PBS NewsHour and Hurley Leverage Encoding.com for HTTP Live Streaming to iOS Devices
Encoding.com helps customers like Hurley and PBS NewsHour transcode video for Apple’s proprietary HTTP Live Streaming, to ensure an excellent video experience for viewers using iPhones and iPads.
San Francisco, CA(09 Dec 2001)
Encoding.com, the world's largest video encoding service provider, today announced that two key customers - Hurley and PBS NewsHour - now stream video to Apple iPhone and iPad devices by using Encoding.com to prepare their video. Encoding.com enables customers to transcode video for Apple's proprietary HTTP Live Streaming, to ensure an excellent video experience for viewers, by continuously adapting the video stream, in real time, to match the viewer's available bandwidth.
PBS NewsHour provides millions of viewers around the world with reliable and trusted news reporting on air and online. Its "Extra" program is an interactive, current events site with hundreds of lesson plans designed to bring current events into the classroom for students and teachers. The PBS team approached Encoding.com to produce an iPhone/iPad-friendly version of their show every night. With news reporting, the rapid turnaround of content is an imperative and requires fast and high-quality global content ingestion and transcoding to deliver to all devices. Encoding.com helped PBS NewsHour define their workflow requirements and now transcodes the nightly video into Apple's HTTP Streaming format.
"We're thrilled Encoding.com offers this capability," said Travis Daub, Creative Director at PBS NewsHour from MacNeil/Lehrer Productions. "Reaching our target audience on their mobile devices is a strategic imperative for PBS NewsHour. Encoding.com removes all the headaches related to iOS encoding and enables us to focus on creating compelling content."
Surfing, skating, snow sports, music and art all influence Hurley, the Orange County, California-based fashion and lifestyle company. As part of Hurley's efforts to continue its position as a leading clothing and apparel company, it also delivers compelling content to its youthful audience, including access to surf competition videos through its iPhone application, called Hurley PRO. Apple requires that application videos be segmented into 10-second chunks with each segment encoded into four different bit rates. Encoding.com has made the complex process of converting Hurley's videos to HTTP Streaming incredibly simple. The Encoding.com iPhone Streaming preset downloads Hurley's videos from their cloud storage location, encodes them into the Apple recommended multiple bit rates, and delivers the full package (encoded segments and the m3u8 stream instruction file), directly to Hurley's CDN for streaming.
"Encoding.com's extensible platform enabled us to create an automated encoding workflow for content editors to take video while on the beach and, in one step, have it served to iOS devices on demand within 30 minutes," said Russ Ronchi, Digital Technology Manager at Hurley. "Preparing videos for the iOS format is very complex. We're happy to work with the experts at Encoding.com to ensure our customers have the best possible viewing experience wherever and however they are viewing our videos."
"Streaming video to iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch devices is critical for brands that need to reach savvy audiences, but it's very difficult to prepare videos for HTTP Live at scale," said Jeff Malkin, President of Encoding.com. "We are committed to supporting leading-edge video content providers, like PBS NewsHour and Hurley, so that they can focus on content, while we ensure the highest quality experience for their viewers."
About Encoding.com
Encoding.com, the world's largest video encoding service, makes video transcoding into all popular formats easy, cost-effective and, by leveraging cloud computing, instantly scalable for global enterprises and SMBs, including video sites, agencies, and website development platforms. As the first and only encoding service offering service level agreements, Encoding.com removes the necessity for its customers and partners to make heavy investments in expensive hardware/software solutions and overhead required to manage high-volume video transcoding needs, and backs it with a wait-time service level guarantee. Encoding.com received Series A funding in 2010 from Metamorphic Ventures and angel investors: Patrick Condon, Fred Hamilton, Zelkova Ventures, Dave Morgan and Allen Morgan. It was selected as an Editors' Pick for 2010 by StreamingMedia. This Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business is based in San Francisco, California. For more information about Encoding.com, visit http://www.Encoding.com.
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