RipCode, a company that offers online video streaming and transcoding services, has closed a $12.5 million funding round led by Granite Ventures with participation from existing investors Hunt Ventures, El Dorado Ventures, Vesbridge Partners, and ATA Ventures. The company, which was founded in 2005, had previously raised $19.5 million in funding. As part of the deal, Granite’s Eric Zimits will join RipCode’s board.
One of the major issues with streaming video lies in offering content compatible with the wide array of devices that can access the web. Sites are oftentimes forced to store the same video multiple times in different file formats and sizes to accommodate as many devices as possible, but this can lead to unnecessary storage and processing costs.
RipCode allows content providers to negate this issue by transcoding their videos on the fly, without the need to process and store multiple copies. The company recently scored a major win with its partnership with MySpace, which now uses the company’s services to offer streaming video to mobile phones. And given the increasing diversity of devices that can access the high-speed web, we can probably expect to see similar partnerships between RipCode and other major video providers in the future.
RipCode plans to use the new funds to further expand its sales and marketing efforts, as well as continue development on its infrastructure and software offerings.
I would have thought converting a couple copies of a video during initial upload would be more beneficial than custom transcoding for every video request. Sure, at the cost of storage, but I guess this company has something special. Cool stuff.
Josh – I suspect that transcoded copies will be cached for future request, but that this technology prevents unnecessary transcoding into ~100 formats even for infrequently requested videos.
It’s getting to the point that I dread visiting the homepage.
Make a resolution for 2009 to lose some of the page weight and the excess clutter.
http://www.jugargame.com/
How is this play viable when cloud computing is quickly coming up to replace most existing transcoding solutions? So, it’s on-demand – get that – realtime always has a place. But with the cost of storing multiple copies increasingly approaching 0, why substitute CPU instead?
It’s too bad Ripcode isn’t available as an ondemand/saas application.
I agree Jon. Encoding.com has moved encoding services to the cloud.
what’s the messages?
Create or join a crunchie’s chat group at http://groups.im/
It would be great if a site like TubeMogul (http://www.tubemogul.com) could incorporate something like this.
I’m just about to start doing a lot of video content, and would love a simple transcode/distribution solution.
That’s what we built: it’s a video transcoder in the cloud that brokers most of the major CDN solutions. Just pop it in with SOAP to any platform. Ping me if you want details.
Love any company tweaking streaming video tech!!!
$12.5 million… maybe now they can afford a logo that doesn’t suck.
I agree. That logo looks $2.99
I would prefer to invest my money in a company that concentrated on it’s technology rather than it’s logo. I take it as a GOOD sign that they couldn’t care less about their logo.
Jon
http://Buzvia.com – Where’s Your Traffic Going?
these guys are solving a real big issue. This is something I would have also invested in these economic times. They virtually have no competition and is absolutely required to deliver streaming video. Picks and shovels….
I can only imagine the deer in the headlights some VC’s must of had when these guys presented. “What do you mean you don’t do social networking”.
WOW. RipCode CEO Brendon Mills look like Donnie Osmond. http://www.ripcode.com/ (RipCode Blog pic) http://is.gd/eEXi (Donnie Osmond)
Do we need so many formats? Doesn’t http://www.keepvid.com allow users to download youtube videos?
By customizing the end user experience they are saving loading times, bandwidth, etc. for mobile users. I think a big portion of their product is streaming the right size of video to the right devices.
I don’t see a future in a company selling proprietary video transcoding appliances. Sure, some deep pocketed companies are going to buy them, but most people will stick with general use servers/cloud computing and open source software.
The beauty of their solution, from what I understand (and I’m doing lots of guessing) is that they can transcode on the fly – without having to keep actual files around. This means you can create a stream compatible with, say, your mobile phone needing a myopic QCIF format file to your iPhone that can swallow a hansom H.264 encoded file, all from the original source material. If it’s fast enough (and faster than wire/broadband load speeds then it lets companies deploy a video distribution format more easily and faster.
It’s like the Star-imprinting machine from Dr. Seuss. Video file goes in one end and bits for a specific format and frame rate (and audio format) come out the other end.
Having cloud resources is great. It’s still very difficult to manage pedabytes of video content – especially when lots of it is, often, access infrequently. With a solution like this you might not have to.
Congrats to them! There’s definitely a need.
Seattle had a startup a few years ago named PictureIQ that had a similar appliance play but was, at the time, targeting formats specifically for mobile phones. Tom Hull, formally of LapLink and Visio, led them.
I hope, though, they send Fabrice Bellard a bone. He started ffmpeg.
I don’t see a big future for this type of product. Eventually almost all devices will play Flash movies or MP4’s (which in Flash 10 is practically the same thing anyway). You could kind of compare this service to a DVD player that plays all formats – not much point if there is one single dominant format.
Innovation doesn’t stop. Imagine, for a minute, that the state-of-the-art keeps improving and we have a format much better than H.264 in MPEG4 a few years from now (faster, better color, less motion blur, etc.). Now – without products like this you might find yourself having to re-encode a zillion files. I’m not saying this is the penultimate transcoding engine (I actually don’t know much about it), but there’s definitely a need for rapid, flexible video encoding – especially with everyone digesting it now on their phones, PCs, DVRs, etc. Flash continues to evolve too (and ON2 is the actually developer of their high-end video formats).
It may be hard to imagine, but you don’t have to sell that many appliances in the $10 – $50K range to have a successful company. And, I promise, there are many, many more organizations, companies, sites, etc. that want an easy way to service the highly varied video needs of their audiences.
I’ll stop commenting now lest people think I work for these guys or something. I don’t. Eyejot uses ffmpeg!
What a waste. I could do the same with a few scripts and EC2 nodes.
Then why didnt you do it BEFORE?
Some of you guys think too small.
Say you are Sony, Paramount or Universal Music and have gazillions of media titles that you want to distribute.
Do you really want to create a huge translation process when (assuming you have digital media already) you can just make it available to everyone instantly with no up-front cost or effort?
Didn’t encoding.com try this already?
one company has provided mobile encoding and play service to watch videos on cell phone, like http://Vuclip.com