VidTech

What is Cloud Transcoding and Who Needs It?

Stefan Lederer
. 3 min read
cloud transcoding for mpeg-dash and hls

Bitmovin is the future of video cloud transcoding, providing a high performance cloud-service to transcode multimedia content at speed in excess of 100x real-time, even for highest 4k and 8k qualities.

Cloud transcoding

Bitmovin is a high-performance adaptive bitrate transcoding and streaming platform for cutting edge media formats such as MPEG-DASH and HLS, (including HLS 4k), which are natively supported in HTML5 platforms. Thus, Bitmovin is enabling the highest possible video quality on the web, mobile and home entertainment devices, up to HD, 4K and beyond, while keeping the distribution costs low due the usage of efficient HTTP infrastructure and a scalable cloud encoding/transcoding service.

Why is Bitmovin unique in the adaptive video industry

The Bitmovin platform is designed and built from the ground up to scale massively on standard public and private cloud infrastructure, which enables cloud transcoding of adaptive video at speeds that are 100x faster than real time (e.g., a 2-hour HD video in minutes). The fast transcoding enables even the largest on-demand video providers to distribute uploaded media virtually instantly during the upload and transcoding process with no delay. Leveraging the flexibility of the new MPEG-DASH and HLS standards – which is fully integrated into Bitmovin– content providers can use cutting-edge technologies such as the native DASH adaptive streaming support in HTML5, as well as the native DRM support using MPEG-CENC based upon that. This enables distribution and playback across web and mobile platforms, while being more light-weight and battery efficient than heavy plugins like Silverlight or Flash. Bitmovin furthermore encourages separation of video, audio and subtitle streams, which helps Bitmovin customers to save up to 75 % on their storage costs while increasing distribution efficiency and reducing CDN costs.

Who needs cloud transcoding?

Bitmovin provides premium content publishers, VOD providers and broadcasters with a highly scalable, flexible, and cost effective cloud-based encoding platform to deliver high quality On-Demand as well as live streams to any device. Content providers can offload their Live or On-Demand transcoding needs to the cloud, adding performance and capacity when they need it, without the fixed costs of buying dedicated hardware. In addition the ability of the Bitmovin platform to encode the video and audio tracks in a media files separately helps content distributors realizing important savings in terms of storage and communication costs, while increasing customer’s quality of experience.

Product details and differentiation

Beyond its scalability, performance and efficiency capabilities, Bitmovin is a rich platform that offers a multiple features:

  • Continuous and instant online previewing of content during the encoding process
  • Virtually zero delay between the start of the ingest and streaming, allowing for near simultaneous streaming of live events.
  • Fully support of MPEG-DASH compatible to HTML5-based DASH players, as well as HLS for iOS devices
  • Separate egress of audio, video and subtitles for full flexibility and up to 75 % of storage cost reduction in typical scenarios, while increasing caching and distribution efficiency, which again reduces distribution costs.
  • Flexibility in terms of input as well as output format, protocol, storage, CDN
  • RESTful API for integration into proprietary workflows as well as large sets of assets
  • Support for on-demand and 24×7 as well as event-based live encoding and streaming
  • Supported format and devices
  • MPEG-DASH browser support

Customers and Partners and quotes

Flimmit is an Austrian VOD provider in the German-speaking market which corporately affiliated with the Austrian National Broadcaster ORF through its subsidiaries ORF Enterprise and ORScomm. Flimmit allows end customers to rent or purchase videos on demand on various platforms including Smartphones/Tablets, Web, and SmartTVs.
”Flimmit itself is a 100% cloud-based operated VOD service so when we were looking into the requirements for supporting MPEG DASH and a larger numbers of devices, it was natural to start with looking at cloud-based encoding services”, says Walter Huber from Flimmit. “We were impressed with the performance and flexibility of the Bitmovin platform, and bitmovin’s focus and innovation in the adaptive streaming area”
Following a successful live-streaming deployment around its 2-day continues fundraising event, KRONEHIT, Austria’s only nationwide private radio broadcaster, uses the Bitmovin  cloud transcoding platform in combination with bitmovin’s MPEG-DASH players to realize 24x7x365 live streaming in highest quality.
“Live video streaming in highest quality studio complements our web presence and existing offerings. It helps KRONEHIT reach a larger audience and a higher interactive listener involvement across different platforms”, says Martin Holovlasky from KRONEHIT.

Complementary products

In addition to the Bitmovin platform, Bitmovin developed the leading cross-device MPEG-DASH player for HTML5 and Flash. Based on its highly-optimized codebase, the Bitmovin Adaptive Streaming Player delivers the most efficient and robust MPEG-DASH playback experience – especially in challenging mobile network conditions – and with a broad range of DRM options natively integrated in HTML5, such as PlayReady (IE) or the new Widevine Modular (Chrome). Find out more about our adaptive HTML5 Player.
More Readings:

Stefan Lederer

Stefan Lederer

Co-Founder & CEO

Stefan Lederer is a renowned innovator and thought leader in video streaming with a strong background in academic research. Stefan co-created the MPEG-DASH video streaming standard and has contributed to several open-source tools, including DASHEncoder, DASHoverCCN and VLC plugin. Stefan also serves as an external lecturer at the University of Klagenfurt.


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