Encoding in the Cloud
Unfortunately, the YouTube analogy also planted in my mind the concept that trying these services would be as simple as uploading a file and choosing some output parameters. Boy, was I wrong. Only Hey!Watch supported direct file upload, the simplest approach. Encoding.com let me set up FTP-based watch folders, which was nice, but the technical requirements for getting files to the other services were pretty challenging, so bring technical help to the evaluation process.
As with most encoding tools, my initial encoding runs went awry, with common errors such as lack of de-interlacing, missed data rate targets, funky aspect ratios, and the like. Nothing major, and again, the same type of breaking-in pains that you expect when trying out a new encoding tool. Still, if you intend to run your own quality comparisons between the various cloud encoding services and between them and your current encoding solution, don’t expect it to be a simple process.One User’s View
Interview With Sonicbids’ Lou Paniccia
Q: What is Sonicbids?
A: Sonicbids is an online music company that helps bands get gigs and promoters book the right bands.
Q: Tell me about the type and quantity of video that you’re streaming.
A: When a band creates an account on Sonicbids, they build a sort of online resume called an Electronic Press Kit, or EPK, which contains some info about the band, samples of their music, and in many cases, a video of some sort. We’ve got more than 200,000 bands on Sonicbids, which results in quite a few videos being uploaded, encoded, and viewed. When all is said and done, they end up as 320x240 VP6 Flash videos playing at 384Kbps bitrate.
Q: How were you encoding before you started with Encoding.com?
A: We used Sorenson Squeeze to process videos locally. Bands would upload videos, and they’d end up in a queue that would be processed manually by our engineering team.
Q: What were the problems that you were experiencing?
A: The process was taking up a lot of time from our engineering team to babysit the video queue. We also had a high rate of errors that caused videos to process without sound or video or sometimes not at all. Errors not only sucked more time from our engineering team to reprocess the videos but also created work for our customer service team and a less than ideal experience for our customers whose videos didn’t work the first time around.
Q: What other services did you consider besides Encoding.com? Any?
A: We found out about Encoding.com when they were announced as a finalist for Amazon’s $100,000 Startup Challenge. After researching a bit about how their stuff works and comparing to a few competitors, we found that Encoding.com offered the best solution for us.
Q: What were the key points that convinced you to make the switch?
A: We were able to get a scalable solution without long-term contracts at a better price.
Q: Describe how it’s integrated with your internal CMS.
A: We don’t currently have Encoding.com integrated with our CMS.
Q: The biggest potential problem with cloud encoding seems to be upload times. Describe how that works.
A: From the user’s perspective, bands go to a section of their account to manage all of their media files. When they upload a video, they go through the usual process of selecting the file from their computer, adding some metadata, and then watching a progress bar as it uploads. Our bands mostly upload MP4, MOV, and WMV files. On the back end, Encoding.com grabs their video via FTP as soon as it finishes uploading to our server, converts it to a Flash video, and dumps it back in our servers ready to play.
Q: Have you run any quality comparisons against your former solution?
A: There are far less errors during the conversion process, but the end result is pretty much the same quality as we had before.
Q: How much is Encoding.com saving you?
A: We haven’t done a detailed ROI, but it’s safe to say that our engineering and customer service teams are spending a lot less time dealing with video issues these days.
—J.O.Guess Who’s Coming to the Table
Interestingly, a number of companies have been providing cloud encoding services for a while, but they simply haven’t unbundled their encoding-only services. Specifically, most entries in the video distribution SaaS market that we discussed in the April issue ("Choosing an Online Video Platform," pp. 50–60) accept uploaded files that they convert into the format required for their distribution mechanism.
Figure 5. Atlanta’s Multicast Media Technologies, which runs the Vidego online video platform, unbundled Vidego’s transcoding services as a standalone offering in April.
In April, the first of these companies, Atlanta’s Multicast Media Technologies, which runs the Vidego communications platform, began offering Transcoding as a Service, or TaaS, using its own banks of encoding servers. Pricing is per megabyte of video transferred, like the other services, but minimums do apply.
Whether or not other distribution SaaS vendors will follow suit is unknown. For now, if you’re in the market for cloud encoding services, you’ve got another candidate to consider.
—J.O.