Zencoder is honored to be included among Red Herring’s Top 100 companies in the Americas.

We’re not huge into industry awards, but we’re honored to be included with other innovative winners in the online video world including Adap.tv, Ooyala and Skyfire.

You can read more here.

At Zencoder, we sell to a wide range of customers, from media companies to large enterprises to startups, but we know that marketing to developers is critical when selling cloud infrastructure.

This is because cloud computing fundamentally changes the way infrastructure works. Amongst other changes, cloud infrastructure allows technology to scale in both directions. The same API – whether Zencoder, AWS, Twilio, or hundreds of others – can be used by the largest customers in the world, and can be used by startups who are just getting off the ground. This is a big change, and a major driver of innovation and efficiency. If open source software was the major technological revolution of the 2000s, cloud infrastructure is the revolution of this decade.

This transformation changes the way software gets sold. No matter the company, when it comes to cloud services, developers are the end user and the gatekeeper. This is obviously true in tech startups and side projects. But developer marketing is a great way to get into the enterprise as well. Large enterprises are full of developers who try APIs in their spare time, or use them on small internal projects. And it turns out that when working with APIs, enterprise customers care about the same things as developers: good performance, competitive pricing, easy integration, and strong support.

Sales organizations are still important, especially at scale. Just look at who AWS is hiring these days. But getting 100,000 developers excited about a cloud service is a great way to build momentum, and the lines between large and small customers are blurring over time.

So how do you effectively market to developers? Here are a few lessons from Zencoder’s experience.

1. Don’t be good. Be great.

Enterprise customers are used to working with bad software. Everyone complains about it, but they keep using it anyway. This is what you get when products are designed by an alliance of corporate politics, lawyers, enterprise sales teams, and made-up words like “suability”.

If you’re selling software to developers, on the other hand, you’re selling to your toughest critic. Your software had better be elegant, usable, stable, and robust. Not just bug-free, but awesome. The reason for this is simple: developers have the ability to create software that is elegant, usable, stable, and robust. If a developer encounters a problem, their first thought is: “I could do this better.” This is followed immediately by: “Meh, I’ll just do it myself.” (Raise your hand if you’ve ever written your own blogging software or CMS, in spite of hundreds of existing open-source projects.)

Selling to developers is like screening your movie to Stanley Kubrick and the Coen Brothers and asking for a review. It had better be great.

2. Write code, not words.

When marketing to developers, it is often more effective to invest in product than it is to invest in marketing copy. Of course, product descriptions are important, but a better integration library might help a developer understand a product and its value more than a paragraph of text. Or a skeleton app that consumes a service, or a sample open-source project, or an integration with a third-party platform, like Heroku. Or UI tools that exercise or report on the API. For example, take a look at the Zencoder API Request Builder. This simple tool helps customers understand how Zencoder works better than any description we could write.

3. Be transparent.

Developers love transparency. As a whole, engineers are a skeptical breed. We like to ask “why”, like to understand things for ourselves (rather than relying on someone else’s word), and prefer it when people are direct and to the point.

This means that traditional sales doesn’t mix well with developers. Rather than a sales pitch, developers want to see things in action. “Contact us for pricing” will consistently drive away developers.

That is a big part of why open source software is so important. Some people believe, like RMS, that non-free software is inherently unethical. But most developers are suspicious of closed software simply because they can’t see what’s going on inside, and can’t fix things or make improvements on their own.

So when marketing to developers, transparency goes a long way. This involves things like:

• Clear pricing
• The ability to try something before committing
• No long-term contracts
• Simple, fair terms of service
• Open-source software wherever a customer runs something themselves
• Good documentation
• The ability to scale down to low usage/cost, in addition to scaling up to high usage/cost

4. Go where developers are.

This hardly needs to be said, but to market to developers, you need to know where to find them. Online, this is places like Hacker News and Stack Overflow, and (to a lesser extent) Quora, Reddit, and Twitter. Offline, try conferences, hackathons, meetups, user groups, drinkups, and startup weekends.

The best ways to engage developers is to actively contribute and participate. Sponsoring RubyConf is one thing, but even better is speaking and contributing to the community. Similarly, sponsoring Startup Weekend is OK, but having a few developers on the ground helping out is even better.

Open source contributions go a long way as well. We built an open source HTML5 video player for this very reason. Video.js is a great player, used by over 20,000 websites. But it is also a great way to market to developers; videojs.com is our #2 referring site, after Hacker News.

Selling to developers is different than selling to consumers (B2C) and it’s different than selling to businesses (B2B). It is really a third thing altogether: B2D maybe. As software eats the world, APIs continue to proliferate, and technology becomes more and more democratized, selling to developers is going to become more and more important. In the future it won’t just be Zencoder, Twilio, and Amazon who have to worry about this. B2D might just be the way that all software gets sold.

On April 30, 2012 new rules went in to effect governing accessibility standards for Internet video.  These rules require the use of closed captioning for online distribution of video that was aired on TV (broadcast, cable, or otherwise).

