Brightcove announces new Zencoder services that make video encoding less painful

Video service company Brightcove announced a handful of new products today aimed at simplifying the workflow involved with video encoding for both On Demand and live-streaming content.

Brightcove provides several services for large and small content providers interested in simplifying the process of publishing video to the web using HTML5 rather than Adobe Flash. Additionally, the company also offers  live, on-demand, and mobile-specific products.

Two of the products come from video-encoding heavyweight Zencoder, which Brightcove acquired for $30 million back in July. The company’s new Zencoder Instant Play service conducts the various encoding steps simultaneously to speed up the overall process, and it enables On Demand video playback seconds after the process begins. For people in the content-production business, making your videos playable in less time can translate to greater profits and happier viewers.

The other new Zencoder product, Live Cloud Transcoding, eliminates some of the legwork associated with streaming online video. The new service basically handles the encoding for multiple bit rate videos and devices in the cloud. It also eliminates the need for expensive hardware and bandwidth costs, which Brightcove says will save its clients money. It’s a meter-based service, so you only pay for what you use. For companies that only do live video a handful of times per year, this is a decent way to remove the workflow headaches.

While Brightcove’s products typically focus on clients that don’t have any interests in the code and guts-side of video, both new Zencoder services are for the developer/IT crowd, according to the company.

Another product addon Brightcove announced today provides Video Cloud customers with a new Widevine addon. The Widevine standard, which Brightcove is licensing from Google, is a form of DRM that secures On Demand video for premium content providers. Previously, Brightcove clients enabled Widevine on their videos separately, but the new addon allows for the process to be taken care of alone with the initial video encoding from Brightcove.

Video camera photo via DeshaCAM/Shutterstock