Tech Talk

A sizeable portion of the Zencoder crew hails from Minnesota, and we're big fans of the music scene there.

Spuul is a great example of a company leveraging both Brightcove's Video Cloud video publishing platform  and the Zencoder transcoding service to provide a world-class online video viewing experience.  Check out the writeup over on the Brightcove blog to learn more about their business.

LIVE CLOUD TRANSCODING IS NOW COMMERCIALLY AVAILABLE:   Just in time for the IBC show in Amsterdam, we're excited to announce the beta availability of both a groundbreaking new feature of our industry leading VOD transcoding service, and a major new addition to our service - Live Cloud Transcoding.

Featuring properties such as IGN.com, AskMen and GameSpy, IGN Entertainment engages one of the largest concentrations of video games and entertainment fans on the Internet, with 49.5 million monthly unique users. A critical tool for engaging users is video. IGN is number one in their category with 8.5MM video viewers and 76.4MM video streams on their network of sites alone (not including YouTube or other syndication outlets).  With a commitment to growing video distribution to new platforms and devices, IGN undertook a project to revamp their internal content management system (CMS), including their transcoding solution.

Today, Brightcove entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Zencoder. Zencoder will continue to operate as an independent service, but we will do so as a part of Brightcove. We are really excited about this, and hope you will be too, for the reasons outlined below. In summary, Brightcove is a complementary company in the video space who believes in our developer focus, is committed to standalone API-based services, and will keep Zencoder operating largely as you see it today - only better, and with more resources behind us.

For those of us in the cloud computing world, the most exciting thing that came out of Google I/O this year wasn't skydivers wearing Glass, and it wasn't a new tablet. The big news was that Google is getting into the cloud infrastructure-as-a-service space, currently dominated by Amazon Web Services (AWS). Specifically, Google has launched a new service called Google Compute Engine to compete with Amazon EC2. This is exciting. The world needs another robust, performant, well-designed, cloud virtual machine service. With apologies to Rackspace and others, this has been a single-player space for a long time - EC2 is far and away the leader. Google obviously has the expertise and scale to be a serious competitor, if they stick with it. How does it look?

Captioning is coming to internet video. Legislation goes into effect in the US during 2012 and 2013 that mandates closed captioning on certain categories of online content - see our earlier post for details on the legislation. But even apart from this legislation, closed captioning is a good thing for accessibility and usability, and is yet another milestone as internet video marches towards maturity. Unfortunately, closed captioning is not a single technology or "feature" of video that can be "turned on". There are a number of formats, standards, and approaches, ranging from good to bad to ugly. Closed captioning is kind of a mess, just like the rest of digital video, and is especially challenging for multiscreen publishers. So if you want to publish video today for web, mobile, and connected TV delivery, what do you have to know about closed captioning? This post will outline the basics: how closed captions work, formats you may need to know about, and how to enable closed captions for every screen.