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Sorenson 360 video server service

Sorenson – known widely for its compression software, Squeeze, has recently launched a video publishing server service that integrates with Squeeze, but can also be used with nothing more than a web browser to encode files. The new service is called Sorenson 360.

Most magazines or blogs prefer to separate interviews from tutorials from reviews, but this article will be a unique hybrid offering a little of all three. To start, we’ll learn a little about the service from my interview with Sorenson Media’s VP of Product Development, David Dudas.

PVC: What need did you see this fulfilling for your customers.

DD: We’ve got this wide swath of customers who (use Squeeze) for encoding video and increasingly our customers wanted to get video on-line, or they’ve got clients that they want to show their videos to for review and approval. And they were basically running into roadblocks there. They had looked at some solutions that were way, way too pricey, or way too complicated, or they tried to roll their own solution or set up their own server or tried using an ftp account, things like that to get videos on-line or transmit or distribute videos digitally to their customers or clients and they were really frustrated by not having a solution out there that met their needs. So that led us to develop 360, which is really tightly integrated with Squeeze.

PVC: What are the benefits to those customers that they now have 360?

DD: There are some real differentiators. One is just simply quality and control over quality and control over the video format and codecs. If you look at other service providers, you upload a file to them and they encode it for you and you have absolutely no control over it. Most service providers encode to Flash video at their chosen frame size, their chosen resolution, their data rate.

Well if you think about the Squeeze user, that really contradicts everything they’re about. If a guy encodes a video and spends all his time making the video look just great, he wants to control all the parameters that Squeeze allows somebody to dial in. They upload the file. They can choose the output format, the bit rate, the data rate, the frame size the resolution. They have full control over all that.

PVC: What did you want to include to make this product better than anybody else’s products?

DD: If you look at the space and you go to websites and service providers, the pricing isn’t listed in most cases. And if it is listed, it’s really complicated. For example you might get 10gigs of bandwidth per month for $299, or something like that. It just occurred to us that these pricing schemes that are out there are kind of like cell phone bills. If I tell you you get 10gigabits of bandwidth every month, how can you translate that for me? So we just took a different approach which is just based on streams. Our entry level plan is $99 a month and you get up to 10,000 streams for that. That’s it. That’s all you need to know.

PVC: What are some of the features that you’re glad got into the product?

DD: Well definitely, support for multiple formats, for one. With 360 we support Flash, MP4, H.264, so you have more control over the formats and all the data rates and so forth. In addition to that, a real distinction is that have the client-side encoding. I know you’re familiar with Squeeze so, the user can use Squeeze and Squeeze automatically uploads to 360. But we also have web-browser based encoding. So Squeeze is a real power tool. We also have web-browser based encoding and you don’t even have to purchase Squeeze. You can just open up your web-browser. You can drag and drop a file on top of it once you log onto 360 and what we’ve done is, we’ve actually created a lite version of the Squeeze encoding engine that runs inside the web-browser. But what’s going on it, when you drag a file onto that web page, we quickly install a mini-version of the Squeeze encoding engine. The same one that Squeeze desktop actually uses. ANd that will encode the file right there on your local machine, in your webbrowser, before it gets uploaded. So in both cases, whether you’re using the browser or whether you’re using Squeeze, in both cases it’s client-side encoding. And there are really three benefits to that 1) quality and control, 2) just the speed, because if you have a really, really large source file and you have to upload it to, say, a Brightcove before you encode it or compress it, that upload is going to take a very, very long time.

PVC: What are the benefits to the more power user, professional person?

DD: We have real time metrics. So if you’re concerned or interested in measuring the performance of your videos, when are your videos being watched, what is the abandonment rate? let me give you an example. You encode a video, you send it out to 10 or 50 or 100 of your peers or your customers or your clients. The moment they watch it you can log in to your 360 account, go to your metrics dashboard and it will show you a graph Basically, it shows you if it’s a 2 minute long video and people stop watching it after 27 seconds, you’ll see a steep drop off at the 27 second mark, so as a content creator, what we understand from our customers is that it’s really important for them to understand, “Are people watching the video all the way through? Am I losing them after 5 seconds? Am I losing them after 1 minute?” And if so, that’s really great intelligence to use in order to maybe re-edit the video, cut it differently, figure out what’s in there that’s causing people to drop off, so things like that you obviously can’t get from an ftp site

We also have realtime syndication control. Let’s say that you put up a video and overnight it goes viral and you wake up in the morning you find out that it’s been embedded in 10,000 different websites, because they grabbed the embed codes and posted it on Twitter and it’s all over the internet. In some cases you may want that. That might be great, but in other cases you may not, so in those cases we have realtime syndication control. You can log on to your 360 account and there’s a “retire” button, so all you have to do is press one button that says “retire” and instantly, all over the internet every single one of those videos will no longer be available. And it extends to other things as well, like maybe you’ve got rights to the video for 30 days and on the 31st day you need to pull it down, or something like that. So that’s just another example of the thought that we’ve put into it based on the needs that our customers. That’s just not the kind of stuff that you can easily do if you’re simply just using an ftp server or just cobbling together your own solution.

Some of our customers are using 360 for a Review and Approval workflow and they’re sending the video to their client and they don’t want ANYBODY to see it unless they explicitly approve it. So in that case our customers can customize the functionality of the player and they can remove the embed code, they can remove the Permalink, they can remove the Send to Friend feature. And for every single video, you can specify a password and then when the viewer receives the video, they actually have to enter the password in the player before it will allow them to view it. So the features, the sharing functionality all those things in the player can be enabled or disabled to fit the individual needs of the client.

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