Clive, our goat mascot, and the Encoding.com team would like to welcome two unbelievably cute goats into the world this past week — Fred and Ginger.  See mommy and kid in the photo.  For a truly heartwarming story, read about the birth of Fred and Ginger from our friends at the Itty Bitty Farm in the City.   Who says you can’t run a farm in the middle of San Francisco?

What does this have to do with video encoding?  Nothing.  But it makes Clive happy.

We’ll be heading to Amsterdam for the IBC conference (Sept 9th – 14th) and have decided to host a cocktail party on Friday night, September 10th from 6-9pm.  Please see below for the details.

Gregg and I would love to take the opportunity to meet you in person and get to know you better — over cocktails of course.  Please RSVP to amsterdam@encoding.com to let us know if you’ll be coming.

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

We’re now approaching 1,000 customers!  There are so many cool companies doing interesting things with video so we’ve decided to start highlighting some our favorite video use cases.  As a lifelong musician / guitar player, I’d like to feature one of my personal favorite customers:  JamPlay.  For $20 / month, you get access to over 400 hours of lessons from 43 different teachers — and you can even get live webcam help.  JamPlay also provides free lessons for lots of amazing songs like the Beatles’ Blackbird, Fleetwood Mac’s Landslide or even the Green Manalishi from Judas Priest.  You can be up and shredding in no time. 

It used to be that playing along to your favorite tracks was the fastest way to learn guitar.  With JamPlay, you can accelerate your learning by watching where on the fretboard songs are actually played.  Very cool.

Coming up this weekend in San Francisco is the Outside Lands Music Festival.  Kings of Leon, Gogol Bordello, My Morning Jacket — there will be some serious guitar playing.  And, my friend Marcus from Blue Bear Music will be hosting a booth with instruments for anyone to get up and jam.  So, you better warm up your fingers over at the JamPlay site and meet me at the Blue Bear booth on Saturday..

Cheers,

- jeff

European Reader's Choice Awards

We were nominated for the best Transcoding Service provider in Streaming Media’s European Readers’ Choice Awards.  We could certainly use your help so we can bring this award home to California.  If you like our service, please take 30 seconds to follow the link below and give us a nod.  Much appreciated.

Click here to vote for Encoding.com in the best Transcoding Service category.

If you don’t think we’re worthy, we welcome your feedback to help us continue to improve Encoding.com.  Thanks!

[I recently provided this as a Guest Blog for Video Nuze]

For content publishers and consumers, there is chaos in the video ecosystem, and it’s going to get worse before it gets better.  You’ve been reading about HTML5 vs. Flash vs. Silverlight (and recently, WebM), Apple vs. Adobe, H.264 vs. VP8, iPhone vs. Android, Do-it-Yourself vs. OVP.    Whether serving tens or thousands of videos, maximizing viewership with reasonably high-quality videos across web and mobile devices is the new imperative.  With so many permutations of video codecs, formats, containers and features, it’s confusing to design a video workflow that’s cost-effective, flexible to change with the evolving formats and scalable to meet your growth requirements.  With this post, I offer a couple of recommendations to help simplify the array of options currently available.

Case in point: Just when it appeared that H.264 was emerging as the video codec leader, primarily because of YouTube support and strong backing by Apple on its devices, Google went and threw an open-sourced VP8 codec into the ring via the recently announced WebM project, a new video format launched by Google with support from other leading industry players such as Mozilla, Opera Software, Brightcove and Encoding.com.  While both H.264 and VP8 are good quality codecs, only VP8 is currently royalty-free and therefore, has a great opportunity to emerge as the new leader within the next year or two.  However, for web distribution today, we recommend encoding your videos using the H.264 video codec in an .mp4 container.  This is a high-quality output format already supported by Flash, and the leading HTML5 browsers including Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Internet Explorer v9.

WebM is a great shot in the arm for proponents of HTML5 who are pushing for plugin-less video viewing and a more seamless integration with rich media web applications.   But the lack of unified HTML5 standards across browsers has hampered its growth.  Adobe’s Flash, on the other hand, with deep market penetration and a robust feature set, remains the dominant technology for consuming web-based video.  Our recommended approach for HTML5 supporters who want to ensure users can view your videos via a slick user experience is to write code, or utilize a commercial platform, to detect the user’s browser for HTML5 compatibility, and if not supported, launches a Flash player.  If you want to get fancy, you can utilize the Flash Media Server to detect your users’ bandwidth connections during video playback and switch to a higher or lower bitrate version mid-stream to ensure the highest quality video is being served without causing buffering issues.

Adding to the complexity of video format options are the various mobile device requirements.  Yes, Apple’s iPhone OS and Google’s Android OS – the dominant mobile platforms for mobile video consumption – support our recommended encode format using the H.264 codec in an .mp4 container delivered via HTML5 in Safari and Chrome.  However, if you’re delivering video via applications on the iPhone / iPad, Apple now requires publishers to prepare video in its proprietary and complex HTTP Streaming format.  For this, we suggest utilizing a video encoding service or video platform to manage.  To support the plethora of feature-phones already in the market, videos should be encoded to the 3GP format for the most universal coverage.

