Moving beyond "whack-a-mole" encoding for video publishers

Vid.ly Pro http://m.vid.ly/user/ is a new service that promises to ease the pain of publishing videos that will play readily on any user device and browser.  The company says its pro service will be a more robust offering than either YouTube or Vimeo has to offer. That's a big claim, but the offer does seem to address an unfilled niche. On the FAQ page, the company explains it this way:

"We believe that Vid.ly is filling a huge gap in the market that lives between YouTube and Vimeo on one end of the spectrum and the general Online Video Platform (OVP) market on the other end. Over the years running Encoding.com, we have learned that a majority of content publishers and developers simply want a platform that delivers video successfully to all of their users on any device. Vid.ly is not a Content Management System like the OVPs; rather, it's a platform to build into your applications. And, it's not a destination like YouTube; rather, Vid.ly enables you to build your own YouTubes while retaining complete control over your content."

The Vid.ly Pro solution also offers an FLV URL to plug into existing Flash players. This may have the deepest meaning to enterprises that have developed extensive in-house Flash development capabilities and face an operational challenge with the popularity of iOS devices that do not support Flash.

According to industry watcher Will Richmond’s blog VideoNuze http://www.videonuze.com, the Vid.ly Pro service features the following:

"The primary new feature that Vid.ly Pro offers is an XML API so that Vid.ly can be formally incorporated into the customer's work flow. Other features include the ability to delete un-needed output profiles, (which lowers Vid.ly's cost further), a choice of CDNs, no limit on source file sizes (so HD files can be accepted) and adaptive bit rate streaming for iOS devices. ...the next two big features to roll out will be analytics and a skinnable video player. "

In other news, Vimeo Pro http://vimeo.com/pro recently released a low-cost service and toolset solution with a customizable and skinnable player. The Vimeo Pro offer appears to be designed for small businesses or discrete projects, but as we all discovered with Twitter, sometimes a product or solution is designed for one use and finds instead that it becomes a major utility elsewhere.

These developments may interest small businesses that want to drive brand and audience engagement with a solution they can call their own. Chances are, they’ll also be relevant to large enterprise producers looking to strike a balance between nimble, sharable, social media projects (or discrete, small-audience endeavors) and those requiring more exhaustive distribution, control and privacy.