 |
Internet Video still attracting funding
August 20, 2006
There has been a lot of talk about what the lessons of the acquisition of YouTube by Google (GOOG) means (aside from crazy money for its founders).
Part of it is that Google has acknowledged it’s algorithmic approach isn’t perfect for everything (GoogleVideo and Froogle are the prime examples).
The other big thing that YouTube has taught us is that the Internet is fast becoming a massive distribution channel for video. Duhhh … you are thinking.
Where there is opportunity though, is in making that distribution far more efficient. YouTube transforms the millions of hours of video it gets into flash.
Now it wants to deliver it to phones, and it will have to transcode it yet again. When ABC sells "Desperate Housewives" on iTunes it transcodes it one way for an iPod,
another way for broadcast, a third way for the DVD box set, and so on. The promise of IP video being held out by folks like Apple (AAPL) and others is that we can get it
anywhere on any device, but that hasn’t happened yet because the transcoding is slow, expensive if you have high volumes of video, and generally inefficient.
RipCode, a stealth company based in Austin and Dallas, just announced a $7 million Series A round to bring video transcoder equipment to market in
Q2 that changes that equation for social networks, broadcasters, large content providers, you name it. “It’s a significant transformation for transcoding,” says RipCode
CEO Brendan Mills. “It’s all being done today on really hokey server platforms. We are making it much cheaper and faster.” Fair enough, Mills wouldn’t say exactly what
the secret sauce of his company is, but apparently he has enough that ATA Ventures, Hunt Ventures, Vesbridge Partners and El Dorado Ventures kicked in the money to get it to market.
Whether RipCode lights the IP video gear market on fire remains to be seen. But they are on to something in the market they are going after. IP video
will be everywhere soon, but only if its passage is cheap and fast. You won’t see a mobile YouTube explode without it.
|
 |
 |
|