When Google announced their plans for an open, royalty-free codec by launching the WebM Project (with its VP8 codec) earlier this year, the video industry was unsure what the implications would be for H.264.
H.264 has become the de facto standard for encoding and delivering high quality video on the web and across devices, however the hot news from Google today to drop support for H.264 to enable open innovation has thrown a cat amongst the pigeons, so to speak.
TechCrunch: The Gloves Are Off: google Chrome Browser Will Drop Support For H.264 Video Codec
Engaget: Google will drop H.264 support from Chrome, herd the masses towards WebM and Theora
ReadWriteWeb: Google Says It’s Open or Not At All for Video on Chrome
So what does this mean for my video?
Backlot from Ooyala can help simplify this worry, by not making it a worry at all!
It can be daunting and often a challenge to encode your video to multiple formats, resolutions, codecs, frame rates and more in order to support the platforms and environments that your customers use to view your content. In 2007 we were the first company to offer a video platform with its own encoding system, and since then have encoded over five million hours!
What can Ooyala do to help?
We will help you mitigate the risk of being unable to reach your audience by removing the pain of video encoding and video distribution.
As a technology provider we believe it is extremely important to make it easy for publishers to reach consumers independent of codecs and player technologies. This is why Ooyala supports more than one delivery option, including Flash, Silverlight, HTML5 and other standards and player technologies. We were a launch partner when Google announced the WebM Project and we will continue to evolve our services to support it in the future.
[UPDATE Jan 12, 2011] This post is now also available on the Ooyala Blog
Virgin Mobile have really changed up the way they support their customers. Through new help and support widgets embedded on various pages, customers will have access to hours of Ooyala video content providing users with FAQs, reviews, and help and support topics. Need to learn how to configure your voicemail? No problems! Just watch this video.
Ooyala’s Backlot really shows it’s strength here with actionable analytics. Not only are the do the Engagement Reports help you find the best spot to place your ads, they also show you second-by-second engagement and abandonment data.
Virgin Mobile can leverage analytics and engagement reports to understand if their customers are getting to the answers within the video. If half of their viewers are dropping off after 15 seconds then they know they have work to do with their content and video production.
Very insightful!
Find out more in the press release or read the article in The Australian titled “Virgin’s video answer to reduce service calls”
My friends and family always ask, “What is Ooyala?”. That’s if they can pronounce it first!
Ooyala (pronounced oo-YAH-lah) means cradle in Telugu, a Southern Indian language. The name really describes what we at Ooyala are doing, and that’s giving birth to new forms of innovation in online video. Ooyala’s end-to-end video platform known as Backlot makes it easy for anyone to upload, transcode, manage, publish, analyze and monetize their video assets. All of this tied together gives you extreme flexibility to deliver the best possible video experience to your consumers, by understanding what they do with your content.
Over the coming weeks I will be posting exciting examples of how our customers are delivering video to the web, mobile devices and other
consumer electronics.
You can even try it out for yourself!
Go ahead and register for a FREE TRIAL ACCOUNT.
It’s taken me some time to catch up on things, but as you can probably tell from the title I’m no longer working for Adobe, and have joined an amazing team of people at Ooyala! I wanted to share with you my farewell email to my fellow employees at Adobe as I embark on the intriguing world of video delivery, analytics and monetization!
Stay tuned… there’s many great things coming!
October 3rd 2010 marked my 5 year anniversary with Macromedia and Adobe, and it has been an absolutely amazing experience. I can’t begin to explain just how far my career has progressed with the lessons and challenges I have overcome, and I am extremely grateful for them all. More than 5 years ago Macromedia was the company that I dreamt of working for; and it really has been a dream job!
It’s amazing how many people you get to meet in 5 years, and I’d like to thank everyone that I worked with for extending your hands and either welcoming me on a visit to another office, working with me at a conference, teaching me a new skill, or just saying g’day. Thank you all for your friendship, support and leadership.
All of this and more has made the decision to leave much more challenging. I love the technology!
My time with Adobe has more than adequately prepared me for the new challenges and new experiences that await. Thank you to Adobe for providing such amazing life changing opportunities and opening so many doors.
Adobe is a great company, with some really REALLY cool technology, but I won’t be straying too far. I’m off to join Ooyala as Senior Solutions Architect for Australia and New Zealand. Ooyala uses the world’s best in class video technology, the Adobe Flash Platform with their primary video player built with AS3 and Adobe Flex, a desktop management tool running on Adobe AIR, and videos streamed with Flash Media Server. I’m very excited that I can continue to focus on the technologies that I love.
I will miss you, but will endeavor to keep in touch. The world really is such a small place, and the IT industry even smaller. I’m sure I’ll cross paths with many of you in time. I look forward to sitting in the stands at Adobe events being excited by the passion demonstrated in your presentations!
With Adobe Production Premium CS4 you can create searchable video by using the speech to text functionality in Premiere Pro CS4 and Soundbooth CS4. The speech transcript can be embedded as metadata within the media asset, or externalised as an XML file representing Flash cuepoints. When consuming the XML and Flash Video file online the end result is an interactive video where users can search for keywords, view tag clouds for most used words, and browse directly to a timestamp where the keyword is spoken.
Genius! Why didn’t I think of that 
Well here it is. Take a look at the slides from my recent Adobe eSeminar and check out the following demos and resources. Looking forward to seeing how you use this on your site!
Analyzing Obama’s Inaugural Speech
http://www.tinyurl.com/nytsearch
Search captions on Hulu
http://blog.hulu.com/2009/12/21/search-captions-on-hulu/
Adobe Creative Suite 4 Production Premium: Video search templates
http://www.adobe.com/products/creativesuite/production/videosearch/
Nick Hippe, Online Searchable Video
http://nhippe.com/2009/10/15/online-searchable-video/
And for a little bit more detail watch this great recording from Adobe MAX 2008 on Adobe TV.
Register now for the APAC Launch event at http://bit.ly/cs5signup_apac and follow @cs5apac for special updates!
Also check out the Creative Suite Buzz Hub http://csbuzz.adobe.com/ to get
a glimpse into the future of Adobe Creative Suite technologies.