48M people in the US (up to 15% of your site’s visitors) are deaf or have some degree of hearing loss. Providing accessibility extends your audience reach in the deaf community, as well as helps you meet legal requirements. But closed captioning technology can appear complicated and obscure. How can a publisher understand captioning technology, comply with the new legislation, and make caption support an easy part of video workflow?

Captions at Zencoder – Help Test Beta Closed Caption Feature

Zencoder provides support for Apple HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) captions, for iPad, iPhone, and for other devices that support HLS captions. We also offer support for the safe harbor format,  DFXP/SMPTE-TT.  Content providers and device manufactures can standardize captioning support using DFXP/SMPTE-TT, and can be confident that their video is in compliance with the CVAA. If you’re interested in learning more about closed caption support, sign up for our Closed Captioning Beta.

The Guidelines

The FCC rules go into effect in stages, and the National Association of the Deaf has a helpful guide for understanding this schedule.  By the following dates, content providers must provide full support for captioning.

• September 30, 2012: Prerecorded TV programming that has not been edited for Internet distribution
• March 30, 2013: Live and near live programming that was recorded within 24 hours of broadcast on television;
• September 30, 2013: Prerecorded programming that is edited for Internet distribution

By September 30, 2013, 100% of new video programming shown on television with captions must have captions when shown online.

There is a different schedule for archived programming that is re-aired on TV, and subsequently distributed online.  Full caption support must be provided by the following dates:

• The programming must be captioned within 45 days after the date it is shown on television with captions on or after March 30, 2014;
• The programming must be captioned within 30 days after the date it is shown on television with captions on or after March 30, 2015;
• Such programming must be captioned within 15 days after the date it is shown on television with captions on or after March 30, 2016.

And it’s not just content that is under the perview of the new regulation.  Device manufacturers have responsibilities as well.  By January 1, 2014, all devices that play back Internet video must support closed captioning.

Are captions the same as subtitles?

There is a lot of confusion and ambiguity around subtitles and closed captioning. They are not the same, though the technology is converging. Technically, captions are intended to make video accessible to the hard of hearing, and often include more than just dialog: a caption track may include cues about who is speaking or mention other sounds (background music, a knock at the door). Subtitles are used for translation: making dialog understandable to someone who doesn’t understand the spoken language. Theoretically, subtitles wouldn’t need to mention that there was a knock at the door, because the viewer would hear that, regardless of whether or not they speak the language.

Beyond this, there are other differences between subtitles and captions. Subtitles are often included externally to a video stream, whereas captions have historically been encoded directly into the video; if you’ve ever seen white lines in the overscan area of a video, that is how closed captions are transmitted for broadcast content. Another way to slice it: captions are a TV setting, decoded from the broadcast video stream itself, whereas subtitles are a DVD option, where a user can choose an subtitle language (or no subtitles). So the two have historically used different technology, though for internet delivery, the technology is converging.

Here at Zencoder we are continuously working on improving our service. This sometimes means making changes to our API. In our first 2 years as a public service, we haven’t had to make a backwards-incompatible change to our API, and we’re proud of this. But a few months ago, we announced Version 2 of our API, which made some changes that could affect customer integrations. We announced that we would be discontinuing the V1 API on June 1 and that we would require customers to move to V2 before that date.

We’ve since decided to hold off on the June 1 deadline. This means that you will not be required to migrate to V2 on June 1. Instead, we are working on a new API version, V3, which will be coming towards the end of summer. Since V2 and V3 are being released just a few months apart, we will continue to support API V1 until V3 is here, so you would only have to upgrade once. We will be announcing specific dates and features soon.

We know that required API upgrades can be disruptive, which is why we have been very careful with these sorts of changes. The changes introduced by V2 improve the usability, reliability, and functionality of our application, and we’re excited to introduce further improvements in V3. We will always keep these changes minimal, so that upgrading from one version to another can be done quickly and easily.

Check out our online API Version History to stay on top of version announcements, and for info on updating to new API versions.

If you have further questions, please email our support at help@zencoder.com.

On 5/10/2012 we’re taking part in a web event in conjunction with StreamingMedia.com.

The panelists will explore:

• Benefits of using the cloud for video encoding
• Understanding the key differences between live and file-based transcoding workflows and requirements
• Encoding recommendations for multi-device publishing
• Understanding your target devices and defining the most efficient set of profiles for your audience
• Keeping costs down without sacrificing performance
• Key considerations in designing your live event and file-based transcoding workflows
• The need for scale, and potential for automation, of workflow
• Cloud based storage and transcoding as an integrated service

Register here.

Congratulations to Zencoder co-founder and Video.js creator Steve Heffernan, who was named a 2012 Streaming Media All Star by Streaming Media Magazine. The winners represent an array of technology, services and content providers, all of whom strongly contribute to the rapidly evolving world of online video. Congrats to Steve and all of this year’s winners!

Read more at StreamingMedia.com

This month we are announcing four new features that will make your videos more accessible, better sounding and more secure.

