Having the fastest cloud encoder on the market is a great USP for us, but how does increasing your video encoding speed benefit your business? Here are three great reasons for you to care about the speed of your encoder.
Last month we ran some fairly comprehensive tests comparing our cloud encoding service against the competition. The results were great for us and showed that both our standard cloud encoding service and our enterprise system are considerably faster than anything else on the market. It’s very important to Bitmovin that we maintain our position at the top of the fastest list for a variety of reasons. For one, it pushes our developers to constantly optimize and improve every aspect of our encoding system, but there are many more reasons, and most of them are related to our customers and your businesses.
Below are three common examples of where a faster encoder can give you the commercial advantage.
Video Encoding Speed and VoD Libraries
The VoD and OTT industry is expanding quickly. There are new portals popping up all over the internet, many of them are start ups, some of them are new brands and others are satellites of existing brands. As well as new sites publishing new libraries, the established portals are also regularly adding new content, and sometimes entire new categories to their existing libraries as they attempt to broaden their audience base and keep their current audience tuned in.
In all of the examples listed above, one of the major tasks is encoding the new library into the required adaptive profiles. In many cases we are talking about thousands of videos and the encoding process can take weeks. Using a faster encoder is a very easy way to dramatically reduce your time to market from the when you receive your new library, to the moment that they are all available online for your users.
The second way to reduce the encoding time is by spinning up extra encoding instances. That means running multiple encodings simultaneously in the cloud. This gives you enormous potential to increase your encoding outputs.
Bitmovin has a list of examples, where companies have come to us with 8 week encoding estimates, and we have delivered in 2 weeks or even faster. Read a VoD customer user case.
Winning the “First to Air” Advantage in the Broadcast Industry
A recent study published on techcrunch shows that 62% of Americans now get their news from social media. This puts social media marketing at the top of the list for News Publishers, and that means that social sharing is of paramount importance.
So the question that broadcasters are asking is; “How do we maximize social shares of our news content”
There are obviously a few factors to consider, but one of the major ones is being the first to publish that particular piece of news. Video encoding speed plays a vital role in this delivery chain.
The graphic on this page illustrates just one situation where the encoder can give you the competitive advantage. Let’s imagine that several news broadcasters are covering a live event, perhaps Tiger Woods is on the final day and final hole of the US open and is one shot off the lead. (We’ll forget about the exclusivity of the broadcast rights for the example.) He hit’s his second shot towards the green.. it’s close… it drops! Tiger Woods wins the US Open with a spectacular Eagle on the 18th hole! At that second every news agency at the scene will take a snippet from the live stream, fire it to their encoder, and publish a video of that shot through their social networks. The first news agency to publish it will win the lions share of the social engagement which means the lion share if ad revenue. Everyone other broadcaster will be left fighting over the scraps.
User Generated Video in Social Platforms
User generated video is another very fast growing trend that we at Bitmovin are watching carefully. Our encoding service is used by a lot of platforms that provide this, both as a social service, or for internal usage. Social media video is a fast growing and competitive industry, where end users have a lot of choice, not only between brands but between different experiences and sharing models. This makes user experience even more important, not only in viewing video content but also in the user experience as they upload and create their content.
The advantage of using a faster encoding service is in the time delay between when a user uploads their video file, to when they can view it in adaptive format and start sharing it. There are several factors affecting this process and some of them are out of your control, such as users internet connection or the size of the file, but as they say: “Control the controllables”. The video encoding speed is something that you can control, and should be looked at as a priority for your social video platform.
Here are some new types of Encoding that you might be interested in:
