Producing and editing compelling video is only half the work involved in publishing video content to the web. Once finalized, video needs to be formatted and converted to the proper version, or transcoded, to adapt content to the proper format.

Startup HD Cloud, a video encoding and transcoding business, wants to become the “the FedEx of web video” is offering automated, high-definition video encoding in the cloud for large-scale media firms. The SaaS allows video content owners to automatically encode and distribute videos, with HD resolution, to a range of web sites.

HD Cloud has also already signed on a big name customer, Magnify.net, a video publishing platform and social network. HD Cloud’s services will be used to transcode videos for Magnify.net’s 52,000 enterprise clients, including Weather.com, New York Magazine, Zappos.tv, LiveEarth, and BlogHer.com.

HD Cloud is part of the expanding trend of eliminating hardware services in favor of using server-based “cloud” services. In this case, the cloud server’s capacity helps clients run thousands of video encoding sessions at the same time. And HD Cloud then automatically distributes videos to a variety of desinations, including content management systems, local drives, and syndication sites.

HD Cloud has other encoding services utilizing the cloud, including Encoding.com, which also offers a cost efficient and scalable encoding service that leverages cloud computing.

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