HD Cloud Launches SaaS Transcoding Offering

Written by Ryan Lawler

Tuesday, April 14. 2009 at 07:30 AM EDT Post a comment

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New online transcoding player HD Cloud is launching a cloud-based offering that it believes will change the way video publishers roll out infrastructure and establish workflows for moving their content online.

The HD Cloud product offering, which was developed by parent company Diversion Media, is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform for transcoding video files into multiple file sizes and file types, as well as managing them across multiple platforms and distribution partners.

HD Cloud supports a wide range of video formats, including H.264, Real Video and Windows Media, and has the scale to support transcoding of files up to 1080p resolution with bit rates of up to 100 Mbit/s. The platform has the ability to support batch uploads and transcoding of a single file into multiple files at once, and includes security to wipe the cloud clean afterwards.

For content owners, HD Cloud is being pitched as a way to turn capex into opex, by allowing them to transcode their video files into multiple digital formats without making any upfront investment in transcoders. HD Cloud is built on Amazon Web Services, which provides the company (and its customers) with highly scalable Web processing power.

"Someone else could roll their own, but we think we'll have better processing and performance. We will also be a higher-volume user, so we'll get better pricing," says HD Cloud founder and CEO Nicholas Butterworth.

HD Cloud is privately funded and profitable, according to Butterfield. The company has 12 employees, 10 of which are on the engineering side of things. To ramp up sales, HD Cloud is looking to partner with video management systems, such as Brightcove and Ooyala, as well as CDNs as channel partners.

The company's first named customer is Magnify.net, which manages video Websites for WeatherChannel.com, NYMagazine.com, Zappos.com, LiveEarth.org, and BlogHer.com, among others. Butterworth says that it manages transcoding for roughly 50,000 sites that run on Magnify.net.