Sorenson Explains Flash Encoding Limits
When you buy a hammer, you expect to be able to hammer as many nails as you like. You don’t expect the hammer to stop functioning after pounding a certain number of nails, after which you must contact the hammer manufacturer if you wish to continue working.
That’s what happened recently to four users of the latest release of Sorenson Squeeze Compression Suite. These users admittedly are not typical, as they were consistently encoding 50 or more videos per day, exceeding a total of 1,500 videos over the course of a month. After reaching that limit, they received an error message stating that they had reached the 30-day encoding maximum and should contact the Sorenson sales department to continue using the product. It is not horribly unusual for software products to have throttled usage limits, but a review of the End User License Agreement (EULA) yielded no mention of any such limit.
Sven Slazenger, co-founder and manager of German-based InterLake, was one of the affected users. "I would have no objection, had Sorenson advertised the limit and maybe put an additional ‘enterprise’ license in the product portfolio that does not have that limitation but costs more," Slazenger says. "Then we would have been in a better position to screen the market offerings and to compare Sorenson and its competitor's products."
According to Brandon Morford, product manager for Sorenson, all four of the Squeeze users who contacted the sales department regarding this issue are running some sort of encoding service, either in the adult entertainment industry or YouTube-type services, encoding user-generated content. Admittedly, Sorenson did not foresee their product being used in this manner.
"All of a sudden you have Superman using the hammer. One guy can do the hammering for the whole world," says Morford. This scenario was not considered in the original pricing model and is currently posing a serious problem for the 15-person company. "We don’t want to price ourselves out of the market, but have yet to find a viable solution."
Until a workable solution is reached, Sorenson is issuing temporary serial numbers that give the prolific Squeeze owners unlimited encoding privileges for a year.
This issue was first made public on Stefan Richter’s Flash Video blog, FlashComGuru.com. Morford dismisses the conspiracy theories discussed in the thread regarding data gathering and hidden monitoring of encoding activity sent back to Sorenson. "The limit dialog was hard-coded into the latest release; it is not communicating with our server," he says.
The real controversy surrounding these encoding limits is that they were not expressly spelled out in the EULA. "We miscommunicated by not communicating," Morford admits.
The company left itself open for what could be considered abuse of their software by providing watch folders for batch encoding, without expressly prohibiting service bureau-encoding scenarios. For example, with sufficient bandwidth and a $449 Squeeze license, one could theoretically set up an encoding service, eliminating the need for their customers to buy their own copy of Squeeze. This is a dilemma for Sorenson, as they want to satisfy customer needs, but also need to stay in business.
"There are no conspiracies, just mistakes," says Morford. "We found out what we did wrong and will fix it." He encourages customers and partners to open a dialog, requesting constructive feedback and ideas from users for workable solutions and viable pricing models for their specific business model. If you are a Squeeze Compression Suite user and you reach your encoding limit, you may contact Sorenson at 801.313.8150 or support@sorensonmedia.com.