Closed Captioning

On April 30th several important regulations go into effect that will improve the accessibility of Internet video. To help our customers make their video more accessible and comply with the new law, Zencoder is announcing support for closed captioning on Apple HLS video from an external SCC file or an embedded caption track. Contact us for more information.

Dolby Digital Audio

Dolby sound is coming to Zencoder! We are pleased to announce that we’ve licensed Dolby Digital Plus audio encoding technology, bringing high quality, surround sound audio to a variety of devices. MIT research shows that audio quality is extremely important in the enjoyment of media. Stay tuned for the release announcement!

Digital Rights Management

Zencoder is the first cloud encoding provider to encrypt content for Microsoft PlayReady DRM technology and announced a partnership with leading service provider BuyDRM to manage DRM licenses. Contact us if you’re interested in integrating with PlayReady DRM.

Zencoder Secure Transfer – in Beta

Zencoder Secure Transfer combines Aspera fasp transfer acceleration technology with AES-256 encryption. This creates a secure pipeline for content all the way to transcoding. Interested in helping us test it? Fill out the Beta Tester Form!

The ING New York City Marathon is one of the world’s greatest road races, drawing more than 47,000 entrants and millions of spectators. For the 2010 event, one of the marathon’s sponsors, athletic products company ASICS, wanted to create a large interactive campaign to support the runners.

Veteran creative agency Vitro lent their artistic talents and the idea for www.supportyourmarathoner.com was born. Friends and family of marathon participants would upload videos, photos and text messages expressing support for their runners, which were then displayed as the runners passed electronic screens along the marathon route.

The firm had just three weeks to deliver a video sharing application and a website capable of registering over 47,000 marathon participants. Vitro approached interactive agency Gauged2 to develop the backend video infrastructure for the campaign.

Gauged2 co-founder Brian Burridge deployed the application on Heroku, eliminating the need for cumbersome server setup and configuration.  Reliability was essential; video was coming from a range of input sources, including cameras and cellphones, but had to be transcoded to a precise output: an FLV with the proper playback ratio of 1366×768.   Burridge chose Zencoder to process and compress video submissions from users.

Burridge also wanted the flexibility to create multiple thumbnails in order to visually represent video on the campaign website. “We uploaded the videos to the Zencoder service, and then had them converted to our specs. We implemented the callback so we could get the thumbnail file name and know if they completed O.K.”, said Burridge.

A cloud-based service allowed the agency to process thousands of videos without requiring any up-front investment in transcoding infrastructure, making the ambitious campaign vision a financial reality. “Working with Zencoder API was a very simple process and I would definitely use the service again”, continued Burridge.

The hard work paid off on marathon day, when thousands of participants got to see their friends and family cheer them on along the way. The site was hugely popular and was used again for the 2011 ING NYC Marathon and the  2012 Honda LA Marathon. Check out www.supportyourmarathoner.com to see the final results.

On March 8th, Zencoder, Aspera, Amazon Web Services and Netflix gathered in New York City to discuss cloud-based media workflow.  Zencoder is built on AWS, and in November we announced a partnership with Aspera to improve file transfer speeds to the cloud.  The event was the first opportunity that we’ve had to demonstrate the fruits of our “collaborative innovation“.

With scalable storage and processing, the cloud is the right place to do transcoding.  However, these advantages are attenuated by sluggish transfer speeds over the open Internet.

In his talk, Zencoder co-founder Jon Dahl presented four strategies for eliminating the bandwidth bottlenecks that crop up when using the cloud for transcoding. Moreover, he demonstrates that combining accelerated file transfer and parallel processing in the cloud results in a transcoding workflow that is up to 10x faster, and makes more efficient use of bandwidth, than on-premise solutions.

We’ve distilled the talk down to the article below, which is also available for download here.  Major content providers like Netflix use these techniques to optimize their cloud-based transcoding workflows.  While Netflix is a pioneering (perhaps the pioneering) user of the cloud, these techniques will be useful to any organization with large video files.

Rethinking Large Video Files in the Cloud: Strategies for Eliminating Bandwidth Bottlenecks

Online video impacts our day-to-day lives in many ways, from how we are entertained, to how we communicate and get the news. Perhaps the most exciting potential for positive impact is in education.

Today we’re thrilled to announce that we are providing encoding services to Khan Academy, for video that’s destined for its new iPad application. Khan has garnered lots of attention for using online video and technology to enable personalized learning across a mind-boggling array of topics.

Services like Zencoder make it easy for Khan Academy to deploy online video. Lead Developer Ben Kamens commented “Zencoder handles all of our video conversions and prep for the App Store automatically, which is a huge time saver for us. Without them, we’d be going through quite a bit more pain to send our educational videos to the iPad crowd.”

In support of Khan Academy’s vision, Zencoder will be providing qualified non-profits and non-profit educational institutions discounted video encoding services. For more information contact us at sales@zencoder.com

To learn more about Khan Academy, check out this in-depth 60 Minutes segment: youtu.be/zxJgPHM5NYI