Flashforward Austin: Flash Enters Its Second Decade

Further inquiries were met with no response, but Matt Cupal, president & COO of Sorenson Media later responded with a comment on the post:

I’m sensitive to the concerns expressed, and wanted to clear up any misunderstandings we have unfortunately helped create by not communicating our product changes to our customers.

The encoding limits we place on Sorenson Squeeze are by no means a conspiracy targeting customers. The simple reality is that the Squeeze product is licensed for desktop use, not for enterprise-level applications such as one might find at a video sharing site, for example, where systems will encode thousands of videos per day. For that level of volume, we need to charge a price more in line with enterprise server software rather than desktop software.

This restriction is in part a result of the third-party technology that is part of Squeeze. The licenses we have with our partners do not permit us to provide enterprise-level encoding capability at desktop pricing.

Our encoding limits are not imposed if a user is interacting with Squeeze through the UI (a true desktop application), but are imposed if the tool is being driven through the watch folder or command line interfaces.

We are currently finalizing our pricing model for high-volume encoding. However, the fact that our pricing is not yet communicated to our customer base is a significant error on our part, and I agree that it's not fair for us to impose this limit.

So for the time being, I invite any of you who have been impacted by this limit to contact our support group (801.313.8150, or support@sorensonmedia.com) so we can work out an arrangement that allows you to use Sorenson Squeeze as needed until we properly post and implement our new pricing information for high volume users.

I look forward to hearing from any of you who wish to speak with us, so we can understand your usage characteristics, and how we can best meet your needs.

Though they expressed regret at the public relations snafu, it’s clear that Sorenson is closely monitoring their customers’ usage of their product behind the scenes. I was not able to locate a Sorenson representative at the show for further comment.

On a more positive note, one notable new company exhibiting at Flashforward Austin was WowzaTV. This two-person company is developing an alternative to Flash Media Server for video streaming, recording, and chat, called WowzaFlash Server.

Their business model is based upon targeting smaller or more specialized streaming applications that may not be well-served by Flash Media Server. By focusing on custom applications and avoiding the high-end deployment that may step on Adobe’s toes, they plan to exist peacefully alongside Adobe’s FMS. "We respect Adobe greatly," says co-founder Charlie Good. "We just believe that there are a great deal of holes, niches, and targets that need to be filled [in the streaming market]."