Encoding.com Integrates with Vid.ly, Offers Easier Access
Why would a company build up a second brand when it already has a strong identity? According to Jeff Malkin, president of Encoding.com, that was the question facing the execs at his company as they considered Vid.ly's future.
"Over the last six months we're realized that Vid.ly marketed and run as a completely different service from Encoding.com just didn't make sense," says Malkin.
Encoding.com is a leading cloud encoding platform and Vid.ly is its one-year-old service for creating versions of a video that will play on any device from one universal embed code. Vid.ly started out as a free service, then added a paid plan in August, 2011.
Today, Encoding.com is announcing that it's integrating Vid.ly with the Encoding.com interface, a move that Malkin says will make encoding easier for Vid.ly customers that want a high level of service, but don't have the resources to incorporate an API into their workflow.
(The announcement is today, although Encoding.com seems to have scooped its own PR department by putting this news on the company blog a month ago.)
This change will be a boon to small companies, says Malkin, and to ad agencies that don't want to incorporate an API into each separate client project.
Vid.ly will live as a preset within Encoding.com, so that customers will be able to choose Vid.ly as an output for their videos. They'll also have the option of setting up automatic watch folders for videos stored locally or in the cloud. The service will then transcode their videos into 24 versions and offer universal embed codes for each.
For those who enjoy the convenience of free Vid.ly service from the Vid.ly site, Malkin says that isn't going away. But power users of the paid service will now go through Encoding.com, rather than the Vid.ly site.
In a curious second announcement, Encoding.com also announced that videos uploaded to Vid.ly were now "future-proof," meaning that the service will automatically transcode stored videos into any new formats that spring up in the future. It's a curious announcement, because Encoding.com said that stored videos were future-proof way back in January, 2011, when it first announced Vid.ly in closed beta.
According to Malkin, while that feature was announced a year ago, it hasn't actually been available until now.
"We were building it and now we've built it," he concedes.
Due to customer demand, Vid.ly will soon offer performance analytics, Malkin says. He adds that Encoding.com will do much more to market the service this year.
"One of the top two or three value propositions is the simplicity of 'I don't have to worry about what formats are out there,'" says Malkin, explaining Vid.ly's appeal.
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