SubscribeThe New Multi-format Encoder: More Bang for your Click
The Internet has done a lot for the video medium. It has leveled the playing field for publishers of all sizes, and made worldwide distribution as easy as clicking “upload.” Instead of targeting people on their couches, many independent producers started targeting people at their desks. The desktop viewing experience even began to rival that of television with the adoption of HD video on the web, something we introduced back in August of last year.
But recently we’ve seen the widespread adoption of an entirely new category of Internet-connected devices. Things like the iPhone and the iPad are finally making the consumption of online video more portable and more practical. At Viddler, we’re really excited about all the new ways people will be able to consume video in the future, and we want to help our customers deliver their content to new devices with the most optimized experience possible. But we also want to make sure that we preserve one of the key elements that made online video take off in the first place: the ability to reach millions of people with that one single click of the upload button.
Today we’re thrilled to announce Viddler 2.9 and the introduction of our new multi-format video encoder. We’ve rebuilt our encoder from the ground-up, not just to ensure faster and more reliable encoding, but also to enable us to output to a variety of video formats. The new encoder allows us to more easily adapt over time to support emerging video platforms and the formats they require, helping us deliver your content to a larger number of devices today, and helping future-proof your content for tomorrow. To assist me in illustrating some of the things that Viddler 2.9 can do for you right away, I recruited the help of my friend Bentley McCormick:
Business customers and Partners can head over to the new encoding settings page to check out all of the new options. And if you’d like to take advantage of the new support for HTML5 playback on iOS devices, the new iPad/iPhone-compatible embed code can be found on the Your Videos page.
The new multi-format encoder is just one of many changes in Viddler 2.9. To find out about some of the other improvements, stay tuned right here on the blog over the coming days.
Christopher Masto says
June 22, 2010 - 9:37 amIs it decided then that no new features will be offered for non-business users?
Chris says
June 22, 2010 - 10:05 amCongrats, guys! It's exciting to see this launched.
Colin Devroe says
June 22, 2010 - 12:13 pmChris: Not at all. We've released many new features recently that are available to everyone that uses Viddler. Our new Dashboard, the new Your Videos section, the all-new Help section and countless updates to our API have all been available to Personal accounts as well as Businesses and Partners.
That being said, any time a feature has an effect on the overall cost of business for Viddler we need to offer it to our users in an orderly fashion. Notice we're not even turning this new encoding feature on for our Businesses or Partners by default because we know it will cost them extra money. Both distribution of video and storage of video will go up as a result of our new encoding settings and we want our community to make a conscience decision whether or not they need it.
In the near future we hope to open up a few of these encoding features to Personal accounts (like encoding directly into H.264 as an example). But for now though, we're only offering it to those that directly pay for their bandwidth and storage.
Hope this helps make more sense of it.
Christopher Masto says
June 22, 2010 - 1:09 pmI understand that you guys have to make money and just because YouTube can afford to do X (or afford to keep losing money) doesn't mean it's the right solution for you. I'm ok with "we have decided our model is to serve the needs of high-volume business and advertising-subsidised sites". But those of us with personal accounts have been waiting, in some cases years, for features like iTunes, HD, iPhone compatibility, etc. Things we can easily get elsewhere for free. I still have a soft spot for Viddler because it was an awesome community in 2007, so if I could pay $5 or $10 a month for low-volume access to some premium features, I probably would. I don't have an excuse to drop $100/month on a business account (although when my corporate masters wanted to put a video online I tried to sell them on Viddler's platform). And I certainly don't have the viewership to merit a partner account without begging favors, so I'm in a bind.
I guess the tl;dr here is that I think you should either start trickling down these features, offer a less expensive "personal plus" account, or just tell us proles we're not your target market and we should go elsewhere.
Brandice says
June 25, 2010 - 1:26 pmI just ended up at this article from Kyle's tweet, thinking "really? cool!" and then "oh… another premium feature I can't use."
Ditto everything that Chris just said in his most recent comment. Catch up or just admit that you're only willing to offer these really needed features for some type of fee (I wouldn't pay it, but some of your users might in order to get some of this stuff before the world ends in 2012).
It's all necessary innovation, but if you just dangle it in front of your non-business users for too long (and if you have more cool features dangling than you do available), people just wander off to some other service that offers it now. Anything I can't watch on my iPad lately I simply forget about because it's not worth the hassle to go find my laptop and switch gears. That's going to become and more and more true. I know it's not the norm now but are you prepared for when it WILL be?
Food for thought.
Musica Nova says
June 29, 2010 - 5:16 amThis is wonderful!
Right now, I'm using vimeo for video… Just discovered you guys, and I'm thinking of opening an account here. You rock with this portable technologies!
Cheers,
Rodrigo.