaWell Networks for providing stiff competition.  Excellent presentations.  

Encoding.com Selected to Present at ad:tech Startup Spotlight

ad:tech is one of the largest conferences for digital marketers attracting over 10,000 industry professionals.  For next week's event here in San Francisco, Encoding.com, along with some very cool companies, was chosen to present in the Startup Spotlight series.  We are very much looking forward to connecting with new industry friends and showing off our existing work with many of the world's best Agencies.  

If you want to attend, you can use the code STARTMEUP to receive a $200 discount.  You can register here.  

ad:tech San Francisco will be held this Tuesday and Wednesday, April 3-4 at Moscone.  Our presentation is on Tuesday at 5pm.  We'll also be hosting a booth in the Innovation Alley on both days... so please come by and say hello.  

There was an extra day in February this year so we had a chance to fill this platform update with some major new features:

Microsoft Azure Cloud Storage Support
We are now pleased to support our 3rd commercial cloud storage provider, Microsoft's Windows Azure.  Now the Microsoft developer community (or any developer for that matter) can use a Windows Azure Blob as a source location for a job with encoding.com or chose to send the output of a encoding job to your Azure blob.  Please read our KB article for the proper syntax to send use an Azure Blob.

High Performance Aspera I/O
Aspera's fasp™ technology dramatically speeds transfer time over public networks making it a perfect compliment for cloud based video encoding.  During our internal tests, we couldn't even get our Aspera integration up to top speed as we were limited by our servers bandwidth every time.  Transferring your video to and from an Aspera Enterprise Server or Aspera Connect Server to Encoding.com over fasp:// will provide accelerated and encrypted file transfer as well as support for extremely large source videos.  Please see our API docs article the Aspera integration for more details.

Global Data Centers
We now support a total of 7 international Data Centers for video storage and processing.  On a per job basis you can specify the Data Center that is closest to your source video, drastically limiting download time.  No more sending videos from Sydney to Virginia!  Read our KB article on how to specify an data center for you next job.

Virginia
Northern California
Oregon
Singapore
Tokyo
Sao Paulo

New file type decoding RED(.R3D) and GotoMeeting (.G2M4)
We added two new major file formats to confirm our position as the industry leading decoder.  We can now decode RED's .R3D format which is created from the ultra high resolution RED Epic, Scarlet-X or RED One video cameras.  If you have not had a chance to see the 5000K output from a RED camera make sure you spend some time learning about RED as the camera has revolutionized the movie, commercial and fashion industry.  With the addition of GotoMeeting (.G24M) we can now decode the entire spectrum of GotoMeeting .G2M2, .G2M3, and G2M4.  See our complete list of supported input file formats.

HLS Encryption
Encoding.com now offers HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) Encryption.  You can now turn on or off HLS 128 bit encryption on a per job basis and either send us your keys with the API request or have us pull your key off of your own sever.  Please read our KB article for more details about HLS Encryption or a great Apple developer article on serve your keys.
 

Strip Chapter Metadata
We have added a new feature to automatically strip chapter meta data from your source videos.  This is most useful for FLV output destined for the Adobe Flash Media Server as Adobe flvcheck requires chapter data to be removed for proper playback.  Read our article on stripping meta data for more information.

Kindle Fire Preset
I don't have one but I saw an older gentlemen on a plane once with a Kindle Fire and he said he loved it so I thought we would create a one click  preset for preparing your video content for this beautiful full color screen.  Read the article on the Kindle Fire preset.

Oh ya and now you can search your encoding queue by media or task ID, really cool and difficult for us to implement.

We are in the process of reworking the information architecture of the encoding.com client interface and would love your feedback.  What features are currently missing from the interface?  What exisrting features could be implemented better? Speak now or forever hold your encoding queue!

Brandon Goldberg joins us this week as our new Director of Marketing.  We could not be more excited about this roll becasue frankly we have not focused on marketing to date.  Over the last few years we have been more than occupied handling overwhelming inbound requests and building the world's largest encoding platform.  Now it is time to spread the word about encoding.com and vid.ly.  Brandon was born with an unquenchable thirst for generating new business revenue. As a result, the first several years of Brandon's career were spent honing his sales skill-set by hunting, closing and growing new clients for enterprise technology companies such as CDW and XO communications. After realizing that building a robust sales pipeline for himself was no longer enough, Brandon committed himself to mastering the marketing discipline of demand generation and applying those skills towards beefing up top-line revenue for companies such as Stockgroup Media Inc and Arkadin Global Conferencing. Today, Brandon focuses on driving pipeline growth for salespeople across the Encoding.com organization. When not souping-up lead generation and marketing automation engines, he enjoys film production, international travel and fine dining. Brandon has finally managed to keep his thirst at bay…for now. 

We pushed this nice little upgrade to vid.ly today, here is what was included.

Drastic speed improvements on video load time.  We had some complaints about multi second load time of vidlys and reworked the logic of the device detection to be significantly faster.  Our qualitative testing has shown some big improvements, we will share any quantitative metrics when we have them available.  Please send us your feedback on the video load times.

Automatically upgrade a free vid.ly to a paid vid.ly.  Now any free vid.ly owner can visit their vid.ly url /upgrade  (e.g vid.ly/a1b2c3/upgrade) and add billing information to convert their free vid.ly to a paid vid.ly.  This feature is useful when a user creates a vid.ly, runs into their free 50GB limit monthly bandwidth limit and wants to convert it to a paid account.  

Not bad for a Monday, now on to the rest of the week.