Sorenson Media Announces Immediate Support for New VP8 / WebM Ecosystem
• Sorenson Media Site – www.sorensonmedia.com/vp8 – Enables Developers to Immediately Encode Directly with the VP8 Video Codec to the WebM Format
• Sorenson Media Announces Private Beta of New Squeeze Server and Squeeze 6.5, Supporting WebM
San Diego, CA(19 May 2010)
Sorenson Media today announced it will join the online video ecosystem built around the WebM project. The company also announced that it has already optimized all of its products for VP8 and WebM.
Users can begin encoding immediately with VP8 for WebM at: http://www.sorensonmedia.com/vp8
Sorenson Media was requested to participate in a groundswell of technology and product development support for VP8. The official announcement revealing the VP8 ecosystem partners was made today at the 2010 Google I/O Developers Conference, the company's largest annual event for developers, which opened today in San Francisco.
In addition to Google's own support across its network of platforms-including Google Chrome and YouTube-it is partnering with a range of technology vendors, from browsers to encoding companies, hardware and software vendors, and platform providers to foster development around this high-profile, high-quality codec.
"We are honored to be joining the VP8 ecosystem, which highlights our strategic role of creating innovation at the crucial intersection of the online video platform and encoding," said Mike Flathers, chief technology officer for Sorenson Media. "Our participation in this project exemplifies our commitment to remaining on the leading edge of development in the platforms and formats that are most important to our core enterprise, video professional and developer customers."
"A key factor in the web's success is that its core technologies are open and freely implementable. Video is fundamental to the web experience, and developers and content publishers need an open video format option," said Mike Jazayeri, group product manager at Google. "We are excited Sorenson Media is joining a broad coalition of industry leaders supporting the WebM project to bring a new era of open innovation in web video."
Sorenson Media has consistently been an industry leader at the forefront of video optimization for all major and emerging platforms and codecs. Its intelligent embed codes provide native mobile support for all major platforms-including Apple iPhone, iPod and iPad-and all Sorenson Media products and services are already optimized not only for VP8, but also for H.264. Sorenson Media is announcing WebM support for all of it's products, including the private Beta of Squeeze Server, the server-side version of the award-winning, best-selling encoding application Squeeze and it's next iteration, Squeeze 6.5.
Also available today, the company has created a specific website, http://www.sorensonmedia.com/vp8, that enables users to easily begin encoding in VP8, using Sorenson Media's browser-based Sorenson Squish encoding application. With Sorenson Squish, all encoding is done client-side using a transparent plug-in that installs through the browser, making the video immediately ready for use in a Web environment. The intuitive interface eliminates the need for deep encoding expertise; users can simply select a video file for encoding using VP8 and have that file locally returned to their desktop or uploaded to the Sorenson 360 online video platform.
"With the release of major innovations such as VP8 and WebM, there are invariably a host of announcements about full support for the technology on some unspecified future date," said Flathers. "With Sorenson Squish - and our entire line of products and services - we have gone beyond promises by providing our existing and new users with a compelling solution that enables them to encode with VP8 to WebM right away."
To learn more about encoding VP8 for WebM, and all of Sorenson Media's best-in-class products, visit www.sorensonmedia.com
About Sorenson Media
Sorenson Media (www.sorensonmedia.com) offers comprehensive, award-winning solutions that empower businesses and video professionals to easily and affordably publish the highest-quality video to the Internet and other media. Included among its products and services are the Sorenson 360 Video Delivery Network (VDN), Sorenson Media's re-imagined video publishing platform; Sorenson Squeeze, the gold-standard for video encoding applications; Sorenson Squish and SquishNet, which together create an easy-to-use browser-based video publishing platform for user-generated content; and Sorenson Spark, the industry's most widely used video codec, which enables mobile devices and other consumer products to playback the largest selection of video on the Internet today. Since its inception in 1995, Sorenson Media has been instrumental in bringing Internet video to mainstream applications and is committed to dramatically improving the online video experience for both content creators and consumers.