This past weekend, Red Bull entertained San Francisco with their world famous Flugtag competition. Over 116,000 spectators (included members of the Encoding.com team) were in attendance to enjoy this exciting event filled with engineering marvels and mishaps. RED Bull also produces some amazing videos. Enjoy this Vid.ly as one of our most creative clients brings together extreme sports athletes to create the ultimate Rube Goldberg machine!

Learn how AOL On Network and Revision3 use cloud encoding 

to acheive their business objectives.

AOL On Network

AOL On Network collaborated with Encoding.com on high volume, scalable, cloud-based encoding to power properties such as TechCrunch, The Huffington Post, 5min Media and many more.

Revision3

Learn how Revison3 replaced their on-premise encoding infrastructure with cloud based encoding from Encoding.com.

Football season has officially kicked-off and that means Fantasy Football players around the globe are readying their game faces!  When Wieden + Kennedy and ESPN asked us to help them push the online transcoding envelope for a cool new video project, it was game on!  

Here is the concept: Each Fantasy Football league commissioner would receive an online toolkit with simple instructions for participating in a simulated interview with Sport Center host Robert Flores. A pre-recorded video of Robert would ask the participating commissioner a series of pre-recorded questions and provide a fixed amount of time for the commissioner to record his/her answer via their web camera. Once the interview was completed, the recorded footage would be sent to the Encoding.com API for transcoding and other finishing touches via a series of API calls.  

To accomplish this challenge, Encoding.com built a set of advanced editing features that are now available to all Encoding.com customers. These features include: PIP Picture in Picture, Split Screen, Overlays, and Youtube as a destination with full meta data.  Here is an example of their workflow:

Step1
ESPN sends two source videos with the interviewer and Commissioner in addition to an overlay background that matches the Sports Center television experience.

Step2 
A notification is sent using the GetStatus API call that Step 1 has completed processing. Next a request is sent to concatenate all source videos (intro, interview questions, split screens, closing) in a timed sequence and into one output that includes the ESPN ticker and name labels as an overlay.

Step3
Encoding.com sends a final compiled output to the YouTube ESPN Fantasy Football Channel complete with meta data.

As avid football fans, we were excited to participate in this ground breaking project and offer even more cool new features to the Encoding.com community.

The Process                                                                                                                    

                     

The Final Product

Webs, the world's largest do-it-yourself solution for creating great looking websites and recently acquired by Vistaprint, has integrated Encoding.com's Vid.ly into its SiteBuilder3 website builder platform to power its premium video product.  Now everyone can enhance their websites with video without requiring any technical or coding skills. 

Webs has made it very simple for its users to enable video on their sites which can then be viewed by any browser or mobile device.  Webs users can upload their videos via the SiteBuilder3 interface.  Vid.ly then converts the video into a variety of formats and bitrates appropriate for all popular browsers and mobile devices.  Webs users are provided a short URL and embed code to publish on their sites.  When visitors click on the video, Vid.ly detects what device / browser they are using and delivers the appropriate video format. 

"Video content is a key element of any modern, professional website and Encoding.com's Vid.ly, integrated into SiteBuilder3, makes building a website that includes rich video content easier than ever," said Haroon Mokhtarzada, co-founder of Webs and VP of Global Digital Products for Vistaprint.

No design or coding expertise required. Start building your video site today!

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.

We’re very excited to announce our new partnership with KickApps, an award-winning social Content Management System recently acquired by Kit Digital (Nasdaq: KITD). KickApps enables the world’s leading brands such as NBC Universal, American Express, Hearst, Scripps Network, the Weather Channel, and many more connect with their fans and customers and helps these brands build social sites, socially enable existing sites and publish shared content to the mobile and social web.

“User generated video continues to be a key point of differentiation for KickApps. Our platform lets users submit videos of varying length and quality, across a wide range of formats,” said Mike Sommers, EVP, Product Management at KickApps. “Despite this variance, Encoding.com allows us to deliver consistent video experiences for our customers and their users across multiple platforms and site experiences. Encoding.com has been a great partner – they’ve provided our team with a high level of customer service, and they share in our SaaS business model, meaning they can easily scale with the needs of our customers.“ Thanks Mike!

It’s been a pleasure working with your team.
Special thanks to Josh Weinstein, head of video product at KickApps, for trusting in the Encoding.com platform to help build a kick ass solution!

As many of you know we charge for encoding based on our customer’s actual usage.  In some cases (if your usage over your monthly plan is very small) our billing system ends up generating a incredibly small invoice.  We a currently working on a upgrade to the billing system to ensure that if a a usage invoice is less than $.50 it will roll over into the next month before it charges your credit card.  In the meantime we thought we would share a story of a customer, The World Company who went to extraordinary measures to ensure a $.01 usage invoice was paid.  Jane sent us a really nice handwritten letter and included a  penny to pay her usage invoice from last month.   If you are reading Jane, we really appreciate the thoughtful letter and time you took to write it by hand, not to mention the $0.44 you spent to send us the penny!   As a sign of our gratitude we will frame your note (inclusive of the carefully taped penny) to be enshrined in the encoding.com office.  And so you know that our money is where are gratitude is we will credit Jane a free month’s subscription, hopefully this does not cause a mad rush of hand taped currency to be sent to us in the mail  :)

Thanks again Jane!

If you’re an artist/designer/animator, it’s so difficult to get your work noticed.  And if you’re searching for talent, where do you go to discover artists?  Meet the Behance Network — “the Creative Professional Platform.”

I’m in such awe of talented visual artists… and there are so many to explore on Behance.  I find myself spending so much time getting lost in the amazing artwork made available by the thousands of professional making their portfolios available here.  And, it’s rewarding knowing that Encoding.com is a small part of helping artists get paid for their talents.

The beautiful thing is that Behance works — talented artists do get discovered everyday.  Click through to their tour and read real life stories from artists and agencies.  If you got the goods, Behance will help the world find you.

- jeff