We are lucky enough to work with innovative customers around the world, and we always get excited about customers that have the potential to be truly disruptive. One such example is Spuul, which is a service that legally provides Indian content online to anyone in the world. Think NetFlix or Hulu for Bollywood.
Launched in 2010 in Singapore, Spuul is on a path to become the dominant Web portal for Bollywood distribution. The company has a large and fast-growing library of movies and TV shows available today from major content producers, including UTV, Eros, Reliance, Rajshri and Unisys. Spuul generates revenue in several different ways, including through its "freemium" ad-supported content than anyone can sign up to view at no charge and its premium subscription-based content that starts at $4.99 per month. The company also offers .99 cent specials with a 72 hour pass for other content.
Early on, Spuul recognized the need to deliver the highest quality viewing experience possible, which is a major challenge when dealing with the large file sizes of movies. Rather than trying to cobble together a variety of solutions to address each piece of the puzzle (encoding, delivery, digital rights management, advertising, storage, distribution, etc.) and having to hire a sizeable technical staff to manage it, the company looked to both Brightcove and Zencoder (which we acquired in August) to give them the best of both worlds -- world-class encoding in the cloud and the market-leading online video platform for publishing and delivering the content.
With the Zencoder cloud-based encoding service, Spuul is able to take many different types and sizes of source content files and quickly convert them to the appropriate size and rendition for high quality streaming to desktops and Apple iOS devices. The Zencoder service also provides the fastest encoding times and enables Spuul to easily scale up or down depending on the size and quantity of video files they are processing.
Spuul is also able to tightly integrate the Zencoder service with the Brightcove Video Cloud online video platform so once the files have been encoded they can quickly begin the publishing process through Video Cloud. With Video Cloud, Spuul is able to deliver high quality playback experiences to users on any desktop or iOS screen, as well as deliver ads on top of the content when necessary. Video Cloud also enables Spuul to ensure its content is protected through Brightcove's support for a range of DRM technologies, which is crucial when dealing with studio-produced premium content.
In the future, Spuul hopes to expand its reach to Android devices and connected TV platforms from Samsung, LG, Boxee, Roku and Google TV.