The “winners” in the video format battle will reap billions of dollars as their influence and market dominance in the video ecosystem rises.  This simple truth means the utopia of a single, standardized video format across all web and mobile devices will not be realized – not soon, not ever.  In other words, for the foreseeable future, you will need to support multiple video formats to capitalize on your revenue potential across the various internet-connected devices.   The good news is that there is a mature ecosystem of video tools and service providers that can help.  The availability of open-source content management systems, video encoding services and cloud storage providers has dramatically simplified the development effort required to create and manage a powerful, flexible and cost-efficient video workflow. I’ll provide a recommended “how-to” in a future post…

Google announced today the launch of a new open media web project called WebM.  As part of this project, Google is contributing its recently acquired VP8 video codec royalty-free.  In other words, Google is open-sourcing VP8.  Encoding.com is joining Google and other major industry players to support WebM / VP8 and will incorporate into our platform as an encoding output preset.

What does this mean?  We think this is fantastic.  The web thrives on open formats.  As browsers adopt HTML5 for “plugin-less” video consumption, WebM along with VP8 will be a great option as the default format. H.264 is a great technology but not royalty-free.  VP6 is proprietary.  Ogg Theora is royalty-free but a ten-year old technology.  By offering a high-quality codec with no licensing fees, Google is helping to create a new and formidable player in the video format wars, and one likely to experience massive adoption.  We know that Chrome, Mozilla, Opera and others will support WebM right out of the gates.

Here are the technical details:

• Container File Format: WebM
• Video Codec: VP8
• Audio Codec: Ogg Vorbis
• Container DOCTYPE: webm
• File Extension:  .webm
• Mime Type: video/x-webm

We’re actively working on this and should have a Beta live very soon, If you don’t already have an encoding.com account Register here to be notified.

Video Format Trends Q1 2010

From TechCrunch:

Earlier this week, Steve Jobs kicked the debate about the need for Flash into high gear, especially for Web video. As he explained, Apple products like the iPhone and iPad don’t support Flash because although 75 percent of video on the Web is in Flash ” almost all this video is also available in a more modern format, H.264, and viewable on iPhones, iPods and iPads.” The next day, Microsoft weighed in, saying that Internet Explorer 9 would only support the H.264 codec for HTML video.

So how much video exactly is available in H.264? I asked Encoding.com, which has encoded 5 million videos over the past year for a variety of Websites and customers including MTV Networks, WebMD, Brightcove, Nokia, MySpace, and Red Bull. President Jeff Malkin sent me the chart above, which he believes is representative of the Web in general, including mobile. As the chart shows, in the past four quarters, the H.264 format went from 31 percent of all videos to 66 percent, and is now the largest format by far. Meanwhile, Flash is represented by Flash VP6 and FLV, which combined represent only 26 percent of all videos. That is down from a combined total of 69 percent four quarters ago. So the native Flash codecs and H.264 have completely flipped in terms of market share (Flash also supports H.264, however, but you don’t need a Flash player to watch H.264 videos)

Another data point that Steve Jobs mentions: All YouTube videos are available in H.264, which alone represents 40 percent of all videos on the Web. So these numbers from Encoding don’t seem so crazy.

Introducing… (drum roll please)…Clive, the Encoding.com Goat.  Look for him to appear in many places in the near future including his print debut in the latest issue of Streaming Media Magazine.  Why did we choose a Goat to represent the Company?  After many hours and several Board meetings of deliberation, and as anyone familiar with animal behavior knows, we chose a Goat for their extreme intelligence, tenacity and innate ability to discover and exploit any system weakness (think loose rung in a fence); or,  in our case, a poorly served video encoding marketplace.  OK –  we just thought Clive was cool and looked good in the ad.

Streaming Media Editors' Pick 2010

The recent issue of Streaming Media magazine entitled, “Editors’ Picks 2010 – The Best of the Best” features Encoding.com as one of the top ten hottest companies in the world of online video.   They wrote, “At the beginning of 2009, it looked like cloud transcoding was about to explode in much the same way that online video platforms had the year before.  But while a handful of others have entered the market, there’s already a clear leader of the pack. Encoding.com — has got everything going for it; the company understands what its customers need — fast, easy-to-use, and reliable transcoding to multiple formats — and has poured all of its resources into doing that better than anyone else out there.”

Wow!  We are so thankful and humbled to be included in a list that recognizes such amazing companies as Netflix, Amazon, HowCast, BoinxTV, Kyte, LiveStream, Visible Measures, Winnov and YuMe.

We’re very appreciative of the hundreds of our customers who continue to share their honest feedback to help us improve, drive and prioritize our product roadmap, and most of all, trust us enough to manage their video encoding requirements and build Encoding.com into their video workflow.

Thank you Streaming Media magazine.  While we appreciate the accolade, now is no time to rest.  With the video format wars heating up, we promise to continue working as best we can to simplify the ever-evolving video technology space so you, our customers, can focus on your core competencies.

Thanks for your continued support,

- Gregg and Jeff and the entire Encoding.com team.