Not only is the quantity of online videos booming, our expectations for what’s acceptable streaming video quality keep going up too.  All this has created a problem for content creators and developers, who need to encode videos very fast, at full HD quality, for streaming in multiple formats on every device. And the bottleneck is only going to get worse in the future, as 4K/UHD TVs start to hit the mainstream.

bitcodin is a company in our current class that has created a solution to this problem, with a service that encodes videos 100x faster and at a higher quality than other transcoding services.

VentureBeat’s Ken Yeung wrote about bitcodin in a post last week:

“Bitcodin says it enables fast playback of
videos, optimizes the streaming quality, and supports buffering. It
claims that it’s going to be able to provide video encoding at speeds a
hundred times faster than similar services, while also providing Netflix-grade quality streaming.

Developers interested in tapping into this platform can go to
Bitcodin’s website to sign up. All they need to do is upload a video
file and select the output format, such as MPEG-DASH at 1080p. From
there, the service does all the work and will spit out a new video file
that can play on every device.

Perhaps the best news is that when the resulting videos play, they do
so without any additional technology or software. That’s right, you
won’t need Flash or Silverlight installed. It’s compliant with the same
streaming standards that Netflix and YouTube follow. Interestingly,
these standards, both with MPEG and MPEG-DASH online video streaming,
were formed thanks to contributions from Bitcodin’s founders Stefan
Lederer, Christopher Mueller, and Christian Timmerer.”

Read more about bitcodin in VentureBeat here, and in Hacker News here.