Encoding.com, a startup that provides online video encoding services, has raised $1.25 million in Series A funding. The funding was led by Metamorphic Ventures and included angel investors Patrick Condon, Fred Hamilton, Zelkova Ventures, Dave Morgan, and Allen Morgan. The funds will be used to further sales, marketing, and partnership programs.
Launched in September 2008, Encoding.com provides a cloud-based, video encoding SaaS offering to let users host and encode user-generated and premium video. The company encodes an average of 30,000 videos per day for a variety of well-known media and technology companies including MTV Networks, WebMD, Nokia, and MySpace. To date, Encoding.com has encoded more than four million videos since its launch.
Congratulations to Encoding.com!
Extremely reliable service and we use them as a reference point for whenever OUR encoding submissions fail.
Speaks to the tremendous multi-format transcoding support they have built in.
This round will certainly take them to new heights.
-preetam
Can this also determine search engine positioning ?
So it’s a web based front end to ffmpeg?
Rob,
Not sure if they use FFMPEG, but if you really boil it down, then yes..that’s what the service is.
-preetam
Yes, it is. FFMpeg front end, the back-end running at Amazon cloud and S3. One week of coding for one programmer. Hats down for making their 200 lines of code worth money. I always knew the web startups were never about technology. The most profitable companies are usually powered by very simple software. (ie Twitter in early days running on 6-line PHP code + One machine MySQL setup) :)
Petr,
1) This should help bring you to speed on the infrastructure being used: http://bit.ly/at74sG
200 lines of code eh? :) Find a way to get it done, and I’ll pay for your patenting costs.
I dunno, I just finished making a clone of encoding.com for our internal projects, and it took me 5 days. Same exact thing.
email me and show me. i have to see this.
Yup, has full blown API , converts any format to any format, uses Gearman to distribute CPU stress across as many machines as needed (Rackspace or Amazon or any other machines you may have setup..etc). Seeing this TechCrunch article made me think there is a bigger demand for this sort of thing then I thought. Maybe I will make mine an enterprise package and ask TechCrunch to cover it when I release it to the wild.
But really, there is absolutely no magic to this. It’s just a pretty front end to FFMPEG, Gearman installation, some FTP uploading logic , and RESTful API calls. I think Encoding.com did a terrific job at marketing themselves, my respect to them!
OK, now you have my attention. Would you mind sending me an email? pm@marcellus.tv
I’d be interested to. email me mobixpert@gmail.com
check your inbox
Good news. I am about to use Encoding for a UGV site of my own.
Paul,
Would you send me a note, please? I’m curious about what you’re up to with the UGV site. (pm@marcellus.tv)
congrats to gregg and jeff. looking forward to greater scale….dlh
Thanks TechCrunch — very much appreciate the coverage. We’re thrilled to have put together such a great group of investors led by Metamorphic Ventures who believe in us and our vision. And thanks to all of our customers who have been so instrumental in providing us the critical feedback necessary to evolving Encoding.com into a world-class service. (jeff@encoding.com)
Congratulations to Jeff and Greg. Looking forward to seeing great things from their company.
We are trying to use/integrate encoding.com for one of our client project and experience is not really so good. There Control Panel Just doing show encoding queue and they dont yet support .mov and .avi as output format which is not really good.
@shardul have you tried using Ankoder.com ?
from when myspace start using encoding.com?
Congrats to Jeff and Gregg! Love what you guys are doing and we hope to run into both of you soon. Keep on doin’ your thing, fellas!
Thanks Ryan, much appreciated.
Anyone remember LoudEye? Exact same business (originally), went public, then sold to Nokia for a fraction of vs. capital invested. Ironically, not only did it have the same business, it had the exact same URL: encoding.com.
This is a low, low, low margin business no matter how you slice it.
Actually, the first Encoding.com was nothing like this business. They were a very smart business that encoded much of the world’s music for online distribution — converting music from CD’s to formats for streaming / downloading. In effect, they were the master repository for any site seeking to distribute digital music.
The current Encoding.com is a cloud-based SaaS easing the burden of having to manage high-volume video encoding requirements in-house while offering instant and infinite scalability.
I recently met a guy who runs what looks like a similar service – http://www.Ankoder.com
I’d be interested if anyone has compared the speeds/reliability…
What’s the difference between this and Kaltura?
Kaltura provides a turnkey solution for managing the entire video workflow including CMS, encoding, player customization, syndication, etc… Encoding.com is focused solely on video encoding which is a complex and ever-changing target.
Encoding.com is a solid service.
We’ve built similar (and then some) technology into Vidli (which launches soon) and have a lot of respect for the technical chops it takes to make this happen.
I’m looking forward to see how they spend the money.