LOS ANGELES — Computenext.com’s Cloud Evangelist, a.k.a. Marco van den Akker, has announced the offering of the ProMedia Carbon MP cloud-based video transcoding service, which enables transcoding into virtually every media standard in use today, on an affordable per-minute basis.
According to van den Akker, this development is interesting, because today, video is no longer the single channel stream it used to be, such as with television channels.
“As people stream video through their tablet, smartphone and laptop, it is becoming important to transcode video into a format that can be read from any device,” van den Akker explains. “Customers such as Bloomberg News, CNN, Turner TV, ESPN and many other media companies are benefiting from this disruptive new business model.”
Using an open, extensible, task-based engine for managing video centric workflows, a Workflow System (WFS) controls multiple ProMedia Carbon nodes, configured as a transcoding farm.
“The distributed nature of WFS allows for automated processing of high-volume transcoding tasks, failover support, managing job distribution, job prioritization, load balancing, FTP transfer, status monitoring and job notification,” van den Akker explains. “Being a cloud-based technology, ProMedia Carbon MP eliminates the need for up-front hardware investments normally required for this process.”
With an extensive API, WFS can reportedly manage the complete video asset transformation process by integrating additional third party and Cloud Evangelist processing nodes, while a Quality Control System (QCS) can add automated and scalable video verification processes to transcoding farms.
WFS enables scalable, cross-vendor enterprise transcoding and controls ProMedia Carbon, as well as ProMedia Xpress, the Quality Control System, plus the firm’s Packaging Service and Scrambling Service.
There are several basic building blocks for WFS, including the Controller, Node and Manager.
“The Controller is the engine service of WFS. It acts as the core consumer of workflow jobs and a core distributor of job tasks in the process of workflow control, management, and execution. To provide scale, reliability, redundancy, and load balancing, the Controller utilizes a central database for all system, job and task data,” van den Akker continues. “The Node is the work service of WFS, acting as the core consumer of tasks, requesting tasks from the Controller and passing them to the proper worker service.”
These worker services include transcoding (ProMedia Carbon), quality checking (QCS), file transfer, notification, and watch folder monitoring and are all registered with the Node as a task type. This task type ensures the Controller’s response to a task request from a Node is met with a matching task.
“The Manager is the management and monitoring application for WFS [and] provides control over the creation and manipulation of presets, workflows, and workflow execution methods,” van den Akker adds. “It also allows for monitoring and review of all job and task activities.”
As for who typically uses a cloud-based transcoding system, van den Akker says the service is effective for a broad range of businesses, from media professionals with low-volume transcoding requirements to content owners and service providers who need assistance with managing spikes in transcoding volume.
“For enterprise customers, ProMedia Carbon MP transcoding can serve as the underlying transcoding engine in a complete video processing workflow, able to perform a wide array of critical operations, including SD/HD conversion and PAS/NTSC conversion,” van den Akker concludes. “Companies such as Mindgeek and C4S can enhance their current WFS transcoding infrastructure by automatically scaling out to the cloud based WFS nodes, without an upfront investment.”
For more information, visit Mediapaas.com or email marco@computenext.com.
