Want to learn more about cloud-based online video transcoding and delivery? Check out Zencoder CEO Jon Dahl in a StreamingMedia.com webinar, covering best practices and common questions about online video in the cloud. Get more details here: http://streamingmedia.com/webevents/details.aspx?eventid=353&src=zen3
This post originally appeared as a guest post on the RackSpace Cloud:Blog Zencoder is happy to announce that we have added native support for Rackspace Cloud Files storage. Zencoder is the performance leader in scalable, fast, high-quality cloud-based video transcoding.
The following is a Zencoder guest blog post on the Google WebM blog. Zencoder is a cloud service for video encoding. Through a simple API, we provide high-performance, high-quality video encoding for web and mobile, at any scale, small or large. Our customers range from broadcast media to online video publishers to UGC websites. At Zencoder, we encourage our content publishers to support HTML5 video. Though HTML5 video is relatively new, it's now playable by more than 50% of Internet users, and that number is growing quickly.
Yesterday was April 21, 2011, the day that Skynet becomes self-aware and destroys the earth in the Terminator universe. Yesterday, the internet saw the worst outage in cloud history when Amazon EC2 experienced a catastrophic failure. Unfortunately for our customers, Zencoder was affected by this EC2 failure. We were unavailable for much of the day due to this outage. This is a serious problem. We know that our customers couldn't encode video for much of yesterday, and experienced unacceptably long delays in getting their videos processed. We sincerely apologize for the downtime, and we are making changes to our system that will ensure that it never happens again.
Zencoder has been affected by the Amazon EC2 outage today, and we've seen significant downtime. As you can imagine, we're taking this extremely seriously. Our hands are tied with respect to EC2 itself - we're at Amazon's mercy there - but we're actively working on getting something online so our customers can get back up and running.
Zencoder just closed on a $2M funding round from some pretty awesome investors. This is our second round of funding, though most of our first round investors participated again in the second round. Investors this time around include Andreessen-Horowitz, Ignition Partners, SV Angel, Lowercase Capital, Founder’s Collective, 500 Startups, Matt Cutts, James Lindenbaum, Orion Henry, Adam Wiggins, Wolfgang Buehler, Mike Bollinger, Neil McClements, and a few friends-and-family investors. Why did we raise this money, and how did it happen?
Available today, Zencoder is discounting the cost of every output after the first by 20%. You don't have to do anything to get this discount--it will automatically be applied every time you encode a single input file to multiple output files. However, this only works if the outputs are a part of the same job; if you submit two separate jobs with the same input file, you won't see a discount. Within a job, the highest priced output is run at full price and every additional output receives the discount. So, if you encode an input file to two HD outputs and two SD outputs, one of the HD outputs and both of the SD outputs would be 20% off.