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

This month, Zencoder released beta support for closed captioning. Our first version provides support for Apple HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) captions, for iPad, iPhone, and for other devices that support HLS captions. We’re working on a range of other formats, like DFXP/SMPTE-TT, which we’ll announce soon. 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.

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.

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.

Read more at StreamingMedia.com

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!

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.

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

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: http://youtu.be/zxJgPHM5NYI

In a growing startup, it’s hard to know what to think about a milestone like this. On the one hand, it’s exciting – 20M is a lot of video and audio files. And there is something satisfying about rolling over a bunch of 9s on an odometer, even when we all know that there is nothing special about round base-10 numbers. Why didn’t we celebrate our base-2 1000000000000000000000000th video back in January?

On the other hand, in the grand scheme of things, 20M files is tiny. We’re already on pace to more than double that in 2012 alone, even if we don’t grow. (We certainly intend to grow.)

So we’re not too concerned about the 20M number. We’re more excited by 200M. Or 0xB000000, or 0b10000000000000000000000000000. And we plan on getting there soon.

But we’re still going to celebrate, and in true startup fashion, we’re going to celebrate by mining some data. What interesting trends can we pull from our last 20M encodes? Here are just a few; we’d like to publish more soon, and if there is anything in particular you’d like to see, let us know.

Average number of outputs

Many of our customers still just encode a single output for each input file they submit. But more and more customers are doing multiple outputs: targeting multiple bitrates, resolutions, and devices. For those customers doing more than 1 output, the number of outputs trends upward:

Growth of HD video

Error rate

Zencoder can’t support every file. There are a handful of codecs we don’t support (go2meeting, I’m looking at you); we occasionally do something wrong; and some files are just corrupt. But our actual error rates are pretty low, and are trending in the right direction. This chart shows our overall error rates.

Overall growth

What would you like to see?

We’ll be mining more data over the next few weeks, and we take requests. What sort of information would you like to see from the last 22-or-so months of encoding that Zencoder has done?

Here are some words from Screenlight founder Chris Potter on the technology behind their service.

Want to be featured in a blog post?  Hit us up at info@zencoder.com and let us know what you’re up to

What do you do at Screenlight?

Screenlight offers a private video sharing and collaboration platform that makes it easy for video producers & editors to securely review videos with clients, get their feedback, and get video projects approved. The service solves communication and platform compatibility issues that people experience when using DVDs, email, FTP, YouTube, and custom solutions to review and approve videos.

ScreenLight provides a private online hub where video producers can upload and share videos with teams and clients. Video projects are password protected, and people will only see projects they have been invited to participate in. Project communication is kept in one place with blog-style comments that can be entered for each video. The service can accept virtually any input video format, and videos are automatically encoded for playback on desktops, advanced smartphones, and the new Apple TV.

Whereas most online video platforms are about mass distribution of video, Screenlight is about private viewing with invite only groups of participants. Video production is an inherently collaborative process, but until now, there have been few mass market online tools to make it easy and affordable for video producers editors to collaborate with clients outside the edit suite.

How are trends in the marketplace effecting your technology decisions?

Our customers needs are constantly changing and we work to evolve the platform and keep them happy. Customers want to review and collaborate on video production anywhere, anytime, anyplace (much how they want to watch television). This need to review video on the go (especially on the iPad) was a major factor that drove our decision to automatically encode client videos for cross-platform delivery. Customers can now review videos “outside the edit suite” on mobile devices without having worry about codecs, encoding specs, HTML5 vs. Flash, or the delivery method that is used.

What types of encoding solutions did you look at? What led you to choose Zencoder?

We looked at several alternatives and how they would stack up in terms of quality, encoding speed, scalability and reliability.

• Quality: Video quality is the livelihood of our customers. We absolutely had to deliver high quality video that would look fantastic on different devices.

• Encoding speed: Our value proposition to customers is that we can help them can save time with video review and approval. If videos take too long to encode, then we can’t deliver on our promise.

• Scalability: The volume of uploads that we process each day is highly variable. We wanted a solution that would easily handle our peak demand without videos getting stuck in a queue. The ability to simultaneously encode video into multiple formats was also an important component of this.

• Reliability: Encoding is a tricky business, and we wanted a solution that would meet our customer needs in terms of uptime and successful video encodes.

Rolling our own solution in a way that would meet the requirements above would have been costly and time consuming. A big concern with this option was that there would be encoding bottlenecks and that we would have to manage spinning up and spinning down a bunch of servers to manage peaks and troughs in our daily encoding volume.

We looked at alternatives that charged per dedicated encoder. The issue with this model is that it forces you to make the choice between buying the number of encoders that you need during peak times, or provisioning for your average capacity and accepting that videos will have to sit in a queue during peak periods. Neither choice was acceptable to us.

Since we started using Zencoder we have had fewer video playback problems, the quality pleases even the most discerning eye, we can support playback on iPhones / iPads, and customers appreciate not having to think too much about the settings for the video they upload. In short we have a more reliable service and happier customers since we integrated with Zencoder.

What’s your favorite Zencoder feature?

It might sound strange, but two of our favorite Zencoder features (and ones that helped swing us towards Zencoder) were the API documentation and the per-minute pricing model.

The documentation was really important because it provided a signal about the quality of the customer experience that we could expect. Since documentation is usually an afterthought, your clear documentation was a sign that you put a tremendous amount of care into the service. It made integration easy and totally frictionless. We didn’t need to call on customer support or use forums for help.

The pricing model was important because it provided predictable costs that were easy to model. I think this model does a much better job of showcasing Zenconder’s value compared to charging by file size (data transfer in and out).

Please share a recent company milestone.

We are excited about having completed a full overhaul of the look and feel of the application in December and a revamp of the marketing site in January. We’ve added automatic video encoding, support for playback on iPhones/iPads, and a much larger video player (960*540) that puts customer videos front and center on the desktop. We also started the year off by significantly increasing the amount of storage in all of our plans. We expect that 2012 is going to be a game changer!

What’s the most exciting trend in online video at the moment?

I find it really exciting to see how innovation in the video industry is being driven by a continual reduction in the cost and complexity of making and distributing great video. As video moves beyond the television and the desktop onto mobile devices it will shape our lives in a pretty profound way. Online video is changing how we learn, how we tell stories, how we entertain ourselves, how companies market themselves, etc. It’s a really exciting place to be!