Introducing… (drum roll please)…Clive, the Encoding.com Goat.  Look for him to appear in many places in the near future including his print debut in the latest issue of Streaming Media Magazine.  Why did we choose a Goat to represent the Company?  After many hours and several Board meetings of deliberation, and as anyone familiar with animal behavior knows, we chose a Goat for their extreme intelligence, tenacity and innate ability to discover and exploit any system weakness (think loose rung in a fence); or,  in our case, a poorly served video encoding marketplace.  OK –  we just thought Clive was cool and looked good in the ad.

The recent issue of Streaming Media magazine entitled, “Editors’ Picks 2010 – The Best of the Best” features Encoding.com as one of the top ten hottest companies in the world of online video.   They wrote, “At the beginning of 2009, it looked like cloud transcoding was about to explode in much the same way that online video platforms had the year before.  But while a handful of others have entered the market, there’s already a clear leader of the pack. Encoding.com — has got everything going for it; the company understands what its customers need — fast, easy-to-use, and reliable transcoding to multiple formats — and has poured all of its resources into doing that better than anyone else out there.”

Wow!  We are so thankful and humbled to be included in a list that recognizes such amazing companies as Netflix, Amazon, HowCast, BoinxTV, Kyte, LiveStream, Visible Measures, Winnov and YuMe.

We’re very appreciative of the hundreds of our customers who continue to share their honest feedback to help us improve, drive and prioritize our product roadmap, and most of all, trust us enough to manage their video encoding requirements and build Encoding.com into their video workflow.

Thank you Streaming Media magazine.  While we appreciate the accolade, now is no time to rest.  With the video format wars heating up, we promise to continue working as best we can to simplify the ever-evolving video technology space so you, our customers, can focus on your core competencies.

Thanks for your continued support,

- Gregg and Jeff and the entire Encoding.com team.

Since we launched our simple iPhone preset, we have encoded over 91k videos for the iPhone.  This preset has saved our customers from having to research the exact H.264 settings and screen size best suited for the iPhone.   As Emperor Nero said in History of the World: Part I, “Nice. Not thrilling, but nice.”

Now, we’re ready to thrill you.  Today, we’re proud to launch our support for Apple’s HTTP Live Streaming for the iPhone and iPad devices.  Mobile video consumption will now explode.

What is iPhone / iPad HTTP Live Streaming?  Designed into iPhone OS 3.0, the built-in video player now supports adaptive bit rate switching during playback.  As a user watches a video, the iPhone player will detect the user’s available bandwidth and automatically switch to the appropriate bit rate during playback.  This process provides for a much better viewing experience: higher quality (bit rate) videos are streamed for faster WiFi connections while lesser quality videos are streamed in low bandwidth situations such as is the case with AT&Ts 3G network (especially in San Francisco).  And, Apple’s version of adaptive bit rate streaming can be utilized by any HTTP server.

Sounds easy, right? Well, let’s just say that Encoding.com has done all the heavy lifting to make this ultra-simple for you.   Just choose the iPhone Streaming preset and you’re done – Set and Forget. Behind the scenes, we have pre-selected 3 bit rates and a 10 second time interval to segment each video.  We then package up all the segments in the various bit rates, along with the important .m3u8 XML stream instructional manifest, and deliver to your CDN (or wherever) in compliance with Apple’s strict Media Stream Segment system. Of course, you can modify the bit rate settings and segment time interval as you desire.  For more details, please see our Apple Live Streaming Help article or go directly to our API docs.

IMPORTANT NOTE: For iPhone / iPad application developers that utilize video, Apple will reject your application unless you offer a low bandwidth (64k) version of video.  Thanks AT&T.

Once again, you have spoken and we have listened.  We’re happy to announce the launch of a new set of highly anticipated features we’re calling the Sub-Account API system.  Encoding.com customers and partners can now create sub-user accounts via the API and track individual encoding usage within a parent account.  The system includes an entire new class of API calls enabling you to manage sub-users (add/delete/modify/getinfo) along with a complete set of API calls designed to return real-time encoding and storage usage for a single sub-user or group of sub-users.  In addition, we have added a new call, AddTrialUser, which is designed for third party sites to activate trial Encoding.com accounts from within their own application or registration process.    Both the AddSubUser and AddTrialUser features must be manually activated for your account.  If you are interested in testing the Sub-Account API system, please contact founders@encoding.com.  The complete Sub-User documentation can be found here.

2009 was a challenging year for many of us.  For Gregg and me, and the entire Encoding.com team, it was a time to hunker down and focus our very limited resources on trying to build a disruptive world-class service.  As with any startup, sacrifices were made to keep the dream alive — time with family, financial, sleep…

But a friend and mentor once said to me, “Just keep swimming.”  No, I’m not referring to Dory in Finding Nemo.  We did keep swimming, and our persistence along with your patience, feedback and support has paid off.

