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Outsourced video-processing

MM: As I understand it, you had — within Omnifuse — a media-production group — and you’ve begun to look for ways of outsourcing parts of that video-processing.

RT: Absolutely. In the earlier versions of our platform, using some of the industry-standard tools out there, we created a mechanism to take video and convert it on the fly to flash. But it was just a real nightmare of a support scenario, where we were always having to keep the codices up-to-date, and go through the whole process of maintaining the software updates that creates the video-processing engine.

It just became a little bit overwhelming. We’re not specifically video-processing engineers, although we have some experience in it. That’s not what we do full-time. We’re social-networking guys.

We immediately started trying to identify partners that could help us with the video processing, in particular. Especially video-processing to mobile, video-processing to Flash — video processing to all of the particular elements for that consumable media part that we were looking for.

MM: What criteria did you use in selecting a video service provider?

RT: Really, there were two primary things. The first thing we were looking for was a tried-and-tested video-processing engine that was maintained by that specific third party. Meaning they were vested in making sure the codices were always up-to-date. And making sure that the software stayed current with the technology that was out there.

The second thing was somebody who had a world-class delivery network that could deliver this content in an extremely reliable fashion — anywhere in the world.

MM: So now we’re talking about content-delivery systems such as Akamai or one of the other guys. What we’re talking about is the ability to push large pieces of content out to the edge of the internet.

RT: Right.

MM: Across several thousand different servers. So that it wasn’t all having to serve from one central server on your site, but from stuff that was already cached in the network.

RT: Absolutely. One of the other painful lessons that we learned was as follows — we always provide an embed tag and a URL tag for every movie that we created — every Flash file that we created — so that members could put them on different profiles and different social networks.

When you get one or two that get really, really popular, you find the holes in your infrastructure very quickly. We’ve painfully found that out from our ISP when we had two of our videos hit YouTube’s top 10, and they started to generate 250,000 hits a day. It was quite overwhelming, at first.

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