Mobile Video Sharing within a Social Networking Site

Social networking sites enable online communities of people who share common interests to interact. A variety of mechanisms, including e-mail and instant messaging have been used to interact, but now video sharing is a centerpiece for sharing experiences. Further, mobile video sharing has become a hot form of communication. But, the very nature of social networks ensures that many video capture devices with an array of video encoding capabilities will be used, not to mention just as wide a variety of playback devices for video viewing.

RipCode’s transactional transcoding is a natural fit for social networking. With so many small communities within the larger whole, a significant volume of content viewing is ‘long tail’, meaning a relative small number of views per individual piece of content, and where many video clips will likely have a short cache life. Further, social networks in the aggregate are easily seeing 1+ million new video postings per day. In this model, the ability to avoid pre-transcoding each and every new video into a multitude of mobile formats – as well as avoiding the storage, and cache management cost and complexity of that content – presents a compelling argument for on-demand transactional transcoding.