It is with great pleasure to announce that we closed a $1.25M Series A financing on December 31st.  We feel very fortunate to have put together such a great group of investors who believe in our vision and our ability to execute.   The round was led by Metamorphic Ventures, a fantastic and extremely supportive firm from NYC run by guys who have built their own successful companies.   Other notable investors include Pat Condon, co-founder of Rackspace; Dave Morgan, CEO of Simulmedia and founder of TACODA and Real Media; Zelkova Ventures from NYC; and Allen Morgan, venture partner at Mayfield.

We will use these funds to continue improving our platform, and to generate awareness that our solution exists.  And yes, we will celebrate with morning bagels for all employees… for one week.

The Encoding.com team thanks you for your continued support.

We’re excited to announce that we are now live on the Rackspace Cloud. Please watch this wildly entertaining 3-minute video describing the benefits to you for our integration with Rackspace. Being the only video encoding SaaS provider integrated with both EC2 and Cloud Servers, we can ensure that we’re minimizing the distance between your source video and our cloud-based platform. Ideally, you’ll store your videos in the cloud and now you have two great choices with Rackspace and Amazon.

For detailed technical information on our Rackspace Cloud implementation, please click here: Rackspace Info

Encoding.com was recently featured on Mashable’s “Spark of Genius” series. Check out the story here: http://bit.ly/6OKzLo . Can’t say we mind reading, “That’s why Encoding.com is so brilliant.” Yes, that’s slightly overstating our value proposition. But, we do appreciate the coverage and starting the year off with a bang.

Happy New Year. Wishing you a fantastic “twenty ten”.

Christmas has come early for Encoding.com customers. Today, we are proud to announce a great set of enhancements to our platform.

1. Prepay Plans
Do you have a defined encoding project? Would you prefer to buy a set amount of encoding bandwidth? Now, you can take advantage of our Prepay Plans available to new and existing customers.  With 4 new Prepay Plans to choose from, we now offer a wide range of packages that offer ultimate flexibility to match your encoding projects.  The new Prepay Plans come with an optional auto-recharge feature that will refill your account when you dip below the 1GB threshhold — so you never run out of encoding bandwidth in the middle of a project.

2. Rackspace Cloud Integration

The only thing better than one cloud… is two! We’re very pleased to kick off an important partnership and great technical integration with our friends at the Rackspace Cloud.  With integrations into the two leading cloud computing providers, you can take advantage of a video encoding service with virtually infinite capacity to scale along with added intelligence to route your encoding job to the processing datacenter closest to your source media’s location. If your media is stored on Amazon’s S3, we will process your jobs on Amazon’s EC2 compute platform. If your media is stored anywhere else, we process your job on our preferred compute platform — the powerful Rackspace Cloud Servers system

3. Basic Plan now includes 5GB (up from 1GB)
Maybe it’s the Holiday spirit… We’ve decided to give a present to all existing and future Basic Plan customers. The Plan now includes 5GBs of encoding bandwidth increased from 1GB. Happy Encoding!

4. Other Stocking Stuffers

• Support of Rackspace Cloud Files storage location as either source or destination.  Please see our Cloud Files help article for more details.
• A load of new enhancements to our image converting service — you now have the ability to specify a resize method, sharpen radius, or sharpen sigma.  See the recent changes section to our API docs for more detail.

The Encoding.com WordPress Plugin allows you to quickly and easily upload video from your computer and insert into your self hosted WordPress blog posts by using the encoding.com platform for automatic transcoding. The plugin is easy to use and comes with a simple encoding setting page and includes a free Flash player from JW Player.  Visit the Encoding.com WordPress Plugin site for more details and to download the plugin.

One of our favorite things about building Encoding.com is the very candid feedback we receive from you, the users of the platform. While we have spent most of our time developing new features and improving performance, we heard from many of you over the past 6 months your dissatisfaction with the Client Interface. That said, we are proud to announce the launch of a major release to our web-based Client Interface.  What was once our Achilles heel we now believe is one of our most impressive features! Of course, you’ll be the judge of that.

No more Media List! The Media List section of the Client Interface previously enabled you to manage individual encoding jobs: add/delete, edit, process and restart.  The UI was slow with a large volume of jobs in the queue, and there was overlap with the Encoding Queue.  It seemed logical to combine the media management functions of the Media List into the Encodign Queue. Now you can edit, delete, process and restart jobs directly from the Encoding Queue. In addition, we have created a special section called “Add Media” which is dedicated to adding individual tasks via a browser from your hard drive, FTP/SFTP. HTTP, or S3 locations.  We have also added live job status updates to the Encoding Queue so you can see the progress of any job in your queue without reloading the page.

Key system metrics added to the Statistics section!
By popular demand, we have  added a few key system metrics to the statistics section, Encoding Success Rate, Average Queue Time, Average Processing time, and Average Connection Speed from your source destination to server to our cloud data processing centers.

Major Speed and Stability Improvements We re-architected the interface from the ground up to improve load times up to 150% faster and more efficiently for a larger set of popular web browsers.

Watch Folder Redesign Finally, we made some minor improvements to the Setup Interface for Watch Folders and the management of large numbers of Watch Folders.

Please don’t be shy and let us know what you think. It’s ok, we can take it. Praise is welcome as well — the positive reinforcement seems to work for our 6-year old kids.

Thanks,
- Gregg and Jeff