What video encoding and streaming services are there out there?

Question

I looking for something that I can either embed their uploader directly or send the video files to that will then encode the video and allow me to stream the video through a player on "my" website.

The services, I have found so far are:

• Bits on the Run
• Bright Cove
• Video Streaming Services

The service cannot be like YouTube ewhere the video would also be posted on their website.

Are there any other out there? Has any one had experience with any of the above ones?

It would be also cool if the service could also encode audio and stream them through Flash video.

Edit: From the number of responses, it looks like this isn't a very common task, although most websites you go to these days have video some where. A lot of that is YouTube, but there are quite a few sites that don't use YouTube either. What are these other sites use?

Answer 1

Another possible service that looks much simplier to setup than Panda: http://heywatch.com

Answer 2

www.blip.tv allows you to embed videos on your page. You can also make them "private," meaning nobody can watch them on blip, and therefore must go to your site to view them. Blip also allows you to brand your own player, which is better than having YOUTUBE or some other name watermarked on the video.

Answer 3

Have a look at Panda.

Answer 4

www.ooyala.com is worth considering as another option (I work on the Ooyala video player team, so I'm biased). We have good apis for uploading and managing your content, as well our own flash-based content management system, if you prefer to use our UI. We also can do really high quality adaptive bitrate playback using pure flash (no plugins), and give you strong control over who can see/embed a video.

Answer 5

Note: Some services may let you use your own CDN.

For instance 'Bits On the Run' from LongTailVideo lets you use Amazon's Cloudfront if you want. The bandwidth charges are significantly cheaper. So you get the benefits of encoding etc. without the expense of a proprietary CDN.

I noticed that you mentioned Bits on the Run. We also know of the benefits of using AWS streaming, and that is why it is now very easy to set up Bits on the Run accounts to use AWS instead of our CDN solutions. All you need to do select “Stream videos through your AWS account” on the signup page and enter your AWS key and secret. That way you you still get the benefits that the BotR solution gives you (use of licensed player, integrated system that creates embed codes for you and takes care of all the heavy lifting, automatic bitrate switching). If you use AWS as your CDN you won’t incur any traffic costs from Bits on the Run, you only pay for the amount of GB (total file size of originals + transcoded videos) that we help you manage.

I don't work for LongTail - but whoever wrote this obviously does. I do however quite like their JWPlayer.

http://www.miracletutorials.com/s3-streaming-video-with-cloudfront/

Answer 6

I worked on a project for a Lucozade campaign a few years ago "Lost your Edge", we used VideoEgg to achive the media hosting and transcoding.

Answer 7

Have a look at Ankoder. It is a pay as you go encoding API platform hosted on Amazon EC2 servers. You can find full documentations and code samples there.

Answer 8

We've also recently released a hosted version of Panda which makes setting things up much easier: http://pandastream.com/

Answer 9

This is a rather common procedure for digital asset management where it handles the encoding and distribution of the content. There are a number of managed services out there that charge for this service. I haven't worked with these companies directly (we did evaluate some before writing our own system), but they seem to meet what you need:

• Omnibus (I think ITX is their off-the-shelf component that does this but I recall that they provided a cloud-based system as well)
• thePlatform

Search terms to use include: asset management, digital asset management, and content management systems; however there is a lot of noise because you'll find everything from money investment to web content management systems.